Two days after approving distorted textbooks for middle school students, Tokyo reiterated its official claims over the Dokdo islets on Friday. In its Diplomatic Blue Paper for 2011, the Japanese government said it has a consistent position that Korea’s easternmost islets are its territory, and will continue to promote such a stance.
Japan’s Foreign Minister Takeashi Matsumoto moved one step further, saying, ``Takeshima is Japan’s proper territory. If some foreign countries hit it with a missile, we will regard it as an attack on Japanese land.”
It was last August that Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto vowed to ``frankly reflect on Japan’s mistakes with the courage to look straight at historical facts and humility to admit them,” on the 100th anniversary of Japan’s forced annexation of Korea. So it is doubly disturbing to hear Matsumoto, a great-great-grandson of Hirobumi Ito, Japan’s first governor-general of Korea, completely reverse his boss’s verbal pledge.
In making territorial claims over Dokdo, the Japanese foreign ministry cites its provincial decree issued in 1905. But it was when the current minister’s great-great-grandfather stripped Korea of its all diplomatic rights to protest against it on the international stage. If Korea had maintained independence, Japan must have never been able to dream of snatching it away in the first place. This is why Koreans think these volcanic outcroppings must not be a subject of territorial dispute with Japan.
The Japanese foreign minister also said he hopes Korea’s measures to enhance its claims over Dokdo would not hurt bilateral ties (that have been cemented by Koreans’ support for Japanese quake victims).
Minister Matsumoto must know it’s his Korean counterparts that should be saying exactly that.
What the Korean officials are doing, however, are far from it.
President Lee Myung-bak stressed Dokdo is Korean territory ``even if the whole world was to be turned upside down not once but twice.” Japan has heard harsher comments from Korean leaders but not even blinked. Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan called in the Japanese ambassador to convey Seoul’s displeasure, which has long been reduced to an annual or biennial ritual. Korean ambassador to Tokyo Kwon Chul-hyun sounded more persuasive when he said Seoul must respond ``not with words but with actions.” But what actions specifically?
The Japanese government’s determination to take Dokdo away is far stronger and its maneuvers are far more systematic than Koreans might think, either because of the reported huge natural resources undersea or because the islets symbolize Japan’s efforts to justify its historical wrongdoing, including Korea’s colonization.
Tokyo has effectively put Seoul in a diplomatic dilemma. The Korean government has largely adopted a ``quiet diplomacy” of ignoring Japan’s challenge, but the tactic has the danger of appearing to acknowledge Japanese claims. Noisy, emotional tit-for-tats for their part carry the risk of recognizing the issue as a territorial dispute and even taking it to the International Court of Justice, a development which the Japanese government would like to see.
But the nation can ill afford to remain defensive on this vital issue. Korea should fight openly and squarely by repudiating Japanese assertions one on one by making perfect ``geological, historical and legal” sense. Seoul also should be ready to take countermeasures by, for instance, nullifying the Korea-Japan fisheries agreement of 1991, which made the foolish mistakes of reducing Dokdo to sunken rocks with no nationality.
No country that avoids unjustifiable challenges from foreigners can expect international respect, much less maintaining its own rights and interests.