Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

SEOUL — No matter which way South Korea looks, the government faces tough new/old issues with the two enormous powers that have subjected the Korean Peninsula to pain and suffering over the centuries.

First, this week, the problem was with China after the skipper of a Chinese fishing boat stabbed to death the Korean Coast Guard commando who was trying to hold him for “illegal” fishing in Korean waters in the Yellow Sea.

Next came trouble with Japan after Korean groups campaigning on behalf of World War II “comfort women” implanted the bronze statue of a demure teen-aged girl in traditional Korean hanbok across the narrow street from the rear of the Japanese Embassy.

For Korean leaders, the killing of the commando may actually be the easier of the two problems, at least politically, and at least for now. All President Lee Myung-Bak had to do was come out with a get-tough statement promising “strong measures” against any Chinese fishing boats that come trawling within Korean territorial waters.

No doubt the Koreans, whose coast guard subdued the Chinese captain along with eight crew members, will make a huge show of putting them all on trial.

The skipper will be sure to get a lengthy prison term while his crew will eventually be returned to China after the routine of an investigation, expressions of regret and demands for China for their release.

The problem with Japan, however, is a little more subtle. How can any Korean government respond to Japanese demands for removal of a statue that so quietly, tastefully, artistically reflects deep-seated Korean resentment over not only the forced servitude of young Korean women as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers in World War II, but also a host of other bitter feelings?

President Lee will have difficulty avoiding the topic when he goes to Tokyo this weekend for talks with Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda that should normally deal with much more current topics, including common cause against North Korea.

For both Lee and Noda, the issue of the comfort women will be an incredible distraction. The Japanese have been saying, with remarkable consistency, that they settled all that when they signed a treaty with Korea in 1965 for normalizing of relations. For the first time since they took over the Korean Peninsula 60 year earlier, ruling it as a colony from 1910 to the end of World War II, Japan was able to deal with Korea with the diplomatic respect due a foreign power.

The comfort women, though, refuse to go away.

Over the years, as revelations of the suffering of the comfort women poured out of obscure files and records, a score of non-governmental organizations have taken up their cause. Every Wednesday since Jan. 8, 1992, comfort women have demonstrated outside the Japanese Embassy. Usually only 20 or so people are there, but this week, at the appointed time, hundreds, including five or six one-time comfort women, in their 80s, showed up to mark the 1,000th weekly protest.

For the Japanese, inside their drab red-brick embassy, overshadowed by gleaming new high-rise office buildings, the protest would have been another moment to endure in stoic silence. The unveiling, however, of the image of the comfort women, perched demurely on a chair, beside another chair, all in bronze, embedded in cement across the street, with a carved inscription on the “sexual slavery” endured by the women, adds a whole new dimension to the confrontation.

Protesters may come and go, but the statue is there, enduring, immutable, deceptively modest in appearance and bearing — and totally immovable.

The empty chair symbolizes the tens of thousands who never came home — left to die in far-off jungles or military encampments, tossed out and deserted when the Japanese surrendered. Passers-by can sit in the chair beside the image of the woman, consoling her in her grief and loneliness, posing for souvenir snaps. People place flowers at her feet. When I walked by, I saw someone had left a burgundy wool scarf around her neck.

In vain, Japan’s ambassador, Masatoshi Muto, has lodged a complaint with the Korean government. What foreign embassy, Japanese ask, can accept without comment the presence of such a politically motivated statue across the way? And does Korea not owe the embassy a certain amount of protection from such an affront?

Lee, when he sees Noda, promises for the first time to raise the topic of the comfort women with a Japanese leader. There is little else he can do — he’s got enough trouble with demonstrators protesting the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement every night, elections for the National Assembly coming up in April — and then a presidential election in December.

The last thing Lee needs is to be identified as the gutless leader who wouldn’t stand up against Japan. He’s already made a show of undying defense of Dokdo, the rocky islets known in Japan as Takeshima, held sturdily by Koreans in the East Sea, that is, the Sea of Japan as far as the Japanese are concerned.

In the crunch, however, the Japanese are not really the enemy. South Korea and Japan may not be allied, but they’re both allies with the United States, and they both have got to be worried about North Korea, considering the North’s ties with China.

The Chinese have it both ways when it comes to the Korean Peninsula. They have North Korea beholden to them for military protection and economic support, and they’re South Korea’s biggest trading partner. While North Korea (whose leader Kim Jong-Il passed away on Dec. 18) has to go courting Chinese leaders, South Korea’s giant chaebol (conglomerates) go courting Chinese politicians and business people.

The Chinese strategy of divide-and-rule was never more relevant than now for both Koreas when everyone’s counting on the Chinese to keep the lid on whatever mischief North Korea might have in mind while becoming “a strong and prosperous country.”

The trouble with the dream of China’s role as peace-keeper is that Beijing has its own aggressive intentions. Thousands of times in recent years South Korean forces have stopped Chinese boats encroaching on territorial waters. Almost every time, the Chinese pay a stiff fine, go away — and come back again. Twice now, in 2008 off Mokpo and again on Monday, enraged Chinese crew members have killed a South Korean.

All that would still not be all that much of an international concern were it not that China’s real interest in the Yellow Sea goes considerably beyond fishing.

Increasingly in recent years, the Chinese have come to view the Yellow Sea as more or less their lake, or at least within the Chinese sphere of influence.

They reacted furiously last year to the prospect of the U.S. aircraft carrier USS George Washington leading a flotilla of U.S. and South Korean Navy ships into the Yellow Sea on exercises after the torpedoing of a South Korean navy corvette and then the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island that took the lives of 50 South Koreans.

Those Chinese fishing boats are going into waters where North Korean boats would also like to venture. China has never actually taken a position on the South’s Northern Limit Line, challenged by the North Koreans in bloody battles in 1999 and again in 2002.

The Chinese are happy to exploit constant friction between the two Koreas in those troubled waters, giving the South Koreans the dual missions of defense against North Korean and Chinese fishing boats.

It’s a standoff that’s likely to worsen while Korea and Japan try to devise a face-saving way out of the dilemma of a girl in a hanbok seated quietly across the street, never moving, never leaving her chair — a constant reminder of undying tensions in a restive region.

  Kim Jong-Il, Lee Myung-Bak, Masatoshi Muto, real time friction with communist neighbors, South Korea beset by historical tensions with Japan, Takeshima, Yeonpyeong Island, Yoshihiko Noda