Photo/Illutration Park Cheol-hee, South Korea’s new ambassador to Japan, receives a bouquet on arrival at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on Aug. 9. (Nobuo Fujiwara)

Park Cheol-hee, South Korea’s new ambassador to Japan, got straight to the point in what he hopes to accomplish in the post.

“I am ready to go anywhere and see anybody so long as doing so will help deepen the trust and cooperation between both countries,” he said upon his arrival in Tokyo on Aug. 9.

Park, 61, is the second ambassador to have been appointed to Japan by the administration of President Yoon Suk-yeol, which has focused on improving ties with Japan and trilateral cooperation with Japan and the United States.

He has served as a diplomacy adviser to the Yoon administration and is one of South Korea’s leading scholars of Japan. Now, he has been tasked with the heavy responsibility of carving out a “new future for South Korea-Japan relations,” which is his pet slogan.

Park earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the United States for his study on contemporary Japanese politics.

Posts in which he has served include director of Seoul National University’s Institute for Japanese Studies, a project professor with the University of Tokyo and chancellor of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy. He has broad personal connections in Japan and the United States.

Park previously walked around the Tokyo No. 17 Lower House electoral district to gain a firsthand sense of how Japanese politics works on the front lines.

That experience gave him a viewpoint that he could not have gained just by interviewing people in Tokyo’s Nagatacho district, the heartland of Japan’s national politics.

Although bilateral ties have started to improve after hitting an all-time low, and the flow of people and active cultural exchanges between the two countries have picked up again, there remains a gap in perception over issues of shared history.

Public approval ratings in South Korea for the Yoon administration remain weak. And there is deep-rooted criticism over concessions the administration has made to Japan over bilateral issues.

The latter includes lawsuits in South Korea over wartime Korean laborers who were conscripted to work for Japanese companies and the inscription of Japan’s “Sado Island Gold Mines,” where many wartime Korean laborers toiled, on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage list.

Against this background, taking any future-oriented steps must be far from easy.

Japan and South Korea will mark the 60th anniversary of restoring diplomatic relations next year. That will be a golden opportunity for people of both nations to look back on their shared history and discuss what they can do in the future.

“I am pleased that I am taking up the post of ambassador at this extremely crucial moment,” Park said. “I am feeling, at the same time, a sense of extremely heavy responsibility.”

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