Instead, first Japan and then South Korea have chosen to escalate the diplomatic conflict while using accusatory language and issuing demands for apologies. This is due to a combination of unresolved historical tensions related to Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, nationalistic theater designed for domestic consumption, and genuine divergences in foreign policy.

Japan effectively turned Korea into a Japanese colony between 1876 and 1910. After the Japanese defeat in World War II, the nation was split into its present divided status. During the war, Koreans had been forced to labor in factories and serve as sex slaves (“Comfort Women”) in support of the Japanese war effort.

Though Tokyo has at times apologized for various atrocities its forces undertook in the first half of the twentieth century, these acts have been undermined by a consistent drive by Japanese nationalists, including President Shinzo Abe, to redefine events such as biological weapons testing on civilians, the mass rape and murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, or the forced recruitment of sex workers under conditions that killed thousands of them, as ordinary wartime acts no different than those undertaken by the Allies in World War II.