Former Prosecutor-General and leading opposition hopeful Yoon Seok-youl has criticized the government for worsened ties between Seoul and Tokyo. 

While announcing his presidential bid during a press conference on Tuesday, Yoon said diplomacy should be based on pragmatism, empirical tradition and realism. 

However, he argued, the Moon Jae-in administration has exacerbated relations with Japan by playing the "Jookchang-ga," or the Song of the Bamboo Spear and stoking public outrage, describing the current bilateral ties as being at its worst since the formation of ties and is now “irreparably damaged.”

The song he referred to was shared by former Justice Minister Cho Kuk when he was serving as a senior presidential secretary for civil affairs in 2019, apparently to drum up public support for the government’s indignation against Japan’s export curbs on South Korea. 

The lyrics to the song, which was popular among student activists in the 1980s, is from a poem by Gim Nam-joo, who wrote the initial piece "The Song," which described the desperation of farmers armed with bamboo spears during the Donghak Peasant Revolution, rising up against Japanese forces with firearms. 

That movement, which took place in the 1880s, protested the exploitation of farmers by regional Japanese imperial colonial officials. The discord eventually served as an opportunity for the Japanese army to lay groundwork for formally annexing the country.