The Dokdo issue

Someone already wrote about Dokdo, but I want to add a few things about the nature of the dispute.

One of the most familiar and still relevant territorial disputes is that of Dokdo (Liancourt, or Takeshima), a set of islets that have a combined area of about 180,000m². In even the most favorable portrayals, Dokdo is a gloomy, isolated and small volcanic protrusion. Yet Japan and Korea (often both North and South) are fighting a war over the islets using maritime surveys, historical precedents and newspaper articles as weapons.

The origin of this modern dispute arises from a technicality in the peace treaty following the Japanese surrender. The treaty explicitly lists certain territories to return to sovereign Korea, but Dokdo is conspicuously absent. Both nations also claim the islets under the auspices of different bodies of historical evidence, which are often conflicting or ambiguous.

I am less familiar with the Japanese media portrayal of Takeshima, but the Korean portrayal uses menacing rhetoric to portray the issue. Here is a sample of article titles published in the Chosun Ilbo during the 2006 “escalation” following a planned Japanese maritime survey (links to the articles are below):

-“Korea Vows to Stop Japanese Incursion Near Dokdo”
-“Japanese Provocations Over Dokdo Intensify”
-“Mystery Japanese Ships Strike Out”
-“Japanese Nomenclature Encroaches on Korean Waters”

This vocabulary creates images of imminent conflict, vilifies Japan and is designed to invoke nationalist sentiment. Such is the nature of territorial disputes; unlike other international issues, these conflicts do not invite compromise or mediation. The Dokdo dispute is almost unique in the fact that it includes little of the violence typical of such conflicts in other regions of the world, although one might think otherwise from the language being used.

The potency of the discourse echoes the gravity of the issue. From the economic standpoint, Dokdo represents an increased EEZ and a small boost to the fishing industry, so economics alone cannot be the only grounds for such struggle. The more important reason may be that this is a surrogate conflict for Korea to address unresolved grievances between the two nations, both real and perceived. As such, the media portrayals all serve to elevate the issue to that of a national crisis, and suggest unity in opposition to the perceived threat. I think it will be interesting to follow this issue it unfolds and is ultimately resolved.

And the 2006 Korean news articles I referred to:
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200604/200604140022.html
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200604/200604140035.html
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200604/200604180027.html
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200604/200604190015.html

The Japanese official stance on the issue:
http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/takeshima/position.html