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Message:: [QUOTE="mlov43, post: 5140466, member: 16729"]Yeah, I was worried that you might have had such experiences, gx... The historical facts, are just that.  Like you said, we should acknowledge them. The problem is that the enmity growing out of them is used politically and is "enculturated" in some fashion so as to make it durable over time.  It can always be dragged out again to fit another purpose or for another government, for example. There are Koreans with reasonable opinions (who still do not like the fact that Japan ran Korea for 35 years) but yet are not using a "resentment lens" on these issues, and the Koreans absolutely know that there are reasonable Japanese with whom they can have sympathetic discourse with on this topic.  The problem is that a "shared Korean/Japanese narrative" among these kinds of Koreans and Japanese has never taken hold. Without the same kind of cross-national narrative building that the Germans and French had after the war, there is no hope of this enmity evolving into something other than what it is now. The Japanese govt. has apologized before (I think formally in 1984). However a "shared narrative" built and promoted by knowledgable people from both countries is what is really needed, not more apologies.  It literally is the only way I can think of getting out of this mess. Otherwise, we'll be witness to this "neverendum" of contention between the two societies.   And WITHIN Korean society...[/QUOTE]