The Last Card
“Damn it.” Prime Minister Koizumi barely managed to swallow the nausea rising in his gut. Every report landing on his desk carried the same grim tone. The latest dispatch from the United States was particularly bleak. According to it, the U.S. House of Representatives had begun drafting a resolution condemning the war crimes Japan had committed during the Second World War. Japanese-American Congressman Mike Honda was leading the effort.
In the past, he would have laughed it off and quietly crushed the measure with pressure. This time, the situation was different. Dozens of representatives had already signed on, each eager to add their name.
“All because of a single game!”
Japan had long considered itself an authority in the gaming industry. While the history of games began in America, it was Japanese video games that turned the medium into a dazzling global phenomenon. When ID Group announced its entry into the market, Koizumi had not been overly concerned. No matter how much capital they poured in, he believed true entertainment required a special talent that money alone could not buy.
That confidence now felt hollow. The Pacific’s impact surpassed any game that had come before it. The month after its release, surveys showed the first measurable drop in favorable views toward Japan. Hotel and airline bookings—reliable indicators of tourism—registered a slight but unmistakable rise in cancellations.
What deepened Koizumi’s frown was the absence of any effective countermeasure. He wanted nothing more than to deliver a crushing blow to Yoo Jae-won and ID Group for daring to provoke Japan. A public example would discourage others from joining the chorus. Yet no such weapon existed.
Since taking office, he had ordered the Cabinet Intelligence Office to hunt for ID Group’s weaknesses. Three years later, they still had nothing. The reason was simple: Koizumi had long believed that the true architect of Japan’s lost decades was not internal failure, but Yoo Jae-won himself. The 1998 foreign-exchange crisis had been engineered under his direction, and every industry ID Group later dominated had once been firmly in Japanese hands.
Now the U.S. House resolution on comfort women was accelerating precisely because Yoo Jae-won’s interest in the issue had become known. American lawmakers were already managing his sensibilities. It was proof that his influence had grown beyond what they could ignore. Lobbying was legal in America, and elections were staggeringly expensive. ID Group’s lobbying power and financial reach had long since eclipsed those of Japanese corporations. The ID Foundation alone spent billions of dollars annually on social causes. Even more dangerous, though less visible, were the East Asia Strategy Institute and the Deokjin Foundation—ID Group’s political think tanks—whose combined budgets matched the Foundation’s.
Then there was Time Warner Nextcom, which shaped popular culture. Films produced under its banner rarely portrayed Japan favorably. Japanese electronics were conspicuously absent from its productions, while ID Group products—from phones to computers—appeared as the default. In particular, computers were always either Newegg or iWorks; it had become an unspoken rule that no other brand was permitted on Time Warner Nextcom sets. Directors who treated film as art might protest such restrictions, but in Hollywood, capital ruled.
Moreover, Time Warner Nextcom had begun delivering one blockbuster after another. In 2004 alone, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, and Troy had all succeeded, extending the studio’s unbroken streak. With NBC now under its control, broadcasting across the entire North American continent, there was no medium left untouched. Public opinion online, Hollywood, and mass media alike were within ID Group’s reach. Any attempt to strike back risked a devastating counterattack. Even now, Japan had no answer to the follow-up measures ID Group had prepared after The Pacific’s release.
The two-part documentary that aired on NBC—Beyond the Game—had been almost unbearable for Koizumi to watch to the end. Every point the game had been accused of exaggerating or distorting was backed by irrefutable historical documents: official orders to accelerate the recruitment of comfort women due to shortages, and retreat protocols that explicitly listed comfort women among items to be destroyed. Each revelation struck like a blow to the back of his head.
“Comfort women…”
The blunt term used directly in the game had stunned him. Until now, the euphemism “military comfort women” had offered a sliver of breathing room—implying some had volunteered. The phrase had never been intuitive to Americans or Europeans. “Comfort women,” by contrast, was brutally direct. It immediately evoked the image of a war crime committed to satisfy the sexual appetites of the Imperial Japanese Army.
The documents and testimonies released through the documentary were too clear to dismiss as fabrications.
“In the end, the only card left is the 1965 Basic Treaty.”
Even if wartime atrocities were set aside, Japan’s final argument was that all questions of apology and compensation had been fully settled by the 1965 normalization treaty with Korea.
The next day, Koizumi relayed his conclusions to the Liberal Democratic Party. The party responded positively at once. A cabinet meeting was convened to make the position public, and as soon as it concluded, the Korean ambassador was summoned for a formal protest. Koizumi’s core message was that the claims agreement within the 1965 treaty had already resolved all matters of apology and compensation; any rekindling of the issue was therefore Korea’s responsibility.
