In April of 2006, only two months after the inaugural Takeshima Day, the Liancourt Rocks dispute erupted again. The JCG announced plans to conduct hydrographic research in order to examine submarine geographical features in the Sea of Japan, controversially including features near the Liancourt Rocks and within an area which South Korea claimed as its EEZ (hydrographic research is traditionally permitted within another state’s EEZ, though this has become problematic, see Bateman, 2005; Fang, 2010).118 This action was a response to similar South Korean research trips, undertaken with a view to proposing Korean names for the undersea features at the annual meeting of the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) in June of the same year, and which, according to Japanese government officials, would be used to strengthen the Korean EEZ claims (The Japan Times, 04/07/2006). The South Korean response to the Japanese research mission was defiant, with Foreign Minister, Ban Ki Moon, warning Japan against the expedition and the immediate deployment of over
117 The opinion polls cited earlier show that there was a substantial increase in awareness and support for Japan’s position on the dispute among its citizens over this period.
118 UNCLOS Article 246.2 states that “marine scientific research in the exclusive economic zone and on the continental shelf shall be conducted with the consent of the coastal state”, but it does not specify precisely what constitutes such research.
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18 ships to the area in order to block the Japanese vessel (The Japan Times, 20/4/2006). It emerged several years later that these South Korean ships were actually under orders to ram any Japanese vessels which came near the rocks (The Japan Times, 20/08/2011). Japan, for its part, asserted that the research ship would be on the high seas, and thus its actions would be entirely legal according to international law.
The stand-off was eventually resolved following negotiations that were described as
“severe” and “tense” by Vice Foreign Minister, Yachi Shōtarō, head of the Japanese negotiating team. Eventually, the Japanese agreed to temporarily suspend the trip, while South Korea tacitly agreed not to propose new names at the IHO naming conference in the summer; both sides agreed to resume talks on the demarcation of their EEZs (The Japan Times, 23/03/2006) Despite the agreement, President Roh, in a live broadcast on Korean television, used the occasion to describe Japan’s claims to the Liancourt Rocks as tantamount to “justifying its history of crimes committed during the war of aggression”, and that the claims denied “Korea’s full liberation and independence” (The Japan Times, 26/04/2006). At the conference itself, a large number of South Koreans were present, and while no new names were proposed, they offered to hold the 2008 meeting in South Korea, and in a speech given at the end of the conference, Jung You-sub, criticised the manner in which “some undersea features are mostly located in the EEZ of Korea, but named without any consultations or consent with us” (International Oceanographic Commission [IOC] and IHO Report, 2006:
30).119
The controversy was not over yet, however, as in July South Korea began conducting research in the waters around the Liancourt Rocks, which provoked Japan into a tit-for-tat
119 South Korea did eventually propose new names, and these names were accepted at the 2007-8 conferences.
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response – in the words of a senior MOFA official: “If South Korea conducts the survey, we will also consider doing it” (The Japan Times, 04/07/2006). Vice Foreign Minister Yachi summoned the South Korean Ambassador and delivered a protest, but the research continued as planned. From a Japanese perspective, the timing of the South Korean research was highly significant: the research vessels arrived at the disputed rocks on the same day as North Korea fired its Nodong and Taepodong missiles into the Sea of Japan. The timing, combined with the fact that Seoul refused to give any official prior notification of its survey, led to damaged ties at local and national level (Russel, 2006b).
In June of 2006 both sides sat down to another round of EEZ negotiations. As mentioned previously, in the negotiations leading up to the 1999 Fisheries Agreement Japan’s negotiating base was that the rocks would serve as Japan’s baseline, putting the median line between them and Ulleungdo. South Korea did not use the rocks, despite its control over them, instead starting from Ulleungdo, with a median line between Ulleungdo and the Japanese Oki Islands. However, this all changed in 2006: in advance of the negotiations, South Korea submitted a declaration exempting itself from the compulsory resolution of maritime boundary disputes (UNCLOS Article 287) and then altered its negotiating stance to one where the rocks were the baseline for the claim. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, once again the negotiations proved fruitless. The discovery of gas hydrates in 2007 added another potential stumbling block to the already fraught EEZ issue.
