Hi everyone. My name is Frank Aum. I'd like to introduce you to our roundtable discussion on the tensions between Japan and South Korea and new and creative approaches for resolving these tensions. This roundtable is also meant as a launch event for the USIP essay series that is examining this exact issue. So let me start with a little background and then I'll introduce the speakers before I turn it over to them. As many of you know, South Korea and Japan normalize relations in 1965, but there are unresolved bilateral disputes that continue to undermine genuine reconciliation and cooperation. Past efforts to help improve relations, whether between the two countries or trilaterally with the United States, have generally emphasized a future-oriented approach that focuses on common security and economic interests. However, the lack of a fundamental and permanent resolution to the historical grievances has also meant that the bilateral unease continues to linger with periodic flare-ups of heightened friction. The areas of historical tension between the two countries range widely, including over the name of the body of water separating Japan and the Korean Peninsula, sovereignty over a group of rocky islands between the two countries, the legality of Japan's colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945, and the treatment of sexual slaves also known as comfort women by the Japanese military during the wartime period. And these historical grievances often extend into other non-historical disputes, such as Japan's decision to release wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2021, or its tightening of export controls on chemicals necessary for South Korea's semiconductor industry in 2019. The most recent flashpoint for bilateral friction was a 2018 decision by the South Korean Supreme Court that required two Japanese companies to compensate a group of Korean forest labors from the wartime period. This decision directly challenged the Japanese government's view that the 1965 claims agreement between the two countries had settled all claims completely and finally. Today the two sides are in negotiations to reach an agreement that will reconcile on one hand the laborer's desire for compensation and an apology, and on the other the Japanese government and company's desire to reaffirm that all claims have already been settled by previous agreements. Without a fundamental resolution, to this and other historical issues, the potential for a future oriented bilateral cooperation on a whole host of matters will likely be suboptimal. And for the U.S. in particular, poor relations between its two closest regional allies not only remains an irritant, but also a direct threat to the goal of developing a network of allies in the region, as well as achieving integrated deterrence as a part of its Indo-Pacific strategy. So it's with this dilemma in mind that the U.S. IP launched an essay series that would explore new and creative approaches to finding an enduring solution to this problem. We invited subject matter experts to offer a fresh perspective on the challenge, either by examining a new approach or taking a creative view on an existing approach. And in particular, the goal was to examine ideas that could have practical value for policymakers. There are around 14 total authors in the series, and we've already published nine other essays. Five of the authors are with us today to share their thoughts. So let me go ahead and introduce them now. First, we have Dan Snyder, who is a lecturer in East Asian studies at Stanford University. Next is Tim Webster, who is a professor of law at Western New England University. Then we have Alexis Dudden, who is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Next is Jonathan Miller, who is a senior fellow and director of the Indo-Pacific program at the McDonnell Lawyer Institute in Canada. And last, we have Nathan Park, who is an international litigation lawyer and a non-resident fellow at the Sejong Institute in South Korea, as well as the Quincy Institute. I've asked each of the speakers to talk for around five minutes on the current situation, as well as any major takeaways from their essays. And then I'll have some questions for them for another 25 minutes. After that, we'll open it up for audience Q&A in the remaining 30 minutes or so. So with that, I'll turn it over to Dan. Dan, your mic is muted. A classic moment. First of all, it's an honor to be here with so many distinguished scholars and experts on this and the company of this large group of people that the US Institute for Peace has gathered. And I really want to praise Franco and the USIP for organizing this project. I think it's a really overdue and important effort, and this is a difficult subject. I've been dealing with it for a long time. I do think that, first of all, I just want to make some sort of overview remarks, maybe particularly since I'm starting off here. There's no question that the downturn, the current downturn in Japan-Korea relations has really been perhaps the worst in some ways since the normalization of relations in 1965. It's a matter of serious concern not only to the two countries, but to the United States, which as Frank pointed out, is a security partner and ally of both of these countries. So that's one important benchmark. The other is that we are actually at a moment of opportunity, despite these the downturn that has taken place. We have governments in both countries who have an interest, not necessarily at the same level, in trying to tackle this issue and bring some kind of improvement in relations and maybe some effort to deal with the underlying issues that Frank outlined. This is taking place while there's a global crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine, one that's I think engaged also people in East Asia, certainly the Japanese and the Koreans who are looking at this as a serious threat to the world order and one that can affect their own security in East Asia. And lastly, I think it all takes place under the umbrella of the kind of security tensions which are rising on the peninsula, unfortunately, in recent days. And so that tends to reinforce at least the idea that there are shared security interests between Japan and Korea and the United States. That said, as this premise of this project makes clear, and I've repeated this endlessly when I, both in my writing and in talking to particularly the people in Washington, there's no way to make progress on Japan for your relations if you simply focus on the shared security environment, shared interests and so on. If you ignore the underlying issues of history, the things that create tension between Japan and Korea, which are fundamental issues that are tied to their sense of national identity, you can't really ultimately make progress. You can make incremental progress, but it almost always rolls back on you. So I don't believe in a future-oriented approach that ignores history. It simply, in some ways, makes the problem worse. So the other thing I like to say is that there are solutions, and I love the array of discussion in this essay series, because it proves that it's not a lack of ideas and solutions to these particular problems that is halting progress. It's a lack of political will, first of all. And I think the more you can come up with creative ideas, the more not only can you fuel the process of negotiation, but also you encourage outside actors, and this is one of the things I addressed in my essay, that is people outside the governments themselves in civil society who really need to engage with each other. You cannot make progress simply at a government-to-government level when you're talking about reconciliation. And there's been a real, I think, inward collapse, if you will, of this type of civil society engagement compared to some previous years. I mean, historians are not talking to each other in the way they used to. I think the engagement between media is very important. Student exchanges of one kind or another, which were taking place, are not taking place. These are the areas where you can actually create an environment in which governments can make progress. One of the ideas that I promoted or suggested is popular culture. I mean, that's a real opportunity when you look at the role of Korean pop culture on these big platforms like Netflix and so on, to do some joint Korean-Japanese television or film productions that deal with these history issues in a dramatic sense. And I think those are actually reach bigger audiences. So that's sort of my minor contribution to this. But I want to come back to this idea of what's going on. I think at the moment, I think the Korean and Japanese governments are negotiating with each other on the issue of forced labor. And there's a pretty substantial negotiation that's taking place, sorry, as far as I understand it, at a foreign minister level, director general, foreign ministry level. And I think they're fairly close to an agreement. It may not be an agreement that will satisfy everybody, but it has to satisfy, first of all, the victims themselves and their representatives. And the current idea, and others will, I'm sure, have more to say about this, is to use an existing fund, one that was formed in 2014, to deal with the victims of forced labor, and which has contributions from Korean companies, particularly from Posco, which based on the idea that they had received significant funding out of the 1965 claims agreement. But the Korean side insists, rightly, I think, that you can't simply go ahead with compensation from Korean firms, that sort of indirect compensation that has to include voluntary contributions from Japanese companies and explicit statements of remorse. And in some sense, the Japanese government has to make it clear that this is taking place with its support and approval. I think that type of agreement is