Two weeks ago I was in Seoul and wrote about South Korea’s 386th generation. This anti-American, anti-Japanese, pro-communist generation is, as I see it, the half-brother of the new left generation that dominated Japan in the 1970s, with its pro-communist, anti-American, anti-Japan-US security alliance stance.
In Japan, this group is now retreating from the forefront, while in South Korea, the 386ers are still in their 50s and will dominate the country’s politics for another two decades. This is the main reason why I am ambivalent — neither optimistic nor pessimistic — about the future of Japan-South Korea relations.
When I mentioned this to a friend recently, he immediately came up with the hypothesis that human history works in 70-year cycles. This theory states that the dominant culture, philosophy, or ideas of an era are repeatedly created and then destroyed in cycles of about 70 years. Over the course of about 70 years—or four generations, each about 17 or 18 years long—cultures, philosophies, and ideas are created, inherited, mature, and eventually become obsolete and discarded.
