On Nov. 12, 1962, the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Kim Jong-pil, and Japanese foreign minister Masayoshi Ohira worked out the so-called "Kim-Ohira Memo," sealing a secret deal between them on South Korea's reparations claim to Japan.

But the Third Republic faced a serious crisis when the secret deal became public in early 1964. The public seethed at what they understood as the Park administration's readiness to settle for a paltry sum in reparation for Japan's colonial rule of Korea. Opposition parties and students staged the largest rallies since the April 19, 1960 Student Movement. Some 5,000 college students in Seoul took to the streets to oppose the "humiliating diplomacy" on March 24, and rallies raged for more than two months.

Delegates raise a toast after signing the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea in 1965 to re-establish diplomatic ties.

Finally, about 10,000 protesters reached the Gwanghwamun area in the center of Seoul on June 3. The crowd, including some hooligans, set fire to police boxes and stole military trucks. Some of the protesters even broke through part of the police cordon in the outer area of Cheong Wa Dae.

The government placed Seoul under martial law at 9:40 p.m. that day. For the 55 days under martial law, a total of 1,120 people were arrested and 348 of them, including Lee Myung-bak, who was student council president of Korea University's College of Commerce, were thrown into jail.

On June 22, 1965, foreign minister Lee Tong-won and his Japanese counterpart Etsusaburo Shiina signed the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea at the official residence of the Japanese prime minister in Tokyo. This put an end to the 14-year-long talks on normalizing bilateral ties.

In return for Japan's promise to pay US$800 million into an economic cooperation fund under the treaty, South Korea agreed to forgo a formal apology from Japan for its past invasion of Korea. The treaty has therefore been seen as humiliating for the past 43 years.

But in May this year, the Institute of Japanese Studies of Kookmin University shed new light on the Korea-Japan talks in 1965 based on its analysis of the entire dossier of about 36,000-page file records. The think tank concluded that the talks were at least to some degree a success for Korea, considering that the government used a tactic of putting pressure on Japan in cooperation with the U.S. and careful preparations by able diplomats increased the amount of reparations.

(englishnews@chosun.com )