SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis examines the rapid deterioration in South Korean-Japanese relations during the early 1970s, a period during which the two countries experienced a series of intense diplomatic incidents that included the abduction of Kim Dae Jung, the attempted assassination of then Korean President Park Chung Hee, and a series of fabricated espionage charges. While South Korea and Japan were both under the international diplomatic umbrella of an American hegemon, the Korean and Japanese governments nevertheless sought for independent ways to navigate discrete diplomatic difficulties. This study seeks to understand how the emergence of this partial détente affected the relationship between South Korea and Japan within the context of the global Cold War. Although Japan and South Korea (hereafter, Korea) were never directly allied with each other, the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1965 led them to often behave as if they were. In the latter half of the 1960s the triangular shape to relations between Korea, Japan and the United States was surprisingly amicable. One reason for this was the security needs precipitated by the United States’ war effort in Vietnam, which led the State Department to push the governments of Korea and Japan to further develop economic as well as political ties. This relationship began to crack in 1969 when the United States seemed to be disengaging from its Cold War obligations in East Asia. Unlike previous wisdom that found the reason for Korean-Japanese conflict in their antipathy, I argue in this thesis that the cause of this crack in their relations were political and economic in nature based on different situation that the détente brought to the each. Thereby this thesis seeks to better understand the historical context of this unique period in the diplomatic relationship between Korea, Japan and the United States.