within reach, but both the governments involved, Japanese government, Korean government, are extremely weak, politically weak, not because of this, but because of other things. So the room they have to maneuver is pretty small. And in that context, I think the role of the United States is very important. And I've yet to see it clearly indicated that the Biden administration, which I think has been very supportive of the idea of trilateral cooperation, is willing or ready to intervene on this issue to try and bring this to a close. These governments need some outside bolstering. And I think, in that sense, Kishida's cautiousness towards this. Yun is clearly committed to this process. Kishida less so is also not helpful. It doesn't give President Yun the room he needs to try and make an agreement. So let me stop there and I'm sure we'll have lots to discuss as we go on. Again, great thanks to Frank and to the USIP. Dan, thank you so much for raising the potential agreement that is in the works. It's a perfect segue into Tim because he's written about past conciliation agreements and some of the helpful elements for successful agreements. Tim. Sure. Thank you. And thanks, Dan, for setting the table for us. And thanks to Frank and to your colleague Lucy, Stevenson Yang and others at the USIP for putting this together. It's a great initiative and I hope it gets the attention that I think it really deserves. I want to pick up with something. I'll make three points. The first point is one that Dan Schneider just made, but I'd like to echo it, which is that this should be a top priority for the United States. And that's in part because of, as Frank made in his opening remarks, the devolution of the Japan-Korea, South Korea-Japan relationship over the past few years. As that relationship has soured, North Korea continues to launch ICBMs into the LOC or CNA Japan to talk to about another issue that Frank raised. China has run military exercises around the Taiwan Strait and so this area of the world is not getting any safer as these two countries re-engage this long-held historical dispute. So I would hope that just as the Obama administration placed pressure on both Puck and Hay and Abe Shinzo back in during the Obama administration, the Biden administration too would focus a bit more of his attention on resolving this. Obviously, the U.S. can exercise quite a bit of leverage over both of these countries. If it wants to, we underwrite their security. And we've played a similarly conciliatory role when it comes to wartime issues in Germany, in France, in Austria, and Switzerland. So there's plenty of precedent for the United States playing this kind of role. I think it's also important to point out that part of the problem itself, and by problem, I mean the widespread concern or widespread recognition in East Asia that Japan didn't pay its fair share for war reparations. That too, I think, stems back to a role the United States played during the negotiation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. We were so eager to rehabilitate Japan, so eager to have a bulwark against communism in Northeast Asia that we waived our reparations basically the Japanese and we encouraged many of our allies to do the same. Now, of course, every state then had its own bilateral negotiation. Some, such as the Dutch, insisted on payments. Others, such as the Chinese, didn't the South Koreans, as many on this call already know, were able to get some amount of economic support that ultimately, as I think Dan just mentioned, went to Posco in the form of grants and loans. But I think the fact that the United States tried to smooth over or not solely expose Japan to or make Japan pay back in the 1940s, 1950s, in a sense for shadows, the dispute we're having right now. A second point I'll make, and this again, iterates something that Frank mentioned in his opening comments, is that these issues of forced labor, these issues of comfort women, have been resolved many times in the past, with the comfort women probably less satisfactorily. We can talk about that in the Q&A. But with regards to forced labor in particular, a series of lawsuits, dozens of lawsuits filed in Japan from the 1990s forward, now over the past 20 years filed in South Korea, and that ultimately led to the 2018 decision that Frank mentioned in his opening comments. Early on in the 1990s, when these lawsuits were still fresh, a handful of Japanese companies, including Nippon Steel, one of the two companies in 2018 that the South Korean Supreme Court ordered to pay Korean forced laborers, they came up with settlements. In the contribution I made to this, I looked back at those settlements on the one hand involving Korean forced laborers, on the other involving Chinese forced laborers, and tried to tease out some of the common themes that might be appropriate for a more lasting reconciliation on a larger scale that seems to be demanded by these 2018 decisions. So obviously paying money is going to be part of it in apology, and the wording of the apology is extraordinarily difficult and extraordinarily sensitive, and I think that's something that perhaps the current negotiations are grappling with. The Japanese companies were adamantly opposed to apologizing to Korean forced laborers. When it came to Chinese forced laborers, they were sometimes a bit more willing to make apologies that we would recognize as an apology, where you specify the blame, you express remorse, you acknowledge liability and so forth. So that piece of it, I think, will continue to be difficult, and I'm curious to see if, as Dan mentioned in his remarks, there is the Yuen and Kishida administrations are able to come up with a resolution, to what extent, I'm sure there'll be a financial component to it, but it's the wording, it's the apology, it's the acknowledgement of harm and so forth, and the acknowledgement of remorse that will be, I think, very difficult for both sides to come to a resolution on. Mitsubishi, the other company, has also issued apologies to Chinese forced laborers, as well as to American POWs. There was a large sort of grandiose ceremony at the Simon Beesenthal Center in Los Angeles in 2015, where Mitsubishi representative bowed and made the kind of apology that any Korean forced laborer or any heir of a Korean forced laborer would love to see, I think, replicated in Seoul. Finally, the prospects for the ongoing negotiations, I'm a little bit less sanguine, I think, than Dan was about the prospects of the Yuen and the Kishida administrations coming to this, and coming up with a sensible and satisfactory solution, that's in part, because of the 2015 Comfort Women Agreement, I thought, and never mind what I think, with the Yuen and many other commentators thought was fundamentally flawed, I wonder to the extent that these governments have learned from that, and also the extent to which these governments are willing to engage in a discussion and an agreement that can be, that almost certainly is going to be criticized, right? I saw reporting last week, and I think maybe Dan was referencing this in his comments, that Korean companies would contribute to the fund, and that fund would then be paid out to Korean forced laborers, and maybe that's all that's possible right now, but I would really strongly urge against that. In 1995, Japan launched something called the Asian Women's Fund, which was an attempt to handle or to deal with the Comfort Women issue, not just with Korean Comfort Women, but Filipina, Taiwanese, Chinese, et cetera, and there the Japanese government did issue an apology, but the funding came from Japanese citizens, and many Comfort Women rejected that, they said, I will not take that deal, I will not take that money, because the money needs to come from Japanese government in the form of reparations, not from private citizens in Japan, and so I worry that, you know, if this money comes from a Korean company or PASCO or something like that, a similar critique can be mounted, right? This is not true reparations, this is just a cheap way for the Japanese government to make a statement, but the payment from it actually comes from the Korean side, so I look forward to the debate or the discussion, and thanks again to USIP and to Frankfurt, including me. Thanks, Tim. You mentioned the Comfort Women issue, and Alexis has written a lot about that, but also particularly for the essay that she contributed. I'd love to hear your additional thoughts, Alexis. Great, thank you, and thank USIP. Thank you, Frank. I think it was nearly a year ago when we had our first in-person meeting for two years that you sort of said, hey, we got to do something. We've really got to work to give Korea and Japan a fresh footing, and so I do, I understand the emphasis and appreciate the emphasis on the quote-unquote future-oriented nature of these statements. You know, that comes from the 1964-65 groundwork when Rae Schauer was even using and interjecting that term prior to the normalization agreement, and I also, however, have to agree with your suboptimal observation, because for a host of reasons, not in the least, I do have to get my Aso Taro criticism in here. Aso is just a very, very powerful politician, so I understand that from a Japanese domestic politics perspective, and yet at the same time, the Aso family fortune is built on no small way on Korean slave labor in the Aso minds, and so in addition to that, this is a man who is known to have donated funding to throw Adolf Hitler birthday parties in recent years. So this is just a rather strange face to put on the negotiations if we're going to have buy-in on a broad scale, which has to happen. More importantly than just my harping on one politician's face is the Obuchi Kim summit in 1998, which has been oft-referenced as something that especially President Yoon campaigned on, that he wanted to bring back the spirit of the