by edededed on Thu Aug 13, 2009 9:54 am
In my experience...
Koreans (and often Chinese) don't like the general idea of Japan and Japanese; Chinese are to some extent influenced by the government's stance on the Japanese at that particular time, while Koreans have been ingrained with some amount of antipathy by the education system and some funky museums. That doesn't mean that they will spit on your Japanese friend that you bring along - but if that friend reinforces the bad stereotype of Japan, well... Unless the Chinese or Korean works in a Japanese firm, I think that there is a pretty small chance that they had any meaningful personal contact with Japanese people (it's not like America where we have lots of different kinds of people together)...
In turn, Japanese in general don't really feel sorry about past atrocities (that they did not personally participate in) and often think that the whole forcing an apology thing is a scheme to get Japan to give money to Korea/China. They also have a secret (but obvious) superiority complex towards the entirety of Asia (and other races), but an inferiority complex towards the West in general (especially older folks).
On the positive side, Korean dramas became very popular for a while here in Japan, giving Korean culture quite a bit of exposure here those few years - I think that helped things quite a lot, with lots of older women starting to (unsuccessfully try to) learn Korean language and go to Korea. A few Korean TV personalities (all female) also appeared around that time - some truly Korean, some Japan-born Korean, and some Japan-born Korean with Japanese name. (Actually, it is said that a large number of TV personalities in Japan are of Korean ethnicity, but secretly - still, people are not coming out of the "closet," so to speak.) It seems that pretty girls are one way to soften people up (there is finally a male Korean group nowadays, too, but I guess girls were more common.)
I think that in China and Korea, Japanese anime/manga do a lot to "soften" the image of Japan for these countries - after all, the people who made this fun stuff can't be that bad, right? (In older days, I remember how Korean-dubbed anime tried very, very hard to hide the Japanese origins of the program - for example, all characters got Korean names, Tokyo became Seoul while Okinawa became Cheju, and so on. I dunno about today, but there is a lot more than there was when I was younger, I think.)