26 Asia The EconomistJanuary 20th 2018
2 It was rewarded with threats of libel ac-
tion. Mr Jeyenbekov has form when it
comes to suing journalists. In October he
won a fierce libel suit against another me-
dia outlet. Police have also impounded the
property of a television station belonging
to Mr Babanov, ostensibly over a disputed
payment to anotherbusiness.
Foreign journalists and watchdogs
have not fared well under Mr Jeyenbekov
either. In December one of the few West-
ern reporters based in Kyrgyzstan, Chris
Rickleton, a correspondent forAFP, a news
agency, was summarily deported on
claims that he had violated immigration
law, which he denies. The authorities have
prevented Mihra Rittmann, a researcher
for Human Rights Watch, a pressure group,
from visiting the country for two years onsimilar grounds. Last year the government
also barred a campaigner from a respected
Russian rights group, Memorial. Azimjon
Askarov, one of Kyrgyzstan’s most promi-
nent human-rights advocates, is serving a
life sentence, also on flimsy charges of fo-
menting ethnic unrest.
As Mr Jeyenbekov recently noted, Kyr-
gyzstan remains the first and only Central
Asian country with a functioning, if
flawed, parliamentary democracy. Protes-
ters have toppled wayward governments
twice in recent years. Democracy, Mr
Jeyenbekov said poetically in his inaugura-
tion speech, “has two friends: first free-
dom, second responsibility”. Alas, he does
not seem to be taking his responsibility to
protect the country’s democratic freedoms
at all seriously. 7Y
U MYUNG-SU and his friends have
been fans of Japanese culture for as long
as he can remember. The 24-year-old South
Korean spent years watching Japanese car-
toons, films and dramas before moving
last year to the southern Japanese island of
Kyushu. There he has discovered new
charms. “Japanese service culture is really
the best,” he says.
Mr Yu’s enthusiasm is reciprocated by
young Japanese; many are into K-pop, for
example. BTS, a South Korean boyband of
seven mop-tops of varying degrees of
bleaching, who re-record all their tracks in
Japanese, was the highest-selling foreign
act in Japan last year. (The acronym stands
for the Korean for “Bulletproof Boy
Scouts”). Japanese fans snapped up
270,000 copies of one of its offerings in just
one day. Meanwhile, sparse, noir-ish detec-
tive novels by Keigo Higashino, a Japanese
crime writer, accounted for three of the ten
best-selling works of fiction in South Korea
last year. Several South Korean directors
have made films based on his books.
The cultural affinity of young South Ko-
reans and Japanese stands in stark contrast
to the animosity between the two coun-
tries’ politicians. The neighbours have
much in common culturally, and share
strategic interests in Asia. But since estab-
lishing formal diplomatic ties in 1965, two
decades after the end of Japan’s colonial
rule of Korea, relations have oscillated be-
tween bad and worse.
Ties deteriorated again this month
when South Korea undermined an agree-
ment of 2015 that was supposed “finallyand irreversibly” to have settled the thorni-
est dispute of all, over the “comfort wom-
en”—South Koreans forced during the war
to work in Japanese military brothels. The
government of Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s
president, asked Japan for an apology (al-
ready given) and implied that Japan had
not paid enough compensation by saying
it would match the ¥1bn ($8m) Japan is pro-
viding to support the last surviving vic-
tims. In response, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s
prime minister, suggested that he would
skip the opening of the Winter Olympics
in South Korea next month.
Colonial history isthe main cause of
the bad blood between the governments.
The Japanese grumble that the South Kore-ans are emotional, renege on agreements
and have made hostility to Japan part of
their national identity. South Koreans re-
tort that the Japanese are reluctant to face
their wartime past, especially under Mr
Abe, who is seen as a revisionist. There is
some truth to both narratives, but the dip-
lomatic back and forth has become petty. “I
feel sold out by both,” says Lee Ok-seon, a
91-year-old former comfort woman.
America, the closest foreign ally of both
countries, is frustrated too. Closer co-oper-
ation is needed to counter China, whose
regional hegemony is feared by both coun-
tries, and to rein in North Korea, whose
missiles threaten them both (and the
American bases they host). In 2016 Japan
and Korea agreed to share intelligence on
North Korea. Ties are deepening between
their armed forces, too. But much more
could be done, says an adviser to the
American armed forces in Seoul.
History matters to the young, too, but
not as much as to the old. Youth in both
countries have more favourable views of
the other than older generations, polls say.
Japanese of all ages feel more affinity with
South Koreans than with Chinese; South
Koreans in their 20s have warmer feelings
towards the Japanese than the Chinese,
unlike older people. Some are even trying
to repair relations. In December young
South Korean and Japanese students met
in Seoul to discuss“the difference in ways
of thinking” about comfort women, says
Kaho Okada, a Japanese participant.
Meanwhile, cultural ties are growing. A
record 7.1m South Koreans visited Japan
last year, while South Korea wasthe most
popular tourist destination for Japanese.
Kim Ji-yoon of the Asan Institute for Policy
Studies, a research outfit in Seoul, reckons
changing attitudes herald better relations
in the future. (It helps that the 31 surviving
South Korean comfort women have an av-
erage age of 91.) “When I talk to my Japa-
nese friends, we don’t argue over whose
land is whose,” laughs Mr Yu. 7Japan and South KoreaK-pop v history
SEOUL AND TOKYO
Diplomatic rows notwithstanding, the two countries are growing closerPelvic thrusts for mutual understanding