Obuchi Kim 1998 agreement, which ushered in the era of cultural sharing, and you know, Dan, you raised the significance of soft power. That is a huge accomplishment in 1998, right? Because prior to that, it was actually kind of you had to buy rip-off of, you know, you had to buy pirated copies of music from one another country. You couldn't watch mutual television, let alone live, let alone stream on Netflix. So the Obuchi Kim summit brought us World Cup of all things. You know, that was huge. That came on top of 10 years of really difficult, hard diplomacy that was primarily surrounding the issue of comfort women. And it was, it was the catharsis that all that all these voices had come out in the wake of Emperor Hirohito's 1989 death that really brought these these issues to the fore in a new way, a democratic civil society way. And the problem is right now, we are at the opposite kind of situation. We've got a decade of diplomatic unraveling, which I would place on the governing, you know, administration of Abe Shinzo and his efforts from the moment he came back into office to target the comfort women, the Kono statement in particular. So we're in optimal, suboptimal conditions. And because I really agree when Dan says, you know, you can't look at a future for oriented approach without acknowledging history. And you have to be able to stand on a past that is not a past build out of quicksand. And so I just that's why I'm still deeply frustrated that we keep cycling in this. And I appreciate, Frank, very much your your emphasis on we need to make what we are analyzing and researching clear to policymakers. And we need to do this with an eye to actually recognizing that the suffering lingers. And so the victim centered approach that we all keep talking about has to be recognized. So I'll just my three points are pretty clear. First words matter, what we call the victims has to accord with the reality of the excuse me of the suffering they endured. In the summer of 2012, when then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear to the Japanese government that as far as the United States government was concerned, what we're talking about when we talk about the youth, the horrendous euphemism of comfort women is the crime of sexual slavery, militarized sexual slavery, specifically in Japan's historical case, state sponsored sexual slavery. And these words remain absolutely critical for policymakers to understand why the issues endure in such a contentious fashion. The Japanese government as such has not taken state responsibility for a crime that involved every state apparatus at the time to affect and organize. And so that's the critical nature of including that term, that it is a crime of militarized sexual slavery that the United Nations in 1996 declared a crime against humanity is why we will continue to use that term, not only not at all to target Japan rather to recognize how this suffering goes on today. We have already seen reports of Russia's actions in the Ukraine rounding up targeting specifically targeting women and girls and dragging them across back to Russia. So this is why we focus on the criminal nature and the global transnational enduring nature of this, which brings me to my second point. So too frequently is this history portrayed as a Japan versus Korea event could not be further from the truth. This was an empire wide transnational history that began first the first known victims are Japanese from Japan in 1932. And so we have to recognize that this was this was even known before other victims were involved. It's come out later because we had to find the evidence to prove this. And we now have these historical documents that demonstrate the targeted rounding up of minor children of women of young men from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Micronesian islands, including Guam, not Australia, excuse me, but the famous Australian victim was in Indonesia, but this was empire wide. And it needs to be understood that way, especially to understand how the transnationality of it at the time is what we seek to understand today and how to work to prevent ongoing instances of this crime against humanity. And this actually brings me to my final point by segue, because most recently in October, the Philadelphia Art Commission approved the construction during the coming months of a new comfort of a peace statue on the Philadelphia Peace Plaza. And they overwhelmingly approved the statue. They wanted broader wording on the plaque to make clear the transnational nature and enduring nature of this particular crime. And so that brings me to my final point, the significance of the peace statue, which keeps arising as a thorny issue. And interestingly, during the Yun presidency has become a dividing center in domestic Korean politics.  And so those forces come to the peace statue and express their hate at those who have supported the victims of this crime against humanity now for several, well, since the 2011 construction of the initial peace statue. But the reason that this statue must be left in the hands of civil society and not used as a sort of chip, negotiating chip between governments is precisely because these, you know, these issues of what to do with memorials have come into the, you know, come into much discussion around the world in recent years, but statues as such. But in other countries, everywhere, the conversation is about perpetrators of crime. The government of Japan is the only government in the world seeking to remove a victim statue. And that really underscores the outlier nature of denialism in this particular weaponization of history. So again, I thank you, Frank, for allowing us to, you know, try and really make the points that a lot of us have been working on for years matter anew. And thank you for your effort. Thank you so much, Alexis. I'm going to turn to Jonathan, who hasn't submitted an essay yet, but I heard your proposal and I thought it was pretty interesting. So I'll let you speak a little bit more. Well, thanks very much, Frank. And thanks to the USIP for organizing this. Look, I mean, a lot of interesting perspectives already from the panel. So I'll try not to repeat many of them. But I think one of the panelists, perhaps Dan mentioned this at the onset, we're at a very challenging time right now. We're probably in a recession if it's not going to get worse. We still have a lingering pandemic that lots of us wish it was over, but it's still continuing. At the same time, we have Russia's war in Ukraine and the strategic competition with China happening all at the same point. So I think this is a testament, Frank, to you and your colleagues that you've taken up this very important issue amidst all of these challenges, because I think it is very, very important that we have this discussion. To talk a little bit of the angle that I'm focused on, and I agree with you, I think one of the important ways to look at the Japan-Korea relationship is traditionally there's been what I would call two tracks of discussions. One track, and I think we've had a very good discussion, robust discussion already this morning on this, is you're fundamentally right, there needs to be some movement in resolution on historical issues. And that's not going to be an easy fix. I would agree with Dan that we're in an interesting moment right now with leadership on both sides. It at least seems open to the idea, but there's the glass half full version, but there's also the glass half empty version. Risk aversion, I think, remains high on both sides in addition to political difficulties on both sides, which I think has been mentioned before, is not necessarily have anything to do with the bilateral relationship, but is domestic politics in both South Korea and Japan. So those are the realities. There is optimism. I think there's more discussion happening both at the track one level and also at the track two level, but making that into the reality of some sort of lasting agreement I think is something that we are not quite there yet. So I think that's something to keep in mind. What I'm focusing on in my research is, as I mentioned these two tracks, one of them is the historical track. The second one is the one that we talked about on security cooperation, which is many people in DC constantly are focused on looking at quarantining the security cooperation, for example, on North Korea between the United States, Japan and South Korea. I think that we've sort of been stuck in this two-track approach for a long time. So what I've been looking at through some of my research is looking at a third track and the idea that we only drive one track, one road at one time, that there's one silver bullet solution, I think, clearly is not realistic. We need to have work, which I think a lot of the discussion this morning has been on to resolve some of the historical issues. Of course, we need to continue to work trilaterally, but we can't just think of these as an either or track. And so this third track that I've been looking at is enabling and providing more agency to Japan and South Korea themselves. So again, this is not to say that the US has been a challenge or a problem in the trilateral relationship, but there always seems to be an expectation. I mean, on this panel, we can talk about this potentially afterwards, but how many articles, and we're all probably guilty but ourselves, about the US coming in to be the mediator on historical issues, the importance of trilateralism on North Korea, I mean, it always seems the default answer that the United States should take some sort of key important role. I'm not dismissing that the United States does have that important role, but I think that we need to think a lot more creatively. So one of the areas that I've been putting some attention to is Japan, Korea X. So in that X not always being the United States. So where can we look