On the heels of a recent trip to Japan, coincidentally, I was asked by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to write an essay for their webpage, Korea.net, on the positive cultural relations between Korea and Japan. The current government is taking a conciliatory position vis-a-vis Japan, in contrast to the previous administration, which took a more confrontational approach. I suppose that the variations of policy are a good thing and a byproduct of government by democracy. It’s a healthy kind of pendulum swing, the essence of democracy.

My recent trip to Japan was at the invitation of Doshisha University and the Korean Cultural Center Osaka. My presentation was on K-pop. I’m not a specialist in K-pop, but I looked at what I could see in the history of Korean entertainment and I made some observations that argued that the antecedents of today’s K-pop run deep in Korean history, maybe 1,000 years or more.

But the result of my trip was a renewed positive appraisal of Japan and the Japanese people. While it is true that historically, the actions of Japan in and toward Korea have not been happy — in fact, the historical brutality of Japan toward Korea is disturbing — despite the historical facts, today’s Japanese, for the most part, are........

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