Trouble in paradise: Just a day after G20 love-in, Japan throttles chip part exports to South Korea Just a day after the G20 free trade summit ended, Japan has restricted exports of some mobile phone components to South Korea. Relations between the two countries have been less than cordial of late - a ruling by a South Korean court that Japanese companies should pay compensation for using forced labour during the Second …
.....using trade restrictions to further political aims. (Trump has obviously given some people bad ideas.)
(....and yes, I know that the Japanese did off-the-scale horrible things to people in their "Coprosperity Sphere" but that was a long time ago...and its not as if the South Koreans are lily white (ask the Vietnamese about how South Korean troops behaved during the Vietnam war).)
As much as I'd love to finger Trump for yet another terrible thing he's done, this has been going on for far longer than he's been on the political scene. Hell, its been going on far longer than he's been alive.
The only difference is that typically the US tried to intervene diplomatically when our allies had trade disputes, because barriers to trade make things worse for everyone. That's unlikely to happen with Trump's administration, since he believes trade is a zero sum game and that if these countries trade less with each other they'll be forced to trade more with the US.
The issue is that it was a long time ago, but Japan has largely denied a large proportion of it even happened and a lot of people in Japan (at least in part due to propaganda efforts by the government at the time) don't believe they did anything beyond occupying territory they wanted to annex
"There should be a law against [...] using trade restrictions to further political aims."
What other possible aim is there for a trade restriction? Any modifiers to trade (either restrictions or inducements) are inherently political by their very nature.
(And if you're about to say "well then, there should be no restrictions to trade", that's very much a political position.)
The United States should have a word with Japan.
Japan is responsible for aggression against Korea, the Phillipines, Indonesia, China, and many other Asian countries. And also there is the matter of Pearl Harbor, so the Japanese government should not allow itself to think it is to be cut any slack. Instead of Japan's laws being made by a Japanese government, have South Korea, Taiwan, and the Phillipines, under U.S. supervision, governing Japan for a while, until it more clearly understands the framework within which it may exercise local autonomy.
The United States should have a word with Japan
The United States should have a word with itself: if you're going back to Pearl Harbour, remember the USA fought the second world war with a segregated army and that the Civil Rights Act didn't come about until 1964.
And let's not get started on the colonial history of much of Western Europe...
I'm all for calling out brutality, just not as a distraction tactic.
You need to look much nearer home.
Really Bad Things that happened before 1945 are history. But one major legacy is still with us: certain countries claiming Good Guy or Victim status from that moment in history to defend a constant stream of Really Bad Things being perpetrated in our own times.
That is reasonable. But today people of Korean descent born in Japan have to be fingerprinted every year. Because they're not citizens. This is an action being taken by the current Japanese government.
Daring to engage in this kind of trade dispute with South Korea is also an action being taken by the current Japanese government.
While punishing people to reform and rehabilitate them, if they have not themselves done any wrong acts, makes no sense, cost recovery for the consequences of wrong acts will sometimes extend into future generations because of the magnitude of the sums involved. It's not as if the heavy burden of reparations payments Japan is facing towards South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Phillipines and so on is making it a poor country, and so it is legitimate to increase the amount of money transfered from Japan to these nations to help them rebuild.
How do you expect people living in the Phillipines to understand it as fair that the average Japanese person is wealthier than the average person in the Phillipines? Something went wrong to lead to the innocent victims of aggression not to lead the way in the economic development of the region.
Japan didn't do the collective memorial work Germany did after WW2. Japan buried all the horrors it committed deep, leading to today's negationism by a large part of the population. Japan's neighbours have the right to be upset by Japanese attitude towards their sufferings: Nanjing massacre, Manila massacre, Unit 731, biological warfare, systematic mistreatments of prisoners of wars, slavery, forced prostitution, etc... all of this part of a Japanese history Japan doesn't want to know.
"We are always right" "The sides who criticize Japan are always wrong"
That is actual state of present arrogant Japan's Abe government.
They restricted export against South-Korea the 2 day after they declared "keeping free trade" at G20.
Japanese supporters of Abe government are delighted at "punishment" against Koreans.
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