SEOUL - Korea-Japan Friendship Year 2005 didn't turn out to be all that friendly.

It was conceived after the euphoria of co-hosting the successful World Cup of football in 2002. With the catchphrase, "To the future, together to the world", it was supposed to be a year of reconciliation, positive steps and celebration of the 40th anniversary of normalization of diplomatic ties. Cultural, economic and sports and arts exchanges were planned.

But the year was a chain of events that resulted in ugly diplomacy, raging nationalism and the opening of old wounds.

In January, declassified dossiers relating to the Korea-Japan Normalization Treaty of 1965 opened the first old wound. It was the first disclosure to the Korean public; it revealed that Seoul demanded US$364 million compensation for individuals who died, were injured or used as laborers during Japan's 35-year occupation on the Korean peninsula. Instead, the South Korean government received $800 million, in a combination of grants and low-interest loans, as reparations from Japan.

South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee agreed that after this payment, South Korean citizens would give up their right to make individual claims against the Japanese government. What the declassified documents revealed was that Park only paid out about 2.56 billion won ($251 million) to families killed by the Japanese and 6.6 billion won to owners of destroyed property. None of the thousands of South Koreans conscripted into the Japanese military and labor workforce received compensation.

The remaining money was earmarked for nation-building construction projects. Park's often-criticized vision of linking Seoul and Busan in the south by expressway became a reality. He poured money into developing infrastructure and heavy industry, especially his favored state-owned business, Pohang Iron & Steel, which later became Posco, one of the world's top steelmakers.

The Japanese reparation money, along with American foreign aid, was the gratuitous seed money that bootstrapped the South Korean economy into the industrial nation of today. Arguments in the winter of 2005 revolved around the wartime victims being sacrificed for the greater good of the nation and Park's Japanese philosophy of "poor people, strong state".

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Copyright © James Card.