A desolate rock - and a focus of Korean pride
By James Brooke
The New York Times
May 6, 2005ABOARD THE SAMBONG-HO After hours of plowing east through empty waters, this Korean Coast Guard patrol ship suddenly encountered seagulls. As they wheeled overhead and glided alongside, a jagged black rock emerged from the gray mists, rising 90 meters from black waters. It was Dokdo, or Lonely Island.
For decades, loneliness defined this isolated island group, with its forbidding cliffs and fingers of rock poking from the sea. A bombing range for American flyers during the Korean War, Dokdo's terrain is so rough and unforgiving that, over the last half-century, several South Korean policemen have fallen off and drowned.
But now, these desolate rocks are getting a lot of company. By the end of this year, every member of South Korea's National Assembly is to have made a pilgrimage to these remote islets, whose land surface is no more than a few acres. Under newly relaxed rules, 5,600 tourists are expected to visit this year, more than three times as many as last year. Last Saturday, a patriotic couple, wearing traditional Korean dress, were married on the main island.
In Seoul, sales of T-shirts, scarves and sneakers, emblazoned with phrases like "I love my Dokdo" are booming. Radios are playing an old hit: "Dokdo Our Land." Government officials are so eager to promote Dokdo that they organized a press tour to the island. Unfortunately, because of high winds and high waves, reporters were unable to travel the last couple of kilometers to the island by launch or by helicopter.
Tellingly, the Koreans did not invite Japanese reporters on the trip. Indeed, of South Korea's 3,400 islands, Dokdo has become Koreans' lodestar, precisely because it also is claimed by Japan. In a geographical standoff, millions of South Korean children learn every year about South Korea's Dokdo in the East Sea. At the same time, millions of Japanese schoolchildren learn that the same island is Japan's Takeshima in the Sea of Japan.
This island dispute fits a pattern for modern Japan. To the north, west and south, Japan has island quarrels with its three largest neighbors - China, Russia and South Korea. In the last six months, China resolved boundary disputes with India and Russia. By contrast, Japan remains paralyzed. Asked recently when there would a resolution to Japan's 60-year fight with Russia over four islands north of Hokkaido, Hatsuhisa Takashima, Japan's Foreign Ministry spokesman, predicted only that it would take "a long time."
Until recently, Japan's island disputes were back-burner conflicts, largely about fishing rights and national pride. "Fisheries are the biggest issue between us," Shigeo Hosoda said by telephone from Shimane, Japan, where he detonated a crisis in relations with South Korea by sponsoring a local resolution to observe Feb. 22 as "Takeshima Day."
But in the era of high energy prices, uninhabited islands are increasingly prized for their subsea oil and gas rights. Japan, China and South Korea rank among the world's top 10 importers of oil and gas.
Southwest of Dokdo, a 10-year, $225-million gas exploration project started last year, according to Korea Gas, a state company. North of Dokdo, oil and gas exploration is to start this summer in a project shared by Korea National Oil and Woodside Petroleum of Australia. In a third state-led project, the Korean Ocean Research & Development Institute is starting a 10-year, $45-million survey of marine and mineral resources around Dokdo.
As China and Japan embark on rival gas-drilling plans near disputed islands in the East China Sea, the rhetoric is turning belligerent. Tokyo's governor, Shintaro Ishihara, told Reuters in a recent interview that Japan should station troops on the Senkakus, uninhabited islets controlled by Japan, but also claimed as the Diaoyus by China.
"We should send our military there, and if Chinese activists or North Korean agents intrude and don't listen to orders to stop, then we should sink them," the governor, an influential conservative, said in Tokyo. "We ought to have speedboats equipped with ship-to-ship missiles or ship-to-air missiles so we can sink them."
Next month, the governor plans to visit Okinotori, a remote atoll that Japan calls an island and China calls a rock. Located 1,800 kilometers, or 1,115 miles, southwest of Tokyo, Okinotori could expand Japan's exclusive economic zone enormously if it is proved to capable of sustaining people.
In the waters around the disputed islands here, South Korea's Coast Guard makes sure that no Japanese boat comes within 20 kilometers of the shores. "If any Japanese ship violates the limit line, we will take action to seize them right away to safeguard our maritime sovereignty," Captain Kim Ki Soo of the Korean Coast Guard, commander of this patrol boat, said on board. Patrolling constantly, Coast Guard ships have warned at least 25 Japanese fishing boats over the last 14 months, he said.
This defense readiness extends to the air. Last month, when the Asahi Shimbun, a leading Tokyo newspaper, filled a company plane with reporters and photographers and tried to fly over this island group, South Korea scrambled four F-5 fighter jets to chase them away.
"I get mad about what the Japanese keep saying. Everyone knows that Dokdo belongs to the Korean Peninsula," Chung Won Do, 77, said as the 135-meter-long, or 440-foot, patrol boat circled the islands today. One of about 30 civilians, largely Korean War veterans, who volunteered to protect the island from 1954 to 1956, Chung said: "I am willing to defend Dokdo again."
Much of South Korea's anger stems from knowledge that, in 1905, Dokdo was the first scrap of Korean territory to be annexed by Japan. Within five years, Japan had colonized the entire peninsula.
Dokdo "is the first Korean territory to be lost to Japan during the time when the nation was being deprived of its sovereignty," Korea's National Security Council said last month. "This is not simply a territorial issue, but is nothing short of denial of the history of our national liberation, as well as a justification of aggression."
After a slow start, South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun, jumped on the Dokdo bandwagon, vowing "a tough diplomatic war with Japan." As protesters in Seoul tried to fire flaming arrows into the residence of Japan's ambassador, Roh's tough talk was popular, giving him a much-needed lift in public opinion polls.
Just as the Russians have purged almost all traces of more than a half century of Japanese life on islands north of Hokkaido, South Korea has assiduously stamped Korea's imprint on Dokdo's rocks. The phrase "Korean territory" has been carved into a prominent cliff face, highlighted with white paint and written in Chinese characters, which are widely understood in Japan.
Visitors who have navigated the island's reef, tricky currents and submerged rock columns say they are greeted at East Dokdo's makeshift port by a large stone declaring the island to be the easternmost corner of Korea. Climbing a steep path with a white metal banister, visitors pass a familiar red- and white-painted mailbox of South Korea's postal system. Tourists can mail postcards home, preferably using South Korea's "Nature of Dokdo" series of wildflower and seagull stamps, which was issued last year over Japanese protests.
At the top of the hill, visitors meet members of the 37-man South Korean police detachment permanently billeted on the island with three civilian lighthouse keepers.