The first real change of regime in more than a half-century in Japan was a major event inspiring to Koreans too. Particularly noteworthy is the new ruling party’s design to pursue an ‘East Asian Community’. A crucial weakness in that design, however, is an insufficient awareness of the indispensable need to resolve the Korean Peninsula issue if any meaningful East Asian Community is to be realized.
There are other impediments to regional solidarity, including the division between ‘Japan and the rest’ and the disparity between ‘China and the rest’. A regional framework after the pattern of European Union is thus an unrealistic option. One must try to build a variety of other regional frameworks suited to the particular needs of East Asia, with significant input at the state level, to be sure, but involving either a looser inter-governmental collaboration (such as the Six-Party Talks) or greater input from business and civil society sectors; collective spaces not necessarily defined by state borders are also an important consideration. This process also calls for efforts to produce shared ideas peculiar to East Asia yet claiming global validity, and at the present stage collaboration between South Korean and Japanese intellectuals must play a particularly weighty role.