Now Playing: Detente

VISITING JAPAN LAST WEEK, South Korea's President Kim Dae Jung offered a gesture to heal old wounds: Seoul was prepared to gradually lift its ban on Japanese pop culture, a legacy of Korean bitterness over the era of Japanese colonial rule. Of course, the ban has grown porous with time, eroded by the demands of young Koreans who are drawn to the tunes and pop icons of their ""close but remote'' neighbor. Korean broadcasters, for example, can get away with showing Japanese cartoons simply by not acknowledging where the programs come from. Many Korean kids watch Japanese animated adventures like ""Sailor Moon'' about a female warrior, with no idea that her Korean is dubbed. They wear Sailor Moon shoes, bags and clothes by the thousands, and if they knew she was really Japanese, most wouldn't care.

Now the adults are catching up. Every Korean president who visits Tokyo expects an increasingly abject apology for Japan's 36-year occupation, which ended in 1945. Kim was no different. What he got was an expression of ""acute remorse'' from Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, which broke new ground only in that it came, for the first time, in written form. If that hardly satisfied many Koreans, it was an awkward time to complain. Kim and Obuchi signed a pact heralding a ""new relationship'' between Korea and Japan, and Obuchi pledged a new $3 billion loan to help restore the faltering Korean economy to health. Kim, in turn, extended an invitation to Japanese Emperor Akihito, which would make him the first Japanese emperor ever to visit South Korea. ""We're neighbors, and it's been 33 years since we've established diplomatic relations,'' said Kim. ""I think the fact that the emperor hasn't visited yet is extremely unnatural.''

The cultural boycott has become equally unnatural, distorting trade flows between Asia's two mightiest industrial powers. Korean authorities have struggled to keep out everything from movies and music to Japanese industrial imports, like cars and camcorders. Cultural imports were a particularly touchy subject, because the Japanese colonial rulers had tried to wipe out Korean language and arts. Yet today, pirated Japanese videos and CDs flood into Korea. Nearly 6 million Koreans keep up with the neighbors by pulling down Japanese satellite television. When a Japanese music star, Hide, hanged himself last May, tearful South Korean fans held a memorial service in Seoul. President Kim had been hinting for months that it was time to call off the cultural border guards. And young Koreans, who often resent having to fight their parents' war, back Kim's new policy. In a recent survey by the Seoul daily Joong-Ang Ilbo, 98 percent of the 1,000 college students polled said they supported lifting the ban.

Kim, 74, does not share the anti-Japanese hostility of many in his generation. As a dissident democrat during the years of South Korea's military dictatorships, Kim found political refuge in Japan (until South Korean agents kidnapped him from a Tokyo hotel in 1973) and speaks Japanese. Nowadays ""there shouldn't be any fears in accepting Japanese culture,'' he says. Kim also complains about the absurdities of the boycott, which effectively bans Japanese classics like the films of the late Akira Kurosawa, but allows in the junk that is hot on smuggling routes--mainly ""violence, sex and crime culture.''

Korea's own cultural industry may not be eager for the competition. For all their enmities, Koreans and Japanese share Confucian and Buddhist values, and both written languages use Chinese characters. Japan had its own Korea boom in the 1980s, when Korean singers and food became faddish. Now Korea has a thriving industry devoted to copying Japanese films and music, or remaking them with Korean performers. Seoul audiences have a rich choice of remakes, like the recent Korean version of a Japanese blockbuster called ""Lost Paradise,'' an erotic story of suicidal lovers. So an end to the boycott poses a threat to Korean originals and knock-offs as well. ""A sudden opening could seriously damage the base of Korea's cultural industry,'' says Hanyang University drama professor Choi Young Chul.

That is why Kim will introduce his market opening step by step. First, a Korean resident of Japan will sing in Seoul later this month in Japanese, and Japanese singers will be allowed to perform on Korean stages probably next year. Then Japanese CDs and tapes will go on sale in Korea--and finally Japanese performers will come to Korean television and radio. By 2002, when Japan and Korea host the World Cup together, all the barriers should be down. If all goes as Kim hopes, Korea will have left behind its postcolonial resentment, extending a warm welcome to the emperor himself.

© 1998