Since the end of World War II, relations between South Korea and Japan have gone through significant changes – from distant and hostile in the 1950s, to cooperative and increasingly close through about 2005, to the last decade of serious deterioration. Three frameworks are used to understand change and continuity in South Korea–Japan relations: a realist perspective emphasizing either structural military power relations or “revealed” patterns of military threat; an institutional perspective that emphasizes similarities or differences in political institutions; and an ideological regime‐type perspective that includes ideologies as well as institutions as influences on government or leadership preferences. The third framework captures two types of ideological factors that have exerted significant influences on South Korea–Japan relations: the existence of a small range of competitive ideological regime types or government types specifying national ideals and national development roadmaps; and historical legacies of intense conflict, which tend to produce ideological and diversionary frictions that cause conflict to persist or recur. Only the last factor, the history issue, is readily subject to policy control: the best way forward to restore cooperative and stable relations is for South Korean and Japanese leaders to agree informally on truthful and empathetic norms governing historical judgments, and for Japanese political and opinion elites to agree informally to marginalize those that defy such norms.