Journalists and academics in Seoul have been running out of colorful descriptions for an intensifying dispute between South Korea and Japan over history and trade that has sent always shaky relations plummeting further.
Sales of Japanese beer, clothes and other goods have declined sharply as have travels to Japan amid boycott campaigns. Some gas stations have refused to fuel Japanese cars. A restaurant and a museum put up signs that Japanese visitors weren't welcome. Busan City is considering tearing down a Korean War monument to U.N. soldiers following complaints that its flagpoles resemble Japan's wartime"rising sun" emblem, a claim critics say is bizarre.
Nevertheless, thousands of people later marched through heavy rain in Seoul, carrying signs that said"Apologize for War Crimes" and"We Denounce Abe." Story continues"We have to ask ourselves whether our top strategic priority right now is winning a history war against Japan," Lee said."It's not."For decades Japan has struggled to face up to past atrocities and abuses, with some people saying that massacres were exaggerated or characterizing colonization as a positive act that helped Korea to modernize, according to Masaru Tonomura, a history professor at the University of Tokyo.
Yasuhiro Yagi, the leader of a small anti-Korea group, believes that accounts of Japan's cruelty during World War II were fabricated. He sees Korean women who were made sex slaves during the war as victims of criminals, not of something the government did.
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