In his strongest comments yet on a growing trade dispute, South Korean President Moon Jae-in yesterday urged Japan to lift recently tightened controls on high-tech exports to South Korea, which he said threaten to shatter the countries’ economic cooperation and could damage Japan more than South Korea.
The dispute has further soured relations already troubled over Japan’s colonial rule of the then-unified Korea before the end of World War II.
Moon accused Japan of abusing its leverage in trade to punish South Korea over their historical dispute.
South Korea sees the trade curbs as retaliation for South Korean court rulings earlier this year that ordered Japanese corporations to compensate South Korean victims for forced labor during World War II.
South Korea says the strengthened export controls of photoresists and other sensitive materials used mainly to manufacture semiconductors and display screens could hurt its export-dependent economy and disrupt global supply chains.
Its government plans to file a complaint with the WTO and raise the issue at next week’s WTO General Council in Geneva, Switzerland.
Trade officials from the two countries failed to resolve the dispute in a working-level meeting in Tokyo on Friday.
Moon also said that South Korea would use the dispute as an opportunity to reduce its dependence on Japan by strengthening its technology industry and diversifying import sources.
“Japan’s export restrictions have broken the framework of economic cooperation between South Korea and Japan that had continued over a half-century based on mutual dependence,” Moon said in a meeting of senior aides at the Blue House in Seoul.
“The shattered credibility of cooperation with Japan in the manufacturing industry will inspire our companies to break out of their dependence on Japanese materials, components and equipment and work toward diversifying import sources or localizing the technologies. I warn that, eventually, it will be the Japanese economy that will be damaged more,” he said.
Moon spoke hours after dozens of South Korean small-business owners rallied in Seoul, calling for boycotts of Japanese consumer goods.
The Japanese measures, which went into effect earlier this month, have stoked public anger in South Korea, where many say that Japan still has not fully acknowledged responsibility for atrocities committed during its colonial occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945.
Korea Mart Association president Kim Sung-min urged shop owners to boycott the distribution of Japanese products until Tokyo apologizes over the trade curbs and withdraws them.
Other demonstrators held up placards that read: “Our supermarket does not sell Japanese products.”
“We will continue boycotting the consumption and distribution of Japanese products until Japan’s government and the Abe administration apologizes and withdraws its economic retaliation,” Kim said, referring to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Tokyo says the materials affected by the export controls can be sent only to trustworthy trading partners.
Abe and his aides suggested that there might have been illegal transfers of sensitive materials from South Korea to North Korea.
India yesterday summoned Canada’s high commissioner in India to “convey strong concern” over Sikh protesters in Canada and how they were allowed to breach the security of India’s diplomatic mission and consulates. Canadian media reported that hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the Indian consulate in Vancouver on Saturday over demands for an independent Sikh state, a simmering issue for decades that was triggered again in the past few weeks. Canada has the highest population of Sikhs outside their home state of Punjab in India. “It is expected that the Canadian government will take all steps which are required to ensure the
CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS: The US destroyer’s routine operations in the South China Sea would have ‘serious consequences,’ the defense ministry said China yesterday threatened “serious consequences” after the US Navy sailed a destroyer around the disputed Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島) in the South China Sea for the second day in a row, in a move Beijing claimed was a breach of its sovereignty and security. The warning came amid growing tensions between China and the US in the region, as Washington pushes back at Beijing’s growingly assertive posture in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway it claims virtually in its entirety. On Thursday, after the US sailed the USS Milius guided-missile destroyer near the Paracel Islands, China said its navy and
The US Department of Justice on Friday unveiled spying charges against a Russian who, under a Brazilian alias, studied at a Washington university and then tried to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The indictment of Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov said it would try to contest his extradition to Russia from Brazil, where he is jailed on identity fraud charges. Cherkasov, 39, was detained at the beginning of April last year by Dutch authorities for using fake identity papers. He arrived in the country as Viktor Muller Ferreira, a Brazilian, to take a position at the ICC as a junior analyst. The
The US military must be ready for possible confrontation with China, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Thursday, pushing the US Congress to approve the Pentagon’s proposed US$842 billion budget, which would modernize the force in Asia and around the world. “This is a strategy-driven budget — and one driven by the seriousness of our strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” Austin told the US House of Representations Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Pointing to increases in new technology, such as hypersonics, Austin said the budget proposes to spend more than US$9 billion, a 40 percent increase over last
RSS