hankyoreh

By Ahn Chang-hyun, Blue House correspondent

President Lee Myung-bak said he decided to visit Dokdo on August 10 because he “felt the need to show Japan with action.” His comments read as a public statement that he intended the visit to be a form of punishment.

Blue House spokesman Park Jung-ha quoted Lee as making the remarks during an August 13 luncheon with National Assembly speaker Kang Chang-hee at the Blue House.

Lee also reportedly said Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda asked him during their December summit meeting in Kyoto to have a statue symbolizing comfort women taken down. The statue, which shows a young girl, was put up in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul.

“I spent over an hour talking him out of it,” Park reported Lee as saying.

Lee also said, “A powerful country like Japan could resolve [the comfort woman] issue if it made up its mind to do so, and I felt the need to show them with action because they’re been so reluctant due to domestic political concerns,” Park reported.

During the Kyoto meeting, Lee pushed strongly for Noda to address the comfort woman issue. At the time of his Dokdo visit Friday, he gave the official reason as having to do with the islets’ “environmentally friendly preservation,” and made no direct reference to Japan there, saying only “Dokdo is our land.”

Lee went on to say he had been preparing the visit for three years, adding that he had planned to go in 2011 with a handwritten message about the islets but was prevented from doing so by the weather.

“I wanted to stay overnight there last weekend, but I decided to come back the same day because of the weather,” he said.

His account suggests that the visit was long in the works, and that he made up his mind to carry it out after Noda’s remarks about the statue in December.

During his Dokdo visit, Lee reportedly said, “Japan needs to apologize sincerely for starting a bad war, and the resentment isn’t going away because it won’t do that.”

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