The LDP did not stop at verbal warnings. They prepared concrete retaliatory measures, including an indefinite postponement of Korea’s inclusion on Japan’s white list. While they could not directly attack ID Group or Yoo Jae-won, Korea remained a viable target. Koizumi did not expect the move to reverse Korean public opinion, but he hoped it would stir controversy among the political forces that had originally supported the treaty, creating at least internal friction that might burden Yoo Jae-won. Simultaneously, pro-Japanese politicians in the United States would be mobilized to obstruct the resolution’s passage.
This was a fight Japan could not afford to lose. Defeat would not merely damage national prestige; it could topple the LDP government itself.
A few days later, Yoo Jae-won smiled faintly as he scanned the headlines displayed across his wide monitor.
— Japan: Compensation settled by the 1965 Basic Treaty.
— Kono, Murayama, Obuchi Keizo—every prime minister has repeatedly apologized.
— Grand National Party: Historical judgments must be made with caution.
— New Right Professor Lee Young-hoon: The colonial period contributed greatly to modernization.
— Data confirms increased productive capacity on the Korean Peninsula after colonial rule.
The curl of his lips was unmistakably mocking.
“I knew it would come to this.”
Cornered, Japan had played its usual trump card: the claims agreement embedded in the 1965 treaty. That agreement, negotiated by former President Park Chung-hee—the very figure Korean conservatives revered as a demigod—had been the first crooked button in the abnormal diplomatic relationship between Korea and Japan. So distorted was the treaty that its full text remained classified even now. The claims agreement in particular existed only as a result; no one knew how the negotiations had proceeded or what compromises had been made.
It was a clearly flawed accord, yet the political party and its supporters who treated it as an achievement still existed in Korea. That party, the Grand National Party, had shown remarkable growth in the 2004 general election.
The historical issues ignited by The Pacific were deeply uncomfortable for the Grand National Party. A year earlier, their opposition would not have mattered much. In the 16th National Assembly they had been a minority. But the April 2004 election had brought dramatic change. The Tongil National Party had become the largest party. Thanks to Yoo Jae-won’s support, the party not only recovered the nearly twenty seats lost when former leader Lee In-je defected before the presidential election, but gained roughly ten more. With 110 seats, the Tongil National Party now held the most seats in the 17th Assembly. It had also elected members across Seoul, Chungcheong, Jeolla, and even Busan, proving itself a truly national party.
The Tongil National Party’s advance came at the expense of the Democratic Party, whose support base overlapped significantly. While the Democrats performed well in the capital region, they collapsed elsewhere. The defection of the “posterior alliance” faction had been especially damaging in Jeolla. The Democratic Party was left with barely seventy seats—starkly different from the pre-regression outcome, when the Uri Party had secured 152 seats amid the impeachment backlash.
Because the coalition between the Democratic Party and the Tongil National Party was expected to continue, President Roh’s governance and reform agenda would not face major obstacles. The Democrats’ weakness, however, created an opportunity for the Grand National Party. Under Park Geun-hye’s new leadership, the party achieved a grand conservative merger and won ninety-nine seats—an astonishing result. It swept Daegu and North Gyeongsang, gained seats in Jeolla thanks to former “posterior alliance” members, and picked up additional districts in Gyeonggi and Gangwon. Compared to the mere twenty seats it had barely exceeded in the 16th Assembly, the growth was enormous.
This success gave the Grand National Party the confidence to speak out against the aftershocks of The Pacific, urging that the past be set aside in favor of the future. Past Japanese prime ministers had apologized, they argued, and while the claims agreement fell short by today’s standards, it had been the best possible outcome at the time.
“As always, the real problem is the enemy within.”
Yoo Jae-won muttered in irritation as he read the articles. During the April general election, his priority had been completing The Pacific. Support for the Tongil National Party had taken the form of designing campaign promises, appearing in commercials, and providing photo opportunities for candidates in key districts—the best assistance a businessman could offer. Had he wished, he could have detonated the scandal surrounding Park Geun-hye, the new center of conservative gravity. He had judged the timing wrong and set it aside, calculating that releasing it during the 2007 presidential election would yield maximum effect. Watching the current spectacle, he now regretted not detonating it immediately. Internal conflict among Korean factions irritated him far more than Japan’s predictable rhetoric.
“Mr. Chairman, it’s time to depart.”
Kim Dae-seok’s call spared him from sinking deeper into irritation. Yoo Jae-won had a habit of losing himself in thought once he started; this time, the interruption came at the right moment.
“Ah, it’s already that time.”
He rose from his seat. For the first time in a long while, he had an external schedule—one that did not involve headquarters or a game studio, but NBC’s Los Angeles broadcast station. He had largely avoided television appearances recently, yet he had agreed to this one to deliver the final blow in the historical reckoning sparked by The Pacific.
Yoo Jae-won placed the documents that had been sitting on one corner of his desk into the briefcase Tiffany had given him as a birthday gift. Though the paper had yellowed with age, the documents bore the unmistakable seals of the OSS and CIA.