IT WAS as if President Michael D Higgins had decided during his election campaign to take a boat out to Rockall to reassert the national claim and burnish his “statesman” credential. South Korea’s president Lee Myung-bak’s provocative visit 10 days ago to a group of rocky islets, called Dokdo (in the East Sea) in Korean, and Takeshima (in the Japan Sea) in Japanese, has predictably raised hackles in Tokyo which also claims the islands. But stoking anti-Japan feeling will do Lee no harm in the December elections in which his conservative party is currently running poorly.
The dispute even intruded into the Olympics when a South Korean soccer player raised a placard saying “Dokdo is our territory” after a match in which they defeated Japan to take a bronze medal. He was barred from the medal ceremonies for “politicising” the Games.
The row is mirrored in a long-running territorial dispute which has flared again between Japan and China over islands in the East China Sea near promising gas deposits. Last Wednesday six Chinese activists were arrested by the Japanese when they landed and planted a flag on the Diaoyu Islands, known as Senkaku in Japan. On Sunday, a group of Japanese nationalists landed on one of the islands, triggering street protests in a number of Chinese cities.
Both sets of islets have returned to the news as Japan marks the 67th anniversary of the end of the second World War, and the rows reflect the region’s failure to resolve differences inherited from the period, not least friction over the sincerity of Japan’s apologies for its colonial role and wartime brutality. Lee has called on it to do more to resolve a dispute over compensation for Korean women abducted to serve as sex slaves for wartime Japanese soldiers, a matter Tokyo insists was closed under a 1965 treaty establishing diplomatic ties. In what has become an annual slight to both Korea and China, two Japanese cabinet ministers paid homage at the controversial Tokyo Yasukuni shrine for the war dead despite advice from their prime minister not to do so.
The three countries have deep economic ties and both Japan and South Korea are important regional security allies with strong relationships to the US. But the niggling legacy of distrust runs deep, and in June domestic political pressure forced Seoul to postpone signing an agreement with Tokyo on sharing military information. The rows are unlikely to spiral into a military confrontation but remain a poisonous running sore.