Japanese Premier Lectured and Yelled At in South Korea

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung lectured visiting Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Monday over the need for Japan to undertake a full assessment of its wartime past, even as Koizumi apologized for the pain his country had caused South Koreans.

Koizumi’s first meeting with Kim since Koizumi became prime minister six months ago followed months of deteriorating relations between the two nations. In August, Koizumi infuriated Japan’s Asian neighbors and wartime colonies by paying homage to Japanese war dead at a Tokyo shrine. The visit exacerbated neighboring countries’ fears of a revival of Japanese nationalism.

There is also a controversy over Japanese school textbooks that gloss over wartime atrocities and subjugation of much of Asia in the first half of the 20th century.

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets as Koizumi arrived, among them so-called comfort women, who were forced during World War II to have sex with Japanese soldiers.

Protesters burned Japanese flags and effigies of the prime minister, shouting “Koizumi, go home!”

The visit followed one Koizumi made Oct. 8 to China, where he also offered an apology for Japan’s wartime past.

In Seoul, he laid a wreath at a monument to Korean war dead at the National Cemetery and toured a former prison where Koreans who fought against Japanese rule were jailed and tortured. It is now a museum.

“I can’t find words to express my anguished mind,” Koizumi said solemnly. “I looked around with a feeling of heartfelt apology and repentance about the many pains South Koreans suffered due to Japanese colonial rule.”

Koizumi also visited and thanked the parents of a South Korean college student studying in Tokyo who was killed when he tried to save a drunken Japanese stranger who had fallen onto subway tracks.

Koizumi canceled a visit to South Korea’s National Assembly, where opposition legislators vowed to block his entrance.

It wasn’t clear how much political healing occurred during his brief visit. Mo Jong Ryn, a professor of public policy at Yonsei University, said, “From the Korean side, no matter what he does in Korea, Koizumi can’t win.”

Kim’s spokesman quoted the president as telling Koizumi that Germany not only apologized after World War II, but then compensated victims and began an education program for its children.

“All those things made Germany’s apologies for the war completely accepted by the world,” the spokesman quoted Kim as saying.

Koizumi’s apology was not the first made by a Japanese leader visiting South Korea. In 1998, late Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi made headlines when he offered his country’s most thorough apology to date to South Korea, which Japan brutally occupied from 1910 to 1945.

Among the issues touched upon by Koizumi and Kim were a dispute over fishing rights in the Kuril Islands, which are claimed by both Russia and Japan. Just before the summit, it was leaked that Japan had signed an agreement with Russia banning third-country vessels from fishing off the southern Kurils. Koizumi insisted that it was within Japan’s territorial rights, but he agreed to Kim’s suggestion that a high-level commission be formed to review the matter.

The leaders also agreed to Koizumi’s proposal to form a historical study group with scholars from both nations.