뉴스레터

I recently had the honor of receiving the "Dokdo Academic Award" given by the Northeast Asian History Foundation. Unfortunately, my own family members are still torn between delight and anxiety. The issue involving Dokdo is in fact like a ticking bomb that could blow up at any time. That is why the Korean community in Japan does their utmost to avoid the issue and the reason it is treated as taboo within the Korean Cultural Center in Japan, which is operated by the South Korean government.

Considering the disposition of some in Japan, the aforementioned circumstance seems inevitable. However, members of right-wing groups who are rational do not belong among those in Japan who share such a disposition. Two or three years ago, I happen to have held a symposium to discuss the Dokdo issue with several of those right-wing group members and North Korean scholars, and none of them raised objections toward research outcomes on the history of Dokdo presented at that symposium. Records from that meeting have been compiled and published this past January under the title "A Sea of Peace in East Asia (東アジアに平和の海を)."

Twenty years ago, the civil societies of Korea and Japan were both seething over the issue of "comfort women" who served for the Japanese military, and that was when fierce disputes over that issue as well as many others began to take place in cyber space between South Korea and Japan. In 2007, I co-authored the book "The Dokdo/Takeshima Controversy" (竹島＝独島論争) with Naito Seichu (内藤正中), an authority on the Dokdo issue. While co-authoring the book, I became acutely aware of the shortcomings in my expertise, so I retired from the company I had worked at for nearly four decades and jumped into a full-scale research on the history of Dokdo.

A Decade of Research on Dokdo

Uncovering new source material is probably one of the most important activities in historical research, and there happens to be an overwhelmingly greater amount of such material in Japan than in South Korea. For instance, almost all sources crucial to the incidents involving Ahn Yong-bok are scattered in multiple locations in Japan, not to mention material related to the San Francisco Peace Treaty, including official American or British copies of the treaty. Even a lot of vital source material on the Dokdo Volunteer Guards are in Japan as well.

The one most eager to study source material in Japan has been Kawakami Kenzo (川上健三). An official working for Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kawakami covered up historical sources in Japan that were unfavorable toward his home country and drew arbitrary interpretations based on favorable sources in order to build an argument for the Japanese government. The same goes for research done by the Shimane (島根) prefecture official Seizaburo Tamura (田村清三郎).

In an effort to overcome such deficiencies of preceding research, Hori Kazuo (堀和生) finally managed to uncover sources issued by Japan's Daijō-kan (太政官). Like Hori, my goal is to work mainly with Japanese sources in order to academically reveal the truth about Dokdo.

First, through the publication "Investigation on the Case of Ahn Yong-bok," I used sources from both South Korea and Japan to show that Ahn Yong-bok had confirmed the territorial ownership of Dokdo when he was taken away to Japan. Ahn Yong-bok's confirmation became a critical part of establishing his argument that Dokdo was a part of the Korean kingdom Joseon. South Korea and Japan have also argued over the veracity of the testimony that Ahn had chased the Japanese away from the nearby Korean island Ulleungdo in 1696, but if the incident turns out to have actually taken place in 1695 instead, the testimony could prove to be true.

Second, through the publication "Fishery in Ulleungdo and Dokdo Near the End of the Korean Empire" and other related research papers, I have presented circumstances proving that the Japanese who Ulleungdo governor Yi Gyu-won met in 1882, along with the Japanese navy, had been seeking opportunities to take over the island by means of international law while conducting fishing operations at Ulleungdo. Around that time, records published by government offices in Japan began describing Usando (于山島) as a mythical island. Instead, Dokdo, which used to be called "Dokseom" (literally meaning a rocky or aloof island), was marked as "Dokdo" (獨島) in various Japanese material including logs of Japanese warships. Moreover, the Japanese government indicated Dokdo as "Liancourt" in official gazettes even after it illegally incorporated the island into its own territory, which demonstrates that the Japanese government too had recognized Dokdo as an annex of the nearby Korean island Ulleungdo.

Third, through the publication "The History of Fishery at Dokdo and Territorial Issues," I have clarified as can be seen in the attached figure that around 1836, Japan's Edo government had recognized Ulleungdo and Dokdo as the territory of the Korean kingdom Joseon. I also used sources to prove that not one Japanese fishing boat had been seized for violating the peace line just outside Dokdo (a maritime boundary drawn between Korea and Japan by Korea's Syngman Rhee administration), contrary to the Shimane prefecture's current public claim that many had been captured for doing so.

Japan Holds the Key to Resolving the Dokdo Issue

Recently, I have been uncovering the process of how and why Dokdo came to be excluded from the San Francisco Peace Treaty's final draft, and that the treaty consequently has no bearing on the Dokdo issue. As for the matter of Japanese patrol boats' frequent trespasses on Dokdo immediately after the treaty came into effect, I have put together an account of the chain of events with primary sources I secured from the Japan Coast Guard. I have also been performing a detailed analysis on the Japanese government's policies toward Dokdo. After almost no indication to make territorial claims over Dokdo, the Japanese government only began to desire the island after the peace line was drawn. Then, over the course of a year from June 1953, it installed a territorial marker on Dokdo and announced that it occupied 80 percent of the island. Such despotic acts were put to an end by the Korea Coast Guard the Dokdo Volunteer Guards.

In the future, I plan to continue uncovering Japanese sources and widely spreading truths about the history of Dokdo. This is why I have been operating the website www.kr-jp.net which contains a collection of sources and research papers regarding Dokdo, and I intend to keep on building that collection. I also plan to publish a guide on Dokdo in Japan that caters to experts as well as general readers. It is my belief that Japan primarily holds the key to moving forward or backward in resolving the Dokdo issue.