The annual diplomatic war-of-nerves between Korea and Japan over the rocky islets located between them seems to have passed rather quietly this summer.
In its 2012 defense white paper released Tuesday, Tokyo reiterated its sovereignty over Dokdo, as it has done these past eight years. Seoul issued a refutation and summoned a Japanese diplomat. Nothing special, it seems.
Yet there was a difference. The Japanese officials went to special lengths to hold a news conference for local and foreign journalists, emphasizing that they had ``described Takeshima (Dokdo’s Japanese name) as Japanese territory since 2005.”
What the gesture signified was clear: to hammer home its territorial claims as an international issue among foreigners. Tokyo’s tactics would have been less worrisome had they not come amid an overall atmosphere of revivalism gripping the insular country, which put back collective self-defense rights and the use of nuclear energy for security purposes on its agenda.
Korea, too, upped its ante, or so it appeared, by upgrading its rebuttal from a comment to a statement, and called in a Japanese secretary a grade higher than last year. But the only difference in the foreign ministry’s repudiation was the change of the word calling to ``withdraw” the claims to ``rectify” behavior. The defense ministry’s statement was literally a carbon copy of last year’s.
True, overreaction is not of much help for Seoul, which effectively administers the two islets and specks of smaller rocks in the body of water between the two countries, by playing into the hands of Japanese tactics to turn the issue into an international dispute. There are also views that the regular challenges from Tokyo are just political schemes, or ``noise marketing, of right-wing politicians to woo nationalistic voters, about which Koreans should not care much.
We don’t see it that way. History shows in territorial disputes ― and Dokdo has long been a subject of dispute whether Koreans acknowledge it or not ― intentional neglect called ``quiet diplomacy” has often succumbed to tenacious and systematic efforts on the other side. The Japanese government, not some errant politician, has provoked Koreans three times a year on this matter ― through the annual approval of history textbooks as well as the issuance of a diplomatic blue paper and a defense white paper.
If this is not a premeditated national agenda, what is?
Koreans, on the other hand, have mainly reacted with transient emotional patriotism and will forget all about the issue until the next Japanese challenge. We doubt whether the foreign ministry, or any other government agency for that matter, has some officials exclusively responsible for working out ways of enhancing Korea’s effective control over Dokdo and developing logic for possible debates on the international stage.
We hope President Lee Myung-bak’s National Liberation Day address on Aug. 15 will contain clearer messages on this and other pending issues between Korea and its former colonizer, such as Japan’s apology and compensation for wartime sex slaves.
As everybody knows, it is Lee’s last chance to do so.