President Lee Jae-myung and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi meeting at the APEC summit (Source: Chosun Ilbo)
As Japan and South Korea commemorate the 60th anniversary of diplomatic normalization, their respective newly elected leaders, Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae and President Lee Jae-myung, inherit a long and complex relationship often overshadowed by unresolved historical disputes and recurring political friction. Yet, as both signal cautious openness to steadier ties, a different story has been building beyond official diplomacy. Cultural ties have become one of the most dynamic forces linking the two societies, and everyday contact through music, television, fashion and food has become more common than at any time in the postwar era, reshaping how both societies encounter one another in daily life. The full influence of these cultural and social ties on the broader relationship is still unfolding, but their impact is increasingly hard to ignore.
Ambassador Mizushima and officials at the 60th anniversary event in Seoul (Source: Yonhap News)
The influence of these exchanges is most visible among the young. For many Koreans and Japanese in their twenties, the other country appears regularly in playlists, streaming platforms and weekend travel plans. These contacts do not resolve longstanding disputes, yet they raise important questions about how attitudes are formed, how they evolve and whether they can contribute to a more stable bilateral relationship. Answering those questions requires first understanding the historical weight that shapes the bilateral dynamic and, crucially, the very different generational experiences that are now transforming it.
The Weight of the Past
Japan’s colonial rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945 left scars that continue to define contemporary debates. While ties were formally normalized in 1965, key historical issues, particularly wartime forced labor and the “comfort women” system, remain unresolved. Tensions are also regularly reignited by territorial disputes, which often spark nationalist sentiment in both countries. This lack of agreement on interpreting the past, combined with unresolved sovereignty issues, has given the bilateral relationship a persistent, structural tendency toward instability.
Political leadership has historically reinforced this pattern. Conservative South Korean governments have generally emphasized pragmatic cooperation with Japan, while liberal administrations have adopted more critical positions, particularly regarding wartime history. This ideological split and resulting policy shift create a dynamic that inevitably clashes with the persistent stance of successive LDP-led governments in Japan. This pattern was seen most recently during the Moon Jae-in and Abe Shinzo administrations, a period marked by high-profile clashes, including the 2018 South Korean Supreme Court ruling that Japanese firms must compensate surviving forced labor victims. The ensuing diplomatic fallout, which saw Tokyo reject the ruling, maintaining its long-held stance that all compensation claims were fully settled by the 1965 treaty, and impose export controls, resulted in one of the sharpest downturns in decades. While the subsequent Yoon Suk-yeol administration sought to restore high-level exchanges, fundamental political mistrust and sensitivity remain.
It is against this backdrop of habitual political instability that Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae and President Lee Jae-myung have taken office. Despite his historically tough stance on Japan, President Lee has so far adopted a measured tone that leaves open the possibility of steadier ties than those seen under earlier liberal administrations. A similar mix of continuity and caution is evident in Tokyo under Prime Minister Takaichi. Mindful of public concerns in Korea that her leadership might revive Abe-era tensions, Takaichi used her first press conference to emphasize her fondness for Korean dramas and K-beauty products. The gesture offered a measured contrast to the image created by her ties to Abe’s conservative bloc and signaled an effort to begin the relationship on a more constructive note. Yet even as political mistrust persists, the more significant movement is taking place beyond the political sphere, where sustained cultural exchange has already begun to redirect societal attitudes on both sides.
The Rise of Cultural Exchange
Only a generation ago, Korean citizens were effectively barred from consuming Japanese cultural products. Until the late 1990s, they were restricted through broad censorship rules that sought to reassert Korean cultural identity after decades of forced assimilation. Even without an explicit ban, anything deemed “Japanese-style” was routinely blocked from public distribution. Yet prohibition never fully matched lived reality. Throughout the 1970s and onward, Japanese pop culture spread quietly through informal channels, from photocopied manga to bootleg anime tapes and traded J-pop albums. Publicly, Japanese culture was taboo; privately, it became familiar.
As underground consumption expanded through the late 1980s and early 1990s, enforcing the ban became increasingly unrealistic. Younger Koreans felt more confident in their own cultural identity and no longer viewed Japanese influence with the same anxiety as earlier generations. In this changing climate, Gong Ro-myung, South Korea’s then-ambassador to Japan, proposed lifting the restrictions in 1994, an idea that would once have been politically unthinkable. This momentum culminated in 1998, when President Kim Dae-jung initiated a phased opening of the cultural market as part of a broader bid for reconciliation and exchange. Japanese films and manga entered Korea legally for the first time, while Korean artists such as BoA, the first Korean singer ever to reach No. 1 in Japan, were already achieving major commercial success by 2002. Korean dramas like Winter Sonata soon attracted devoted audiences in Japan, helping spark the early Korean Wave. These breakthroughs turned cultural exchange into a two-way flow, with Korean music and television beginning to gain a stable foothold in the Japanese market.
