著者

金 恩貞

出版者

一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2013, no.172, pp.172_28-172_43, 2013

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The Japanese claims against South Korea provoked an intense legal debate at the first Japan-South Korea negotiations and have resulted in the most contentious issue during the early phase of the bilateral normalization talks in the 1950s. Some previous studies on the Japan-South Korea talks pointed out that there was a period which could be regarded as a gap between the talks, namely between the 1950s, when the Japanese claims against South Korea escalated tension among two countries and brought the talks to a halt, and the 1960s, when the actual negotiation started moving with regard to what and how much the Japanese were going to claim. Other scholars have discussed what may have been the Japanese hidden purpose for the claims against South Korea whereby they sought to reduce the amount of the compensation payable to South Korea as well as to use it as "material for negations" in order to respond to the claims of the Japanese citizens repatriated from the formerly occupied territories. In addition, these claims of Japan to South Korea have been under severe criticism to defend the opinions that Japan had not sufficiently reflected on its control over the Korean Peninsula before and during the war.<br>These previous studies, however, have not revealed the legal logic which supported the Japanese government's claims against South Korea. In fact,most of the literature pointed out that the Japanese government lacked a logical policy, causing a misconception that the Japanese government was consistently adopting a passive attitude toward the talks. Moreover, the studies tend to conclude that the effect of interference of the US and the Japanese politicians' perception towards South Korea were the causes of Japan's change in its policy leading to the waiver of the right to claim against South Korea during the break period and to its settlement in 1965.<br>This study aims to clarify what was the logic of the Japanese claims against South Korea and how it was formed. For this purpose, it focuses on the report written by Professor Yasuo Yamashita, a Law Professor at Nagoya University and a prominent international jurist, which was made before the Japan-South Korea negotiations at the request of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This report has played a significant role as a basis for the Japanese legal logic. This paper empirically analyses the main issue of Professor Yamashita's logic and the background of his argument in his report. On the basis of this analysis, this study argues that Japan had a concrete vision and strategy with regard to its negotiations with South Korea from the beginning. Contrary to the previous literature, the findings of this paper identify the existence of consistent policy logic on the part of the Japanese government throughout its negotiations with South Korea and this logic had its origin in the formulation of its claim against South Korea.