Japan

Despite being industrial powerhouses, Korea and Japan are both resource-poor nations with limited domestic sources of energy. Powering their economies required both to develop supply chains for fossil fuels, nuclear…

With relations between Korea and Japan improving over the last year the leaders of the United States, Korea, and Japan met in Washington on August 18 to discuss a common…

This month, the world was reminded once again that the relationship between the Republic of Korea and Japan is deeply fractious. Japan has imposed restrictions on the export of chemical…

With the world's attention on Singapore on June 12, U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un walked across a stage flanked by American and North Korean…

Joseph Biden will be inaugurated on Wednesday, 20 January, bringing the Trump era to an end. Under the 45th president, American alliances faced significant stress from his skepticism of multilateralism and preference for transactional agreements. The U.S.-ROK alliance was no different, with friction arising between Seoul and Washington from time to time. As the Biden…

We were reminded last year that it can be difficult to anticipate the events that will dominate any given year. As 2020 began, few people expected focus of the world or the Korean Peninsula to be on a global pandemic, but that is how the year unfolded. South Korea has handled the pandemic relatively well…

In the next few days, the United Nations General Assembly will approve a resolution on “The Situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”  The text of the 11 page resolution reviews the human rights abuses that the UN Commission of Inquiry on North Korea’s human rights documented (2013-2014), as well as…

The agreement between Korea and Japan on the issue of comfort women, announced in 2015, seemed like an amazing breakthrough on a sensitive topic in the bilateral relationship. But in the five years since then, the agreement has largely fallen apart, and other disagreements over the legacy of Japanese control of the Korean Peninsula have…