Leaders Kim Dae-jung and Obuchi Keizō at the 1998 accord (Source: Asahi Shimbun / GLOBE+)
In the following decade, cultural flows deepened and today they have fully normalized. K-pop acts now routinely fill Japan’s largest venues, with groups like Stray Kids, Seventeen and TWICE regularly selling out concerts across the country. At the same time, Japanese anime has become a major force in Korea’s theatrical landscape. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle Arc has effectively dominated the Korean box office this year, holding the No. 1 spot for weeks. Its sustained box office performance, driven by general audiences rather than a niche fanbase, underscores how Japanese animation has become a mainstream cultural presence in Korea. For younger generations, these exchanges are now part of daily life, and recent surveys show how deeply they are shaping attitudes on both sides.
What the Statistics Show
Recent surveys point to a clear structural shift in how South Koreans and Japanese view one another. The 2025 Korea–Japan Public Opinion Survey conducted by the East Asia Institute (EAI) reports that 63.3 percent of South Koreans expressed favorable views of Japan, marking a near fivefold jump from 2020 and the first time favorable views have ever surpassed unfavorable ones. Other polls show the same trajectory. A Hankook Ilbo–Yomiuri Shimbun joint survey reports that 55.2 percent of Koreans now say relations are “good,” the highest level since 1995, with 52 percent of Japanese respondents agreeing. Long-term data from the Asahi Shimbun–Dong-A Ilbo survey validates this warming trend, showing a clear expansion of positive views and a corresponding contraction of negative ones since 2015. While the persistence of a sizeable neutral segment reported in these and other polls from the same period suggests lingering caution, the data nonetheless confirms a simple, unifying trend: perceptions on both sides are warmer today than at any point in the past three decades.
The generational dimension sharpens this trend even further. The EAI survey shows favorability toward Japan at about 74 percent among Koreans in both their 20s and 30s, a finding echoed in the Hankook Ilbo–Yomiuri poll, which records similarly high levels among Koreans in their 20s. Survey results also help explain why: younger Koreans and Japanese most often associate each other with familiar cultural touchpoints, anime, manga, Japanese cuisine and fashion on one side; K-pop, Korean dramas and Korean food on the other. These impressions are strengthened by unprecedented levels of cross-border travel, with many young people making repeated short trips each year and accounting for the largest proportion of visitors between the two nations.
Japanese Tourists in Seoul (Source: Korea JoongAng Daily)
What sets this generation apart is not only the strength of its positive views but the lens through which those views are formed. Historical disputes are not forgotten, but they are no longer the primary frame for interpreting the other country. Their impressions grow out of cultural familiarity and direct, routine encounters, a set of lived experiences older generations never had at comparable scale. Ultimately, these dynamics are establishing a self-sustaining generational perspective, one rooted in shared culture, that operates independently of the historical disputes that continue to paralyze political relations.
Toward a Shared Cultural Future
None of the recent polling suggests that the core historical disputes between South Korea and Japan have been resolved, nor that the political relationship has entered a stable phase. Yet the findings also highlight a deeper and potentially more durable shift, one shaped not by diplomacy or treaties but by cultural exchange and the normalization of each other’s presence in daily life. With new leaders now in office in both countries, it remains uncertain whether these positive shifts will hold or whether we will see a recurrence of the sharp downturns that often accompany leadership changes in both countries. What is clear is that the social foundations of the relationship are changing as a new generation forms its views through lived experience rather than the historical frames that shaped earlier cohorts. It illustrates how soft power has the capacity to open doors that politics cannot, emerging as a subtle but significant counterweight to the political strains that have long marked Korea–Japan relations. The true test lies ahead, but there is clear potential that as these younger generations come of age, these social currents may not only persist but ultimately help steer bilateral relations toward a steadier and more cooperative footing, with profound implications for the wider security and prosperity of Northeast Asia.
- Beyond Politics: How Culture and Commerce Redefine Korea–Japan Relations - January 27, 2026
- The Global Korea Puzzle: Foreign Talent on the Edges of the Economy - December 29, 2025
