From mid-March until mid-April, South Korean charities raised over $52 million for earthquake relief in Japan, a record sum that speaks volumes about the reservoir of goodwill and generosity of the Korean people toward a nation that once colonized the peninsula. But donations plummeted from the beginning of April after Japan reasserted its claim to sovereignty over the disputed Dokdo/Takeshima islands in new middle school textbooks approved at the end of March and in the Diplomatic Bluebook 2011 issued April 1 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
This, in microcosm, is the nature of the roller-coaster relationship between these "frenemies." And so the former comfort women resumed their daily protests outside the Japanese Embassy and the media furor revived a sense of betrayal rooted in sharp differences over shared history.
This multidisciplinary examination of the implications of the dramatic power shift in East Asia toward Beijing is timely and insightful. The 10 chapters help us understand the fractious nature of bilateral relations and how this affects relations with the U.S. and China. Until China's economic takeoff, Cold War antagonisms and shared threat perceptions helped promote a degree of South Korea-Japan cooperation. But as Beijing has dialed down the ideological rhetoric and catapulted the economy into the world's second largest, there is a perception in Japan that Seoul is tilting toward China at Tokyo's expense.
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