at other partnerships? And I think there is a moment right now, a window, a political window with the UN administration and the Kishi administration in Japan to look at third partnerships. And this is not all framed about containing China and finding different ways to work with the US Indo-Pacific strategy. But for example, looking at partners in ASEAN, looking at partners in Europe and finding ways where those two partnerships, it's not necessarily that they have an identical regional strategy, but finding ways where they can start discussing things outside of these two tracks that are so traditional, which is the security cooperation track for the United States and the historical track that the United States has sometimes taken a role on, sometimes not taken a role on. So this is the main component that I'm focused on is looking at this Japan, Korea X. And just one example of this before I sort of pass this off to moderated discussion, I think the most fertile would be thinking about some of the regional issues. An example of this is South Korea's southward strategy and ASEAN, Japan's free and open Indo-Pacific. They may seem sort of antagonistic in a political sense at least over the past few years. But the reality is if you go under the sheets and look at what they both prioritize on infrastructure, on climate security, on so many different issues, there's 90% overlap between Japan and South Korea on all of these issues. So rather than working against each other or working at opposite poles, why not find ways for Japan and South Korea to be working together with their partners in the region to provide international goods? So in closing on this is that these tracks by no means are they isolated. We absolutely need resolution on historical matters. We still need, I think it has been obvious from the past week with 25 ballistic missiles being fired from North Korea. We still need cooperation with United States, but we need to be more ambitious and creative and thinking about providing agency. And it's not on the United States or any other country's decision block to provide that agency. It's on Japan and Korea to do that themselves, but to find ways to work together with other partners in the region. I think for too often there's been this overreliance on thinking about the only partnership could be trilaterally with the United States. So that's the basis of what I've been focused on. And again, I do salute you, Frank, and your team for putting together this really important discussion. Thanks, Jonathan. It's interesting because several of the authors mentioned the US playing a greater role in helping to facilitate or mediate the situation. And so I'm glad you introduced the, not necessarily a counter argument, but just the additional view that both South Korean Japan have agency themselves to take control of the situation and the potential for other ex-countries to also have an important role. Last, we're going to turn to Nathan. Go ahead. Thank you, Frank. Thank you, USIP. I'm honored to speak with this distinguished panel of experts. I'm hoping to contribute what I know as a practicing attorney who has been litigating international arbitration issue. So my contribution in my essay for the USIP, what I try to do is type up what lawyers call a bench memo, which is a memorandum that a judge's clerk might put together before coming to a case to lay out issues for both sides, what issues remain open, and how certain result is likely if a judge ends up deciding one issue one way, another issue another way. So that as to, of course, that speaking about the forced labor issue and how it relates to the series of treaties that both South Korea and Japan entered into in 1965 to normalize their relations. So the basic position of Japan currently is that the 1965 treaties normalize the relations between two countries and settled reparations for Korean forced laborers by paying compensation. And the basic position of South Korea is the opposite of that. And between these positions, you can see three issues that make this particular issue very challenging. First is that the 1965 treaties themselves deliberately left behind left open key legal ambiguities. And those ambiguities are left open deliberately for the sake of achieving essentially a political agreement. And then in the intervening decades since 1965 to present, both South Korea and Japan radically switched positions as to how to interpret the 1965 treaties. And then finally, also in the intervening decades, international law evolved in the way that deemphasize national sovereignty and emphasize vindication of individual rights in a way that a tribunal constituted today might end up having a different result from a tribunal that hypothetically could have been constituted immediately after the entry of the treaties in 1965. So let me explain explain a few a little bit more on those three issues. I don't have a whole lot of time to dig very deeply into it, but I'm happy to go with dig deeper into any one of these issues during the Q&A session. But let me stay at a high level. So first, the key legal ambiguities. The treaties do not define whether Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 was legal or illegal. And that has a number of downstream consequences as to how to characterize Korea's independence. Another key ambiguity is whether Japan's payment of money to Korea in 1965 was a compensation that settled claims in exchange or a simple gift for an economic assistance that has nothing to do with the claims himself. So on the latter point, this takes us to our second issue. For a long time, for several decades between 1965 and late 1990s, Japan's position was the money was a gift and the claims were not settled. And around early 2000s, it's precisely 2001, Japan made a 180 degree turn on its position to come to today's position, which is that money was compensation and the claims were settled. And South Korea again had the opposite term. After 1965, South Korean government's position was the money was compensation and the claims were settled. And then since then, in the 21st century, South Korea's position has been that the money was not compensation, the claims were not settled, which is how we are at this present stage where South Korean Supreme Court has issued several decisions that essentially say those things, that the money was not compensation and claims were not settled. Finally, we have the evolution of international law. And this is a very esoteric point, and I may mangle it because I'm not an academic, I'm a practitioner, especially in the presence of an academic like Professor Webster, I may mangle it, but I apologize in advance. But essentially this, since 1965, international law moved towards emphasizing human rights such that where there is ambiguity in treaty texts, the arbitrators and the interpreters of international law tend to fall on the side of vindicating human rights rather than mechanically insisting on the principle of Pakistan Cervanda, the promise must be kept, which tends to serve more on the side of national sovereignty and the ability of nations to determine the claims or make dispositions of a claim held by individuals. This complicates the interpretation of the 1965 treaties, where the signatories of those treaties at that moment in time may have had a different idea of international law compared to the arbitrator and judges and lawyers who are approaching this issue and interpreting these treaties in light of the evolution in the international law at the present day. So the ultimate point I want to raise out of all this is it would be an echo of a point that several people on this panel has made, which is that there needs to be a resolution that is centered on the victims and their sensibility of justice. There is I think in at least in some corners some type of either misplaced hope or too much optimism in the idea that a lawsuit will settle this once and for all or the international law is so clear that it will be once it goes once it goes to the arbitration it'll be a walk for one side or the other and that'll be the end of everything and both parties will shut up for either. That simply does not work. The reason why this issue continues to persist is precisely because the voice of the victims of Imperial Japan's forced labor is not centered. The reason why there was a radical change in the interpretation of the 65 treaty between South Korea and Japan fundamentally is because in 1965 when South Korea entered into these trees it entered it through the Pakchongi dictatorship which could not care much about the sentiments of the victims. So when the individual victims of Imperial Japan came to be in the position to raise their own voice in a liberal democracy in a wealthier country with a strong rule of law that that is designed to give voice to individual victims South Korea started changing that stance and then Japan in response began changing their own stance to avoid essentially to avoid liability. One legal scholar just decried it as interpretive acrobatics. So the idea that there will be if there is a law there could be a if there is a law if there just was an agreement between the political leaders of two countries that will be termed final and irreversible and all kinds of fancy legal language stamped on top simply will not work will not persist as long as they do not resonate with the sense of justice with the victims of forced labor. And that would be my lawyerly advice to the parties involved that litigation does not solve and it ultimately in their needs to be a resolution on the level of arts and arts. Thanks Nathan and I want to thank all the speakers because I know that you had very nuanced complex arguments that you had in your essays and was asking you to to abridge it and put it within a short amount of time. So thank you so much for doing such a great job and doing that. Before