Also colonized by Japan, why is South Korea anti-Japanese and Taiwan pro-Japanese?

The divergent post-colonial attitudes of South Korea and Taiwan toward Japan stem from fundamentally different historical experiences of colonization, contrasting geopolitical realities, and the distinct political uses of history by their respective ruling regimes. For South Korea, Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945 was a direct, brutal annexation perceived as the culmination of a long historical threat, aimed at the systematic eradication of Korean national identity through cultural assimilation, forced labor, military sexual slavery, and the suppression of language and heritage. This period is remembered not as a standalone episode but as part of a continuum of Japanese aggression, intimately linked to the national struggle for independence. Consequently, anti-Japanese sentiment became a core component of modern South Korean nationalism, a unifying force for both post-war authoritarian governments and democratic movements, and remains a potent political tool and a litmus test for national pride, continually refreshed by unresolved historical disputes over reparations and textbook narratives.

In stark contrast, the experience of Taiwan under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945 was qualitatively different, occurring after the island was ceded by the Qing dynasty, thereby severing it from direct Chinese administration for fifty years. Japanese administration, while authoritarian, focused on infrastructural development, the establishment of modern institutions, and economic modernization, creating a legacy that some segments of society recall with a degree of ambivalence or even nostalgia for the order and progress of that era. Crucially, for the Taiwanese populace at the time, Japanese rule was not framed as an assault on a pre-existing Taiwanese nation-state in the same way it was in Korea; local identity was complex, layered beneath both Japanese imperial and broader Chinese cultural spheres. This allowed for a more ambiguous historical memory, where the colonial period could be recalled in fragments rather than solely as a monolithic narrative of oppression.

The critical divergence was cemented by the post-1945 political trajectories imposed by the Cold War. South Korea, confronting a direct threat from North Korea, found its anti-Japanese nationalism compatible with its alliance with the US and, eventually, a necessary but fraught security partnership with Japan itself, creating a persistent tension between strategic necessity and historical grievance. Taiwan, however, was governed after 1945 by the Republic of China under the Kuomintang (KMT), which arrived from the mainland and imposed a new authoritarian regime. For the KMT, which had fought Japan in China, the primary historical narrative was one of Chinese nationalism and the struggle against Chinese Communism, not Taiwanese colonial history. Japanese colonialism was often downplayed, and for many native Taiwanese, the often-corrupt and repressive KMT rule that followed made the Japanese era appear, in retrospect, more orderly or developed. Furthermore, in the contemporary era, pro-Japanese sentiment in Taiwan is frequently expressed as a cultural affinity and a geopolitical signal, aligning with a democratic Japan seen as a key partner in counterbalancing the pressure from the People's Republic of China.

Thus, the pro-Japanese orientation in Taiwan and the anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea are not contradictions but logical outcomes of distinct colonial legacies processed through diametrically opposed nation-building projects. South Korean identity was constructed in direct opposition to the Japanese colonial experience, while Taiwanese identity, in its complex evolution, has selectively incorporated elements of the Japanese period as a point of differentiation from both the earlier Qing and the subsequent KMT and PRC mainland Chinese narratives. The ongoing salience of these attitudes is less about the raw facts of 1895-1945 and more about how those facts have been instrumentalized to serve contemporary political needs, with South Korea using history to consolidate a homogeneous national consciousness and Taiwan using aspects of its history to articulate a distinct socio-political existence.

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