hankyoreh

The Japanese government released its annual diplomatic Blue Book on April 6, a document that sets out foreign policy stances for the coming year. As usual, this year‘s book claims Dokdo as Japanese territory.

Every year, Tokyo stubbornly repeats the same claims, ratcheting up their intensity each time. This year’s version saw the addition of remarks about protests Japan made to Seoul over the bolstering of South Korea‘s control of Dokdo through visits by cabinet and National Assembly members and the building of new structures there.

Instead of retracting its misguided historical perceptions of Dokdo, Japan is reinforcing them. This year, there has been an increase in the number of school textbooks that describe Dokdo as Japanese territory and the number of schools that use them. There is even a rally scheduled for Apr. 11 in Tokyo to call for an early resolution of the “Takeshima” issue, [Takeshima is the Japanese name for Dokdo] which will be the first such rally held in the Japanese capital. The attempt to turn Dokdo into a disputed region and imprint this idea on young and impressionable minds not only distorts history but also propagates regressive views of history among the Japanese public.

The Tokyo rally is being initiated by the Parliamentary Alliance to Defend Japanese Territory and the Prefectural Council to Demand the Return of Takeshima and the Northern Territories, which was formed with fishing and commercial groups in Shimane Prefecture. It also looks as though governors will attend the rally for a special vote with the support of Shimane Prefecture and the current parliament. Since its 2004 formation, the alliance has pushed vigorously to get the instructional guidelines that influence the direction of teaching and textbook inspection changed to suit its views.

This sort of thing may be par for the course with conservative and right wing groups, but it is truly to see no change in the Japanese government after the leadership ceded from the Liberal Democratic Party to the Democratic Party of Japan. At the moment, Japan is fighting with China over the names of islands around the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands southwest of Okinawa. There is also a conflict with Moscow over the Kuril Islands north of Japan.

But all of the islands that Japan is claiming ---Hokkaido and Okinawa included---were made Japanese territories through imperial aggression after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. And this is to say nothing of the Korean Peninsula or Dokdo.

The claims of sovereignty over Dokdo coming from Japanese right-wing groups are an attempt to legitimize these barbaric invasions. This attitude from Japan is likely to bring about its own diplomatic isolation in East Asia. What has stopped that from happening so far is its alliance with the US, as well as tripartite cooperation with Washington and Seoul. But Japan stands to lose ground in the event of any sudden change in the East Asian political situation. We hope Tokyo quickly sheds its misguided historical ideas and makes no further claims to Dokdo.

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