A Treaty for Tomorrow

Of all members of its onetime Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, no nation hates Japan more bitterly than Korea--and the antipathy is mutual. Koreans, still smarting from 35 years of harsh colonial rule by imperial Japan, regard their former masters as a cruel, crafty race bent on reasserting economic domination of their country. To most Japanese, on the other hand, Koreans are senjin--subhumans--personified by the garlic-reeking Korean thugs who rule Tokyo's underworld. Such acid antagonisms are not easily neutralized in an Asia rent by revolution and rising nationalism. Last week, nonetheless, Japan and South Korea took a long step toward amicable relations and genuine co-prosperity.

Handel & Champagne. That step--after 14 years of quarrelsome negotiations--took place in Tokyo, where the Foreign Ministers of Japan and South Korea marched into the chrysanthemum-decked ceremonial hall of Prime Minister Eisaku Sato's official residence. There, the beaming officials signed a "normalization" treaty and 26 related documents that make the two nations political and diplomatic equals for the first time in modern history. Then, to the sonorous strains of Handel's Toll for the Brave, Sato and the Foreign Ministers toasted one another in French champagne.

Along with the basic treaty providing for the first exchange of envoys between the two countries since 1876, rode four subsidiary agreements aimed at reducing ancient economic and ethnic frictions. One protocol provides South Korea with $800 million in Japanese loans, goods and private commercial credits. Another extends full educational, health and welfare benefits to the 570,000 Koreans living in Japan. The Sato government also agreed to return to Seoul a hoard of Korean national treasures (ranging from ceramics to calligraphy) that the Japanese had stolen during the occupation years. In the most controversial agreement of all, covering South Korea's rich offshore fishing grounds, Japan won the right to trawl outside a twelve-mile limit --it had previously been 60 miles--thus gaining limited access to some 85,000 additional square miles of coveted waters.

Applause & Riots. The treaty was applauded in Washington, which had long worked on both nations to bury their differences. Since the agreements significantly exclude Communist-ruled North Korea, Asian Reds loudly echoed Radio Peking's charge that it was "another step in the program of U.S. imperialist aggression."

Japanese and Korean leftists quickly took to the streets in protest. The ugliest riots took place in Seoul, where crowds rampaged through the streets and gathered under the statue of Yong Hwan Min, a Korean national hero who stabbed himself to death in protest against Japanese aggression in 1905. Seoul cops cracked scores of skulls, carted off more than 1,000 demonstrators to jail.

For all the fuss, though, neither Prime Minister Sato nor South Korea's President Chung Hee Park doubted that their Parliaments would ratify the treaty by year's end. As Park put it: "It is wise that we should hold hands even with yesterday's enemy, if it is beneficial to us today and tomorrow."

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