North and South Koreans find cause for unity: Japan

By Jack Kim

PYONGYANG (Reuters) - It took six decades for the divided Koreas to meet to talk about Japan's colonial past, but it took them just two hours to agree they had common grievances with their Asian neighbor.

Despite the 1950-53 Korean War that killed millions and decades of animosity, there was little dispute between a South Korean group that visited Pyongyang last week and their North Korean hosts, as they agreed Japan's colonial rule still casts a shadow over the peninsula.

The two Koreas have been split since Japan's defeat in World War Two ended its 1910-1945 colonial rule. The united Korea under Japan's emperor was then replaced with two states -- the South under the U.S. sphere of influence and the North under the Soviet.

"The international community is in the midst of change and a number of countries are reflecting on their past inhumane crimes and aggression," said Lee Hae-hak, a Christian pastor and a former democracy activist who headed the South Korean group.

"Only Japan is going in reverse," Lee, who alsohonors South Korean group fighting against Japan's Yasukuni war shrine seen by Asian neighbors as a symbol of its militarism because it honors convicted war criminals, told the Pyongyang seminar.

North Korea's official media and several leading politicians in South Korea seldom miss the chance to criticize Japan for failing to pay what they see as proper contrition for its colonial rule that included forced labor, front-line brothels and attempts to end the Korean language.

And both agree that Japan should relinquish its territorial claims to a set of desolate islands called Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese that lie about halfway between the two.

Japan, for its part, said it has paid proper reparations to the South, issued an apology for its aggression and lived in peace since World War Two ended. It has no diplomatic relations with Pyongyang and said they will not likely be coming until the North settles the issue of Japanese nationals it has kidnapped.

The head of a North Korean academy of historical studies, Ho Jong-ho, told the 90-minute seminar that Japan was running "reckless in its scheming against the North."

Ties between the two Koreas, officially, have been at their lowest point in years. Impoverished Pyongyang has been angry at President Lee Myung-bak, who took office in February, for stopping the free flow of unconditional aid it had seen under his liberal predecessors for 10 years.

Last week, the communist North vowed to close the handful of cross-border links with the South beginning December 1 in a move seen as retreating deeper into its shell amid growing speculation over the health of its reclusive leader Kim Jong-il, thought to have suffered a stroke in August. Ordinary North Koreans only vaguely know of the dispute and about the islands.

But when it came to the need to protect them from the evil colonial hands of Japan, no one was in dispute.

"You should hand them over to us," a North Korean official said, not entirely jokingly. "We'll look after them real good."

(Editing by Jon Herskovitz and David Fox)