’Japan’s ruling elite were behind Takeshima Day’

By Lee Tae-hoon

Officials of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party masterminded the move to designate Feb. 22 as “Takeshima Day,” according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

The bilateral relationship between Seoul and Tokyo soured in 2005 when a provincial assembly in Japan passed an ordinance for the designation of Takeshima Day.

However, some observers note that there was something odd about the Shimane Prefecture Assembly’s move to proclaim the day to mark the 100th anniversary of the provincial government’s annexation of Dokdo, which the Japanese call Takeshima.

Shimane Prefecture’s proclamation prompted angry Korean protesters to stage rallies outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, setting fire to the neighboring country’s flag and calling for a boycott of all Japanese goods.

“Some claim that the Takeshima Day affair was instigated from outside the prefecture,” Daniel Russel, the then U.S. consul general in Osaka, wrote in a confidential memo on July 7, 2006.

Russel noted that his sources emphasized that the issue was not an example of “homegrown nationalism in Shimane.”

“The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) Prefectural Assemblyman Hiromi Notsu, credited with raising the issue initially (and suddenly), lacked sufficient knowledge of Takeshima, doesn’t represent that district, and usually uses a different style of phrasing his questions in the Prefectural Assembly,” Russel pointed out.

He said local bureaucrats found Notsu’s Takeshima Day proposal suspiciously well-prepared, leading to the view that Shimane was being “set up to play the patsy in the territorial dispute issue by an organization from outside Shimane.”

Russel said, when asked to speculate who was behind the move, that one official stated his personal opinion that it could have been LDP headquarters, an individual politician in Tokyo, or a right wing political organization from the capital.

Another diplomatic cable written on Feb. 23, 2006 shows that the U.S. Consulate in Osaka suspected that Katsuhiro Inoue, director general of Shimane Prefecture’s Environment and Life Department, supported Takeshima Day because he was ignorant of the negative colonial context.

“Inoue said that the 100th anniversary of Takeshima being officially designated part of Shimane gave the prefecture an additional impetus to create the ordinance,” it read, noting that he was perhaps unaware of Japan’s unlawful annexation of Dokdo a century ago.

Japan forcefully incorporated Dokdo into Shimane Prefecture in 1905 for its military campaign during the Russo-Japanese War without notification, ignoring the fact that Dokdo had long been recognized as a part of Korean territory.

The U.S. embassy said in the document that the real issue for the prefecture is fishing rights as waters surrounding Korea’s eastern most islets of Dokdo are rich in resources.

“Given Shimane’s lack of jobs, isolation from even regional centers such as Hiroshima or Kobe, and poor economic performance, the fishing industry has political clout,” the cable noted.