Both countries have low birthrates, but Japan is far enough along the labor shortage curve that unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan. From the friendly article:
According to Statistics Korea, the national statistics office, the unemployment rate last year for people aged between 15 and 29 was 9.5 percent, compared with 3.8 percent overall and 3.6 percent for Japanese 15 to 24.
Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular. There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...
> unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan
Much of that is the surprising amount of minor busywork the country uses instead of welfare support e.g. multiple people doing circulation around a minor bit of roadwork when other countries would use traffic signs or temporary traffic lights. This is mostly unreliable contract and part-time work.
Japan has fairly high rates of relative and working poverty, with north of 15% living under the poverty line.
To draw some analogies, Japan has some very conservative people in power, but that's more to do with the election systems that give more power to monolithic parties that attract rural voters. When you look at the proportional vote (Japan has FPTP + a non-reproportioning proportional segment), Japanese people are on average much less conservative than their elected government would make it seem.
> Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular.
And Israelis love Palestinian/Arab hummus. That feeling is not transitive to the Palestinian people.
> There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...
Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens and have limited rights in Japan, and can face widespread discrimination if they do not hide their identities/ancestry.
> Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens
That's a bit of a tautology: if they nationalize, which they can if they wish to, they become citizens and stop being counted as Zainichi. They're also granted a number of privileges (welfare, state pensions etc)
as "Special Permanent Residents" not afforded to any other non-citizen residents, although they're still not to vote.
Japan invaded the Korean peninsula as well as a sizeable portion of China and enacted horribly cruel war crimes against the citizens of those places. I won't get into details, but this comment would be akin to asking "What's the history between the Germans and Jews? Why don't they like each other?". The primary difference being that Germany had a reckoning with the history of what happened during that time, while the Japanese Government has mostly denied that any of its war crimes even happened which never allowed tensions to drop as much as they may have in Europe.
However, Japan has more than its fair share of far-right fruitcakes who deny everything, and in both Korea and China politicians have found Japan to be a convenient whipping boy whenever they need a distraction from domestic problems.
To be fair, they only elected the conservative party, the LDP; the party elected the prime minister. Granted, they've elected the LDP almost continuously since 1955. Of course, they tried electing the other party in 2009, but their leadership kept resigning. Of course, given the LDP's stranglehold on politics, one has to wonder why they feel a need to pander to the nettouyo.
I stopped paying to attention to politics about 5 years ago and am very surprised to learn that the major opposition party (DPJ?) has essentially fractured into multiple, smaller parties, all using a variation of the same name.
At this point, I'm not even sure who to vote for anymore.
The problem is that Japan has a history of doing things like this:
> In October 2006, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's apology was followed on the same day by a group of 80 Japanese lawmakers' visit to the Yasukuni Shrine which enshrines more than 1,000 convicted war criminals.[57] Two years after the apology, Shinzo Abe also denied that the Imperial Japanese military had forced comfort women into sexual slavery during World War II .
Germany's the exception, not the rule. Most countries's governments like nothing more than to behave as if their past transgressions never happened. And even then Germany has had no shortage of politicians who say "Germany has apologized enough".
The agreement is about "property and claims" between the two states. Of course, individuals can and have sued various Japanese entities, some successfully.
They do like each other. Koreans love Japanese food and many Japanese also like Korean food. They watch TV shows from each other. Many TV shows are often just translated versions from the other country.
It's actually the politicians who want the people to have enmity to each other and some people are vulnerable to the propaganda. The existence of the North Korea regime and their history of kidnapping Japanese people also don't help. Much of their economic strength also overlaps, so there's competition as well.
If you still don't understand, think about close European countries. They probably get along just fine, but Brexit happened..
Oh yeah, I understand. That's why I brought up the last part. Germany did a relatively good job after the war of apologizing for its warcrimes and rooting out the toxic culture that led to them. I was trying to describe the gravity of the crimes that happened during the war with that comparison, less so the modern day feelings.
Historically, Korea was repeatedly invaded by Japan. More recently, Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, during which the Japanese ruled with an iron fist and did their best to destroy Korean identity by forcing people to take Japanese names etc.
The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English).
Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul.
I was also very anti-Japan as a I grew up under typical Korean parents.
But after reading the actual history, there were some good parts during the colonization. Although, I'm not denying the horrific parts caused by war. But that's just war. It's horrible to begin with. Not to mention what Koreans did in the Vietnam War to the locals.
I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.
I guess the word you are looking for is "cultural assimilation". 内鮮一体 is the specific case of Japan and Korea.
The Japanese were fresh out of their own industrial revolution so had plenty of experience to do the same thing in Korea. The legacy of that is that Korean and Japanese societies have a lot in common eg Chaebol and Keiretsu. Following the war Japan sheltered people persecuted by the ROK dictatorship (eg Kim Dae-jung, Lee Byung-chul)
> I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.
It's tribal. East Asian People are racist against each other and each other's countries, but East Asian Persons get on just fine.
> The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English). Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul.
Banning Hangul and erasing Korea's independent cultural identity intentionally traced the pattern of Japan's nearly identical actions a few decades earlier in conquering Ryukyu, including classifying each suppressed language as a "dialect" of Japanese.
As a contrast to Korea, the former Ryukyu Kingdom is now fully subsumed as the Okinawan islands and its original languages, religions, and culture are, in practice, nearly extinct.
Much of it can be blamed on propaganda driven by economic decline and political scapegoating. While Korean music, drama, and movies are popular in Japan, consumers are mostly women. Among small but growing and very vocal population of Japanese men, Korea-bashing books and manga are popular. Later trend is not unrelated to continuing economic decline of Japan. And Japanese politicians are leveraging and fueling that trend to divert the blame.
One small chapter of the history "The Mimizuka ... is a monument in Kyoto, Japan, dedicated to the sliced noses of killed Korean soldiers and civilians as well as Ming Chinese troops taken as war trophies during the Japanese invasions of Korea from 1592 to 1598."
Besides more recent events several hundred years ago Japan also tried to invade Korea under Tokotomo Hideyoshi. Japanese Imperialism has a bit of history to it that makes Koreans uncomfortable given the peninsula has been under constant conquest by its neighbors for at least a thousand years now.
And Japan is infamous for its incredibly negative attitude towards Koreans...