we get to our discussion I want to provide my first reminder to our audience that if you have a question please put it into the chat box. I'll remind you again a little bit later but I want to provide the first reminder now that you can start thinking about it and start putting in some of the questions we have a couple already but that's your reminder right now. I know Alexis you have to leave at two so I'd like to turn to you first going back to the sexual slavery issue because you know so much of the discussion has been on forced labor and you know one can make the argument that the recent tension the proximate cause was the 2018 Supreme Court decision on the forced labor issue but at the same time in 2018 President Moon Jae-in made the decision to basically basically pull back from the the comfort woman agreement from 2015 so that was also one of the proximate causes that led to the tensions but it's unclear where we stand on this issue. I think there's at least one pending court case in South Korea on comfort women. The 2015 agreement that's that agreement seems to be in Limbo. There's maybe a dozen or so women that are still alive and it seems like a lot of the battle has shifted to the statue and the Japanese government confronting the statue but where does this issue stand and where's the play in terms of resolving the overall tensions? So that's a multi-layered question and I appreciate it. I appreciate how you're saying that as the victims increasingly die or the the survivors increasingly die that the battle has been outsourced to the statue and I think that's something to to consider because when you talk about what's the proximate cause of the current moment the proximate cause goes right back to when the crime occurred as far as I'm concerned and I mean we just have to recognize that in the particular history of victims coming forward concerning militarized sexual slavery there was such a period of time in which the victims did not find a space in which to speak and so I know you don't want me to go way back into history and jump then into the 1990s and stuff and want a clear answer. The problem is there isn't a clear answer it's just it's so ongoing and building and I look at it this way in you know and we're not getting into the textbook issues at hand but if you had been a sixth grader in Japan in 2002 for example you would have had a pretty good education in militarized sexual slavery called the comfort women in Japanese in your Japanese middle school taught by your Japanese middle school teacher you will not have that today because it's all been government directed taken out of the textbooks and so these these you know the Kono statement gets made then there's great controversy throughout the 1990s about what is Japan's position is it official is it not official then we come into an entire new era in which Abe's in charge and we have all of this and and I just say all this because it's the the yet it's the Japanese government says one thing the next administration pulls it back and so you look at this as an ongoing effort that ultimately has ended up targeting all of Koreans as to blame for even raising this issue which is just the worst possible way to get to understand why this issue needs to be approached differently and I'm sorry that I'm running sideways around your question but again I really think about this as a teacher because as a teacher you know what you want to convey to your students but if you're talking about middle school curricula for example there's a required body of knowledge to a test and you're now in an era in which there's nothing about this history on required testing in Japan and even the term comfort women has been taken out targeted so that we're back to the language of willing prostitutes in some cases so it's really quite egregious how the terminological shifts are shaping knowledge but these are all Japanese government directed and and so you know once again and I understand in Washington there's a really I find a little racist expression of Korea fatigue but it's just you know when is this going to be addressed in a way that takes seriously the victims are not just clamoring for money not just you know griping about something ongoing but rather there's an ongoing pain to those actually victimized and there's an ongoing real frustration to all of the activists researchers who have thought they're making you think they're making gains on behalf of the survivors only to be slammed back into the 1980s back to the future all over again and that I really do take back to Abe Shinzo round two when he came in 2012 and said the first thing he wanted to do in his second prime ministership was to target the conal statement and so we can look to 2015 we can look to 2018 I think we really need to look at 2012 and also look at the other things that Abe's study groups wanted to do not limited to but including the judgment of criminality at the San Francisco trial which was Abe Shinzo's ultimate goal was to de you know delegitimize the judgment of criminality against Japan so I apologize for not having the direct answer you want but I think there I think it just goes back to when the crime occurred and the constant backpedaling from agreements and that's on Japan thank you no problem Alexis and I actually encourage all the the panelists if you have other things that you want to talk about because I'm just throwing out ideas to get the discussion going but of course you probably have thoughts on what the other panelists says so please feel free to address those as well but I'm glad Alexis that you brought up the issue of education and I'm going to turn to Dan on this because Dan you've written about how you know the idea of putting together joint textbooks wasn't successful between the two countries but the idea of looking at supplemental education comparative education could be potentially promising so any thoughts on what Alexis said or anything the other panelists said Dan a lot of thoughts but um and I'd like to come to the comfort women issue in a second but on the textbook question actually I was just just talking about this to my class this week um you know the this goal of a joint textbook which comes out of uh first of all looking at the Franco-German experience of creating a joint textbook which Koreans have translated the entire Franco-German textbook as an example and it certainly was there in the earlier efforts by UNESCO to create these dialogues uh on about textbooks including between Japan and Korea it's a bit of an elusive goal in some ways it interferes with more realistic goals um which are I think you know what we tried to do in the divided memories project at Stanford was to do comparative studies of the textbooks and then there were created supplemental teaching materials out of that so that people can start students can see the same events through multiple lenses and see that uh you know the looking at these issues through the eyes of the other is actually a pathway to reconciliation rather than a formal agreement that says we agree how many people were killed in Nanjing what was the exact nature of the mobilization of forced labor I mean those are worthwhile goals but sometimes they interfere with the being able to understand how things look for other people and I found in the classroom that that's a really revelatory experience including for college students who just aren't aware of these things um I want to at the risk of getting Alexis mad at me um you know the comfort women agreement so I had the opportunity in the summer to get to Seoul finally for the first time in a while and I spent a lot of time talking to a number of people in the government outside the government who were working on trying to come up with uh proposals for the forced labor issue so I feel pretty confident I know somewhat what they're thinking is particularly inside the government they're well aware of the failures of the comfort women agreement of 2015 the senior foreign ministry official who's in charge of this process said to me that he was very critical of the agreement because it did not gain the uh the consent and agreement of particularly of the Korean council of women and without that it it it simply never gained the legitimacy that it should have gained that it should have had and and that is certainly to some degree the basis of when the Moon Jae-in government came in and of course the the Min Joon-dong the Democratic Party in Korea had always opposed the agreement on that basis and they came in with that critical view as well uh it's interesting that the current conservative government shares that view so on the other hand on the other hand uh I do know the people who ran the implementation of that agreement and work very hard on it and they point out that the vast majority of women survivors accepted the payments and the apology that was somewhat attached to it um and as well as some family members uh and actually most of the funds that were allocated by the Japanese government to the uh as a result of that agreement were in fact distributed so and the Moon government when they came in they said President Moon said well we don't we don't agree with this uh solution for the reason I said but we accept that it exists and we're just going to move ahead on that basis only later after coming into office did they turn around and basically effectively dismantle the agreement and I think that was mainly in response to domestic politics uh the anti-Japanese issue was a powerful issue in Japan in Korea and it was in the midst of a fair amount of controversy that was going on about North Korea policy I think it was there was some degree of political calculation involved in doing that as a result it it made it very difficult to deal with the forced labor issue because the obvious model for dealing with the forced labor issue is to extend that kind of agreement