SEOUL — It’s March, a month that’s supposed to come in like a lion and leave like a lamb, at least back home in the States. But here, from what I can tell, there’s no sign that the lions of March are the least bit satiated.

I am at a weekly comfort women demonstration, wondering why an old ajeosi (older Korean man) is drowning out the rally. For the past 13 years, a few Korean grandmothers have been demonstrating every Wednesday at noon at the Japanese Embassy. The elderly Korean man is marching around and wearing a loud, yellow placard, shouting himself hoarse for the Japanese to get off Korean soil as he bumps past me. One Korean grandmother frowns and mutters something with a look on her face that says: “Aren’t we fighting for the same thing?”

But the entire Korean public seems swept up in a new uproar over Japan. Ever since March 16, when the Shimane prefecture claimed the rocky Dokdo Islets for Japan (known to the Japanese as “Takeshima” and located in the East Sea — or the Sea of Japan, which is another bone of contention), the response has been swift and furious. Protests erupted before the Japanese Embassy. Two citizens cut off their fingers, and another man tried to set himself on fire before police smothered the flames. Then, shortly after, another controversy erupted over new Japanese history textbooks being pushed by neo-conservatives in Japan’s Education Ministry that appear to glorify Japan’s colonization of Korea (1910-1945).

The timing couldn’t be more ironic: 2005 marks the 40th anniversary of the normalization of ties between South Korea and Japan, with both governments declaring that it would be a “friendship year.” And on the surface, relations between the two countries couldn’t be better. The explosive success of the Hallyu wave (the popularity of South Korean culture — its television shows, movies and music) in Japan resulted in a cultural détente, where all things Korean brought the kind of adulation and respect from the Japanese that years of diplomacy couldn’t. Korean language institutes are filled with Japanese students, outnumbering Korean American students by far. When I visited Osaka in January, Japanese locals would smile and give me a thumbs up to indicate that South Korean actor Bae Yong Jun was “OK.”

But 2005 also marks the 60th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan after its defeat in World War II, and this is an anniversary to remember because there are some things that Koreans are unable to forget. Koreans like the late Kim Hak Sun, the first Korean woman to publicly testify as a “comfort woman” in 1991. A 67-year-old woman at the time, she recounted how she was repeatedly raped at age 16 by Japanese soldiers at a comfort station in Manchuria: “I have lived with what happened to me buried in my heart since it was so stifling and horrible … but I cannot stand it any longer when the Korean people are so fascinated by Japan, forgetting the past.”