Japan riles Korea with textbook
timing By Donald
Kirk
SEOUL - North and South Korea share
common cause on one topic of historic nationalist
significance on which neither is likely to
compromise - the foreign power most responsible
for historically exploiting and subjugating the
Korean people. The dreaded common enemy remains
Japan, whose claim to a rocky outcropping midway
between South Korea and Japan periodically evokes
outrage from this side of the waters, known here
as the East Sea and everywhere else as the Sea of
Japan.
The fact that a South Korean Coast
Guard garrison is stationed on the larger of the
Dokdo islets was not mentioned in a North Korean
diatribe last weekend scolding Japan for including
them in its national territory in a diplomatic
"blue paper" as well as newly
authorized textbooks. The
North Korean website uriminzokkiri.com called them
"an invariable territory indigenous to the Korean
people yesterday, today and even in the future"
while noting outrage in the South over Japan's
claim.
That choice of wording bore a clear
similarity to South Korean President Lee
Myung-bak's own rejoinder to the Japanese claim to
Dokdo, which he called "our territory under any
circumstances" and pledged to reinforce them by
strengthening the garrison already there.
Just whom the garrison has to guard
against was not mentioned since the Japanese have
shown no sign of attempting to recover the islets
by force and have never ventured nearby with
anything other than fishing boats and, a possible
clue to the natural gas and other valuable stuff
below, a survey vessel.
For Lee, the point
was to show he's as determined to defend Korea
against the Japanese as he is against the North
Koreans, whose challenge to South Korea over
waters in the West or Yellow Sea remains real more
than a year after the attack on the navy vessel
the Cheonan and the subsequent shelling of
nearby Yeonpyeong Island.
If nothing else,
the ruckus over Dokdo served as a reminder of the
latent hostility between Japan and Korea at a most
unlikely time. The question was why the ponderous
Japanese bureaucracy had to repeat its hoary claim
to "Dokdo", meaning "solitary island" in
Korean, "Takeshima" or "bamboo island" in
Japanese, while South Koreans have been collecting
donations and sending rescue teams in the wake of
the earthquake and tsunami that inundated the
northeast coast of the main Japanese island on
March 11.
The suffering of Koreans at the
hands of the Japanese is all the more palpable
while sensors report traces of radiation
throughout the South and Koreans stay away from
Japanese seafood. If Koreans do not accuse the
Japanese of some dastardly anti-Korean nuclear
plot, at least they're finely attuned to the
dangers posed by the country that marauded the
Korean peninsula periodically for centuries and
occupied Korea as a colony for 35 years until the
end of World War II.
Few Koreans are
inclined to distinguish between products from
waters off the Japanese west coast, far from the
area northeast of Tokyo where the Fukushima power
plant has been polluting the seas. As long as the
plant goes on emitting noxious fumes into the air
and water, people are in no mood for taking
chances.
At this sensitive time, what
could have been more inopportune than for Japan's
education ministry to authorize 12 middle school
textbooks that clearly state that the islets
belong to Japan? The immediate response was quite
predictable. Protesters demonstrated outside the
Japanese embassy, and Japan's ambassador was
summoned to the foreign minister for a
tongue-lashing that's all in the ritual of anguish
whenever Japan manages to offend the Koreans.
Then, as if to show how little the
Japanese really care about the caterwauling
Koreans, the Japanese cabinet almost immediately
followed up with a "diplomatic blue paper" that
again made the claim, and again Koreans cried out
in useless rage.
But couldn't the Japanese
have waited a little? Couldn't they at least have
held off on any mention of the islets until the
Fukushima business was well under control and
Korean-Japanese relations on an upward trajectory
thanks to Korea's willingness to help in a time of
human duress?
Maybe, but aside from
general insensitivity about the nationalist and
ethnic feelings of Koreans, the Japanese have one
or two other reasons for not wanting to relinquish
their claim to Dokdo/Takeshima so easily. These
have to do with two other sets of disputed
islands.
First, there are the Northern
Territories, or the Kuril Islands off the northern
edge of Hokkaido that the Soviet Union took over
in the final week or so of World War II and has
not the slightest intention of negotiating about.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev rubbed salt into
the long festering Japanese wound on that topic
when he visited Kuunashiri Island in November,
inspiring Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan to
accuse him of committing an "unforgivable
outrage".
No doubt the Japanese held sway
over the islands after trouncing the Russians in
the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, but Russian and
Japanese forces have intermittently been
challenging one another for control over the
islands at the tip of the Kuril chain for
centuries.
The second set of islands in
dispute are the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands, an
uninhabited cluster that was once part of the
Ryukyu kingdom, taken over by Japan in the 19th
century, conquered by the Americans in the battle
on Okinawa in June 1945 and "reverted" to Japan in
1972. The position of the government of mainland
China in Beijing and that of the "nationalist"
Chinese government on Taiwan is analogous to that
of North and South Korea on Dokdo. They both view
the Senkakus as part of China - more properly an
extension of Taiwan administrative territory -
regardless of China's claim to Taiwan as an
offshore province.
In the case of the
Senkakus, though, the Japanese are reluctant to
upset either Taiwan or Beijing by posting a
garrison on the islands. Rather, they prefer to
let the dispute go on with no chance of
resolution, an irritant in the overall scheme of
Japanese relations with both Taiwan and Beijing.
The South Koreans, unlike the Japanese,
are far more aggressive about their tightening
grip on Dokdo. Boats go back and forth between
Dokdo and the South Korean coast, carrying food,
mail and gifts for the garrison and for an aging
couple that lives there year-around just to show
Dokdo is not "uninhabited". There's a tiny post
office on the larger of the two main islets, and
there are plans to bring tourists to the island by
helicopter rather than by boat, a journey of
several hours that often ends in frustration when
the boat is unable to dock due to heavy seas.
As if all that weren't enough, the
government has a plan to turn the islets into
something more than a rocky outcrop. The Korea
Forest Service has announced plans to plant trees
on the islets to protect against soil erosion - a
problem that no one had previously noticed.
An official, as quoted by Yonhap, the
Korean news agency, was frank about the reason for
the project. "It will not only help protect the
forest ecosystem on Dokdo," he said, but would
"also reinforce practical control". As if that
coast guard garrison, plus the one-person staff of
the post office, plus the civilian population of
one man and one women, had not already made the
point.
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