The islands in the Sea of Japan are controlled by South Korea, but Japan contests its Asian neighbor’s claims.
The dispute pivots around a speck on the Olympic torch-relay map that depicts the islands, known neutrally as the Liancourt Rocks, in the same color as the rest of Japan. It isn’t visible to the naked eye, but South Korean protesters pointed to zoomed-in versions that show the dot.
Seoul called in a senior Japanese diplomat on Tuesday to formally protest the map, and three students were arrested for burning the “Rising Sun” Japanese flag in protest in the South Korean capital.
A 1:2,000,000 aerial navigation map developed by the U.S. Air Force in 1954, which is kept at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, shows a dotted line representing the Japan-South Korea border between the Takeshima islets, or Liancourt Rocks, and nearby Ullung-do island. (Provided by the Japan Institute of International Affairs)
SEOUL South Korea summoned Japan’s deputy ambassador on Tuesday to protest over a map on the Tokyo Olympics website that showed a set of South Korea-controlled islands as Japanese territory.
The small islands, called Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan, have been at the center of a decades-long territorial dispute between the two countries.
Can South Korea and Japan Escape a Tragic Past?
America cannot make its allies get along, but it needs to try and all three contries need to recognize the threat of a rising China.
When I first visited North Korea in 1992, I discovered that officials there and in South Korea shared at least one opinion: they hated the Japanese. Indeed, one of my hosts in Pyongyang suggested that his nation and the United States work together against Tokyo, though to do what he did not specify.
Little has changed in this regard over the years. Generational change should have relaxed the Republic of Korea’s attitude toward Japan, but attacks on Tokyo’s role in World War II continue. South Koreans seem fixated on Japanese brutality when the peninsula was an imperial colony. Japanese appear tired of being badgered to apologize for the conduct of a previous generation and activity which they claim was not as bad as charged. The controversy recently flared as South Koreans who were coerced to labor