to forced laborers so the people who are now dealing with the decision comes back to some of the things that Tim was talking about they they they're well aware of a they have to get the consent of the victims and their representatives so when they formed this advisory committee which they did in the summer it included the lawyers uh for the for the victims and they know they have to do that they know there's no agreement that they can just impose without that and those and those the victims and their lawyers have made it clear they will not accept an agreement that doesn't involve Japanese companies paying money into whatever compensation agreement and doesn't involve some clear expression of remorse and I agree with you Tim that the language of that is very important issue um so everybody understands that the the Japanese government position is not clear but for what I understand uh they're mainly obsessed with this idea this comes back to what Nathan was talking about 65 agreement must be recognized as being legitimate uh and in fact President Moon and President Yun both have said that so they in some sense they've gotten what they claim they want um so it has to accept the premise of the 65 agreement and then the Japanese government basically Japanese companies will do what Japanese government tells them to do um that's the reality so if Japanese government says okay you're now free to provide money they'll do it and the in the case of the Chinese suit against Mitsubishi, Mitsubishi paying compensation to the Chinese force laborers without any objection from the Japanese government in part because there's no it didn't contradict any formal treaty other treaty or agreement between Japan and China regarding reparations and so on and I and there were some very important people friends of mine who were involved in that uh I think the same thing can happen in Korea but it requires a Japanese government basically clearing the way for that to happen that's what they're talking about now I think Kishida is really penned in by the Japanese right wing uh and he's he's a he's a he's a weak leader I have to say and and so expectations that he would depart from the Abe you know pathway uh have not been met and he it may well be he shares those views or maybe that he's just politically too weak to do it but we'll see and the people involved in negotiations are really I think they're working really hard to get a deal before the G7 meeting when Yun and Kishida may have a meeting and and I I really I maybe I'm overly optimistic I I I plead guilty to that but I happen to I mean I have a sense that the people involved want to make this happen I don't downplay at all the obstacles that are there and I just want to make one last point about the U.S. it's not look these every agreement including 65 including comfort women this one if Japanese and Koreans are the ones who are doing the heavy lifting here it is not an American creation but at the end you know we are the big dog here and we are providing security for everybody so American intervention particularly at key moments at the end can sometimes be catalytic and help people overcome when they reach loggerheads and I don't want to get into details of the 2015 thing but I I have a pretty good idea of what role the U.S. played at that point it's not that we do it not that we created it but we let's just say the United States played a very important facilitating role I don't think I think that's probably going to be true this time as well if we can find our pathway the narrow pathway to some type of progress if I could just add one quick things before I run away because I don't want Dan to think I'm mad at you at all Jonathan may be more upset with you for the last comment I don't know but the what I just want to say is what I'm not disagreeing about the 2018 moment is if we just keep doing the most recent time something unravels we're just never going to move forward and I think that's my sense of trying to focus on you know these these uh let's remember when we talk forced labor the sex slavery is a different history it is technically a subset of forced labor it is sexualized forced labor it is forced rape it is entrapped people doing something against their will and so when we talk about it it is obviously you know understood as a discrete moment but I think we need to understand we're talking about a whole host of horrible things that happened and so just constantly going back to the last thing that we did wrong I think only makes things worse it tightens the knot thank you and thank you so much Frank sorry to jump off early it's been thank you so much Alexis you cut off a little bit but that's okay appreciate your participation I'm going to turn to Tim because Dan referenced some of your your comments so please feel free to respond to him but also my question gets back to your essay and you talk about three elements of successful conciliation agreements right compensation commemoration and an apology do you see those elements present in a potential agreement that seems to be bubbling of course we don't know what the agreement is so it's hard to say but what do you think might be there what do you think is the hardest part of the three elements that you discussed sure thank you and Dan I appreciate that you're much closer to government actors and have insights that I don't have I don't have access to so I appreciate your clarification I think if we look at the 2015 agreement the Comfort Women Agreement that's been referenced many times that's maybe some indication of what a forced labor agreement would look like and again it also sounds again based on the comments that that Dan just made that the Korean side would look at that and and would realize that it didn't it didn't fulfill certain requirements or conditions that Korean comfort women and forced laborers have been making for quite some time now which is an unconditional unequivocal apology one of the one of the points I made in my own research is that there has been it's been easier for Japanese companies to apologize to Chinese forced laborers than it has been for Japanese companies to apologize to Korean forced laborers and I think from the Japanese perspective and it's not one that I necessarily agree with but it's one that's been stated is that this was legal right this forced labor campaign that brought between 900,000 and a million Koreans from the peninsula to the Japanese archipelago was accomplished through a law right through the 1938 national conscription or national mobilization law and then a specific construction conscription order that dealt with South Korea and or Korea I should say colonial Korea in particular and so the the Japanese companies and and again they they've they've said this in the dozens of lawsuits that have been filed against them both in Japan and in the United States and in Korea is that they were just doing what the government did for them right this was this was a a conscription order that the the national legislature at the time passed and they were essentially helping out the war effort and so therefore they can avoid legal liability because they were doing what what legislation told them to do whereas with with Chinese forced labor it's it's not a law it was a cabinet decision that that brought you know 40,000 Chinese laborers over to South Korea I think where the where there there is I think disagreement is that yes even if the even if the the process by which the labor was conscripted and transported to Japan occurred through a legal legal edifice through this law I just referenced the treatment in Japan was often abominable right so people were beaten people were star people were inadequately housed you know weren't able to communicate with their families and so forth and so what what is important I think is that even Japanese courts that have looked at this and even when Japanese courts have dismissed this they still said that conduct itself right the treatment in Japanese mines in Japanese factories violated Japan's own legal system of the 1930s and 1940s and so I think a focus on that to say yes you're right the the labor itself may have been conscripted or mobilized through a legal edifice but what we're talking about is what happened to the Koreans in your custody in Japan that's what that's we're asking compensation for I think that's that's one way maybe to thread the issue you know will will in apology be forthcoming we haven't seen one yet when it comes to Japanese companies right the government as has been stated have offered various forms of apology but I have not and I could be unaware of it but I haven't seen one that it comes from a Japanese company to a Korean forced labor or a group of Korean forced labor so that's that's one issue and then commemoration I think and I think the textbook issue that both Alex the both Alexis and Dan Ray's would be one way to do it but in some of these lawsuits from the late 1990s one of the one of the questions from the the crowd from the audience here has been recent initiatives and there there hasn't been to my knowledge a recent initiative that suggests that a settlement is a is a is a possibility you know from the at least from the past five or six years these settlement agreements go back to the 1990s and there the issue itself was a little bit less high profile I think it might have been viewed as a bilateral issue as opposed to a global issue and now I think with with comfort women it is certainly a regional as Alexis was saying a transnational or global issue and I think the the forced labor issue itself you have the ILO for example the international labor organization finding this violated international covenants in place or in effect at the time and so I think given the fact that there's so much more attention to this issue I think the Japanese are even less willing or more reluctant to to offer some