SEOUL: Like many young South Koreans, Lee Jin-hee refuses to shun her Japanese contemporaries and wants the two countries to put an end to long decades of mutual hatred and contempt. What's more, she's doing something practical about it.
Lee, 27, runs a cafe in Seoul called "kakehashi", which is Japanese for "bridge of friendship", and encourages Japanese and Korean customers to swap views and stories and learn about each other's culture.
Such simple interaction between neighbours has long been rare in northeast Asia, given smouldering hostility on the Korean peninsula over Japan's harsh colonial rule from 1910 to 1945.
"I'm sorry about victims during the colonial period, but I don't think we should accuse young Japanese over history," Lee said. "It is the fault of past politicians, not of individuals."
Politicians in Tokyo and Seoul are now listening to their young compatriots and working to institutionalize deeper ties. In October, Japan and South Korea agreed to negotiate a free trade agreement (FTA) to help cement ties between Japan, Asia's biggest economy, and South Korea, its fourth largest.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi want to seal the pact by end-2005. Seoul's culture ministry recently eased 60-year-old barriers to Japanese cultural imports. From this month, curbs on Japanese music, video games and movies are being removed and those on Japanese television programmes relaxed.
K-POP AND THE INTERNET: This cultural detente is the latest move in a warming trend exemplified by the successful joint hosting of the 2002 soccer World Cup. It also reflects confidence in the ability of Korean music and film to compete with that of Japan.
Until 1998, Seoul banned most forms of Japanese culture because of resentment over the colonial period, when Japan outlawed the Korean language and forced Koreans to take Japanese names.
South Korean entertainment products, such as popular music known as K-Pop, have been one of the country's fastest growing exports, winning fans throughout Asia, including Japan.
A teenage K-pop diva named BoA, who went to Japan in 2001 with an album called "Jumping in the World", has since sold more than five million albums.The cultural trade goes the other way, too, with highly wired South Koreans using broadband connections as a window on Japan.
"The Internet burns with passion for Japanese culture, which could not be accessed easily in the past," said independent cultural critic Kim Ji Ryong.Daum Communications Corporation, a major South Korean Internet portal, has around 10,000 Internet communities of Japanese culture fanatics. The biggest community, in which members share information on Japanese television programmes, counts more than 500,000 members. Yoon Young-min, a 28-year-old office worker, is a fan of "Last Exile", a Japanese television sci-fi animation.-Reuters