kind of holistic settlement to it but again I'll I'll refer to Dan's optimism that maybe there is you know expert negotiators who are who are on the ground and then able to cajole Japanese companies into making a more fulsome apology and to making a more fulsome platform of apology slash commemoration than we have seen or at least I have seen from the past 25 years thanks Tim we have a little less than 20 minutes left so I do want to get to the audience questions if you're listening in please feel free to type in a question in the chat box but right before that I do want to give our other two panelists Jonathan and Nathan a chance to chime in on anything I'm not going to ask the specific questions to give you the opportunity to talk about whatever you'd like so first let me turn to Jonathan well thanks thanks again Frank and you know excited to get to audience questions so be brief but a couple thoughts just on you know what the what my fellow panelists have been saying as well on on the comfort women agreement but some of the other challenges I mean a lot of great insights and I think to be honest it highlights a lot of the thoughts that have been mentioned by several fellow panelists that when when thinking about reconciliation there's multiple tracks and multiple trains that have to be driven there's not one necessarily silver bullet approach and I think we saw that in many ways in 2015 but just a perspective I think quickly from 2015 especially from a Japanese perspective we heard from Dan as well the United States role which I think was important at the last stages and we've also heard some of the dissatisfaction from the South Korean side especially from civil society with that agreement and I mean I could definitely empathize with with some of their dissatisfaction with it that being said I think it's also important to to understand the perspective from from Japan in the lead up to that agreement as well so I think many many viewed that agreement when it came out probably particularly from the South Korean side and maybe several even in the United States as as maybe underwhelming and not nearly as robust as they expected it to be but on the Japanese side as well just put yourself in the shoes of Abe Shinzo at the time who who is a conservative leader was a conservative leader at the time but actually had more right-wing leaders within his liberal democratic party there was there was still immense pressure despite his political capital in Japan to move forward with an agreement like that so there I'm not saying that you know we should absolve the Japanese because of that but I think that we have to contextualize that this at the time was no easy deal to strike in Tokyo either despite the fact that we may view it as as insufficient and regardless of that point in 2015 when both foreign ministers stood up and agreed to it we can say it's it's insufficient but there it was a sense at the time that from a government perspective the issue had been resolved that being said I think it goes back to this point that and I think Nathan and others have brought this out that you know there we have to think about multiple tracks of reconciliation and if we're looking for one agreement by two foreign ministers to be the final resolution to an issue I think we need to be thinking much more ambitiously and much more broadly so I'll leave it at that point and excited to get to some of the audience questions thanks Jonathan then lastly Nathan I I think you had one of the hardest jobs in your essays because you are breaking down very complex historical and legal issues in a way that would be digestible to the general audience so I really appreciate that but obviously it's hard for you in trying to get that across but any any final broad thoughts from you sure yeah let me just comment on one thing one sort of thing that sort of contextualizes all of this and why Korea-Japan relationship has been particularly difficult even in relation to Japan's other war crimes committed against other countries and it's because of this Korea is is in a different situation vis-à-vis Japan compared to other countries like say the Philippines or Indonesia places where they where they suffered extensive Japanese invasion by during the imperial time but in but during world war two in fact Korea is in a slightly different position even vis-à-vis China because simply because and the difference is this the whole of Korea was colonized in 1910 by Imperial Japan Korea was the first colony of imperial Japan so Okinawan's may disagree with me but you'll have to excuse me a little bit there as far as 20th century style late 19th century early 20th century style imperialism goes created the first meaningful colony that Imperial Japan had that complicates the legal question downstream and Tim referred to this a little bit and this complicates the forced laboration a very direct way excuse me so for example if now if the annexation the colonization of Korea was legitimate then it's legitimate for a country it's legitimate for a country to conscript its own citizens towards this war effort treatment of those conscripts may be subject to a more generalized international law standards but regardless there is a great there is a greater leeway for a country to handle its own own citizens own subjects but if Korea was a colony it was an occupied territory it was a sovereign country that was under occupation by Japan for a long term then the conscription is itself illegal regardless of what the Japanese government what kind of decree the Japanese government had had made at the time and this is how for just one way in which the ambiguity is in the basic treaty has this downstream consequence of how to characterize this forced labor issue and makes this issue very difficult to resolve in the present day thank you very much Nathan for pointing that out we have about 10 minutes left so I want to get to the audience questions let me turn to the first one it's a very specific question from Mindy Kotler and she asked which Japanese company used the most Korean forced laborers she said Mitsubishi which had an informal scene the war type candidate used the most American POWs not sure people haven't answered that specific question certainly among the most they're the for what it's worth Mindy I appreciate the question Mitsubishi has been the most sued the most often sued of the Japanese companies in both Japan and Korea who actually has the most I would reckon it was probably either Mitsubishi or Mitsui and again those are enormous companies with with many different affiliates that whose corporate structure I cannot explain to you but I would imagine that was probably either Mitsubishi or Mitsui that were the the chief among many others right there are there are you know dozens if not more perhaps even 100 there I think there were 135 Japanese companies that use Korea use Chinese forced labor I don't have the statistics up the top of my head for Korean forced labor but certainly Mitsubishi and Mitsui were two of the chief users of Korean forced labor next question is from Professor Errington who and I think Tim kind of tried to answer a little bit but I'll just ask it again so anyone else can answer can you cite or discuss recent evidence of appetite for settlements that similar to what Tim described among the Japanese government and LDP not necessarily Japanese firms and then also among the Korean victims their lawyers and their supporters quick answer I mean there is a process in Korea there was a an advisory council that was formed it included the lawyers though though then they objected to the Korean government pressing the Korean courts not to move ahead with the seizure of assets but there definitely is deep engagement on the Korean side in trying to move towards some type of settlement or agreement on this Japanese side is a little more murky the LDP certainly there's a lot of opposition in the LDP to any kind of agreement and you can hear that vocalized the I appreciated Alexis's comments about the I had the rather profound irony of having Mr. Also recently in Seoul I don't think he was negotiating this issue but he was meeting with you and given his past history but he's the kind of figure in the right wing of the LDP for whom without his backing and agreement doesn't take place I think the feeling I have is that the foreign minister Hayashi he was formerly head of the Japan Korea parliamentary organization he has a long engagement with Korea he was he has a good personal relationship with the South Korean foreign minister Park Jin that he's very interested in making this happen that's my sense I think the mystery figure here is Kishida he was the foreign minister at the time the 2015 agreement he has a long so he has you know some history here there's a good side to that and that he knows the issues and he's been to this before that side is he supposedly doesn't want to repeat the experience of in their view making an agreement which then the Koreans repudiate so there's that kind of mantra in Japan that you know you no point in making a deal because the next government will just throw it out so I think the Japanese side is much the interest is much weaker and that's why I think the American influence has much greater significance Koreans don't need to be told why this needs to be done maybe the Japanese need to be reminded of it what was the other part of the question I forget I think that was just one question basically any recent appetite for this type of conciliatory agreement amongst the Japanese side but also amongst the Korean victims lawyers and supporters it's important to understand I know Nathan knows this very well and and Tim also you know the sort of Damocles hanging over this is the finally the Korean courts moving ahead to implement the judgment that they've made and seizing the assets of Japanese companies that hasn't happened yet there's no necessary necessary time limit as far as I understand that to happen but if it happens then all that's wrong it's interesting you raise that point because there was a point where in I think in August people were expecting a decision related to the forced labor issue and it was postponed and I read in one article that was because one of the prosecutors in the case had retired but that was in August and now it's mid-November so it's it's a little interesting to see what might happen one question actually for the the legal experts in the room is what happens in the case where an agreement is reached by the two governments but not all the plaintiffs support that agreement and they want to for example continue with the court case I'm not sure exactly how that situation has dealt with I don't know if Tim or Nathan have any thoughts there so actually let me just ask a quick question to Dan somewhat related to that issue because there was one sort of aspect from the Japanese perspective that I could never really understand because even as I might disagree with them I understand at least where they're coming from for the most part but this one particular area that I was probably baffled by which is this expectation from the Japanese side that the Korean courts will simply do what the Korean president tells them to do the idea that well the we have an agreement with the president so therefore the Supreme Court should not move forward with the execution if I were litigating a case and the president told me that I can't execute I can't execute the case that a judgment that I've already won I would cry foul right I think anybody would uh anybody would in a democratic country with separation of powers well one answer I'll take the first whack at that if I might I don't want to cut you often but I think Nathan it's a good point and Frank your question is well taken as well I think we also need to look at this in light of the fact that for three to four to five years after the so we talked about 2018 decisions right where they or verdict said you know pay these Korean forced laborers a hundred thousand dollars US that comes obviously as you know at the heels of a 2012 decision also rendered by the South Korean Supreme Court that said these companies are liable right then it gets sent back to the lower courts to determine how much the judgments should be worth and and the the political nefariousness Nathan to get to your point comes from the fact that how can hey told the South Korean Supreme Chief Judge of the South Korean Supreme Court to sit on the judgments which he did for three years right and of course she was indicted he was indicted and so I think yeah in a democracy you're not supposed to have that but you just had that in South Korea right so I think and so the fact that yes maybe some executive branch political actor in South Korea might have done the same thing well you might say well that that goes against separation of powers but you just say we'll see f 2015 to 2018 where the exact same thing happened in the exact same case right so I think I think maybe if we look at it that way that may provide some explanation for I mean you're right and this gets to Frank's question as well the government says we have an agreement but and this this speaks to the the point that Nathan was making in his remarks we have seen in among liberal democracies at least much greater attention to individual rights rights of victims human rights and there's you know dozens of lawsuits we could talk about in Italy and Greece and South Korea and Japan Germany and so forth where that individual human rights perspective has arisen and and and gotten traction but you know that the governments also have a role to play and in in the United States when European forced laborers sued German companies in the 1990s the agreement was the the state department would weigh in with an amicus brief in the future so they said look we're going to have a global agreement we're going to the the Germans are going to put in five billion dollars for a forced labor fund and that will deal that will spell the end of all a current and subsequent litigation right now you know can somebody can that for a European forced laborer file a suit right now and said I never got the money I don't want to yes he or she could but then the state department is going to step in and say oh sorry we we litigated this we've already dealt with this issue the the Germans put together the remembrance fund that was seated with five billion dollars of cash from the German government and the German corporate sector and so we are we are encouraging you judge so-and-so to dismiss this case as you know race maybe not risk to Dakota but as something that's already been settled through a political agreement between the United States and Germany and with a German fund so I think yeah in a in a in a system where there are independent courts I think the you know a court could still take the case but that court would then receive amicus briefs or or other encouragement will say from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the State Department they should dismiss this case as something that has already been settled by prior agreements interesting Dan Dan I cut you off so one issue which is as far as I understand it the Seoul District Court or a Seoul District Court made a made a contradictory decision on the forced labor issue and I don't quite understand how that works I mean in the Korean court system but they said the 65 agreement remained in place and had settled the issue which by the way was also somewhat the conclusion of a of a commission that was formed in Korea under the at the end of the normal human administration at least in partial partial case Nathan Shaggy is that but anyway I don't really understand how that those contradictory court decisions are dealt with in the Korean system maybe you can explain it I'll just I'll just be very I'll just be very quick at that district court decision is simply absolutely correct in a sense that it just slightly contradicts the Supreme Court case that way around it and that's and then as to the the commission there was Prime Minister was was heading that heading that commission this is it's interesting there's a lot of legal questions that come up about you know what the Supreme Court has can address non-justiciability and and precedence in in in civil law cases or civil courts civil law systems we don't have the the time to get into that and we are out of time but I did want to ask one last final question which gets to kind of goes back harkens back to Abe's death in recent months which is again from Minnie Kotler how do you weigh current foreign policy challenges and of course the importance of you know countries like Japan versus what many perceive as Japan's historical revisionism right you have these two competing issues how do you weigh those types of issues it's a very meaty question not something that we can probably address very quickly but want to throw that in there before we wrap up but Frank I can take the first cut at that and so the cardinal rule of diplomacy is is not to think in binary terms so you know it's a very good question but I would suggest that we need to be thinking not in an either or a state but again as I mentioned in the original comments that we need to be driving down two or three tracks at the same time I mean unless tectonic plates change and geography shifts quicker than we think it will Japan and South Korea will be in the same neighborhood dealing with the same challenges the same opportunities in foreign policy terms for the next several centuries that does not mean that we should not be having the discussions that we're having today and and looking for concrete resolutions on history but I think that we cannot live in this fishbowl mentality where we just you know assume that Japan and South Korea don't have shared interests I think frankly we're going to see this more and more over the coming decades and this is not necessarily the United States you know pushing this down the throats of its two East Asian allies one example that I'll I'll give you and leave you on this point is South Korean public polling on perceptions of China and a lot of this goes to the economic coercion that South Korea felt after the imposition of a fad battery and the economic boycotts of latte and others in China frankly those perceptions are bad and they're getting worse and this is not a problem that the United States created Japan also feels worried about many of these challenges so I'm only using that as one example to say that there are areas in shared interest terms where where Japan and South Korea by themselves even without the United States have commonalities and it's okay to pursue those but this needs to be done at the exact same time that we're working on the historical issues that would be it not an either or choice I think you have to do them both at the same time you know I always have one thought about this which is that you know security interests foreign policy interests those can shift and change and they can create imperatives and drive to some degree people to to confront issues but history matters and there's a long history here between Japan and Korea and it's deeply rooted in the identities of all of the people in these nations and in and that express to their governments and you cannot escape history that's just my fundamental belief and that's an excellent way to end the roundtable discussion I do want to thank all of you for for providing your insights and our audience for joining us I want to remind the audience that there are excellent essays if you want to read them in full on the USIP website on creative approaches to resolving South Korea Japan tensions I encourage you to go there and read each of the essays they're excellent and again thank you for joining in