As outlined in the previous chapter, UNCLOS not only bestowed potential access to valuable maritime resources on tiny rocks and islands but it also created vast new areas in which states could dispute sovereignty, particularly where the respective coastlines were less than 400NM apart (which would lead to overlapping claims). In the case of the Liancourt
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Rocks, even the names of undersea features became part of the sovereignty game.120 South Korea aggressively pursued the naming issue, even managing to gain ‘home advantage’ for the 2008 meeting, and Japanese government officials admitted that, if South Korea managed to name the disputed undersea features at the IHO naming conference, this would improve their position in the EEZ dispute. This is at first glance a curious statement, but makes sense when view from the perspective of the sovereignty game. While at first glance the name of an obscure undersea feature seems to be of little political or legal consequence, the international recognition of one state’s names for the disputed undersea features bestows a political legitimacy on that state’s claims. Were Japanese names to be used this would further undermine South Korea’s already incomplete sovereignty over the disputed waters, while Korean names would weaken Japan’s claims over those same waters.
The hydrographic research incident conforms to the idea that Japan was primarily concerned with the issue of sovereignty over the waters around the rocks, and it was for this reason that it was willing to take an unprecedentedly assertive position. The brinkmanship which the research incident led to had not been seen previously in any of the incidents involving the dispute, maritime or over the rocks themselves; South Korean ships were under orders to ram Japanese research vessels. Nonetheless, the government’s actions were successful in preventing South Korea’s exercise of sovereignty: there were no new names proposed at that year’s IHO conference; moreover, the government sent a message to Seoul that it would not back down when it came to sovereignty over the disputed maritime territory.
Thus, it would be more accurate to say that while the hydrographic research incident does conform to the pattern of the government pushing the maritime issue rather than the rocks
120 In a similar manner, there has been a long and ongoing controversy about the name of the sea in which these features are found; while the conventional name is the Sea of Japan, Seoul insists that the sea should be called the East Sea.
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themselves, it also marks a new departure in its behaviour in the dispute. There was a distinct shift in Japan’s policy to its maritime disputes from the mid-2000s on (Nakajima, 2007;
Manicom, 2010, further examples are given below, Section 3.9), and in the Liancourt Rocks dispute Japan’s more assertive behaviour in 2006 is a manifestation of this new trend. This broader trend is discussed further in the Conclusion, but looking specifically at the Liancourt Rocks, the growing awareness and interest in the dispute among both citizens and politicians surely played a key role.
Finally, South Korea’s decision to move back to the position of using the rocks as a baseline for its EEZ in the 2006 negotiations is highly significant. While the original move back to Ulleungdo in the negotiations for the 1998 Fisheries Agreement was part of the abrogation of the secret pact, it did suggest that Seoul was willing to compromise to some extent on the maritime territory issue as long as it maintained full sovereignty over the rocks themselves. However, the 2006 move is likely to have been a substantial toughening of Seoul’s stance for a number of reasons: the period 2005-6 saw broader South Korea-Japan relations sink to a post-Cold War low, the shift came in the midst of the worst conflict in recent history of the dispute (the hydrographic research incident), and finally Seoul moved in 2006 to exempt itself from UNCLOS’s obligatory resolution mechanisms. The combination of the UNCLOS exemption and the tougher stance served to increase the saliency of the sovereignty game as a determinant in the maritime dispute.
143 3.9 Recent Developments
In late July 2008 media reports surfaced announcing that the US Board of Geographic Names (BGN) had changed its designation of the Liancourt Rocks from South Korean to
“nondesignated sovereignty”, and placed the Japanese name for the rocks, Takeshima, ahead of the Korean name, Dokdo (Crowell, 2008). The BGN is the body responsible for maintaining uniform geographic name usage across the US government, though it does not have the power to determine the US position on sovereignty over disputed territory. The decision provoked a strong reaction from Seoul, with the White House Asia adviser stating that “a very high-level” government official made contact with the George W. Bush administration seeking the reversal of the designation (The Japan Times, 01/08/2008). Bush himself was due to travel to South Korea only a week later, and after consultation with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the designation-change was quickly rescinded. The White House Asia Advisor, Dennis Wilder, stated in a press conference: “we regret that this change in designation was perceived by South Koreans as some sort of change in our policy”.
The changed designation came at an already fraught time in the territorial dispute: in early July of 2008 the Minister of Education issued non-binding supplementary guidelines for teachers and textbook publishers which included for the first time a reference to the need to educate children that “differences exist between claims of our nation and South Korea over Takeshima” (The Japan Times, 17/07/2008). This was the latest in a long line of textbook controversies throughout the 2000s. 2002 had seen the approval of Saishin Nihonshi – a senior high school history book which made references to the Liancourt Rocks – by the Ministry of Education, while in 2005 ministry inspectors altered Junior High School civics textbooks so that, instead of acknowledging the existence of a “confrontation”, they now said
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the rocks were “an integral part of Japanese territory ... unlawfully occupied by South Korea”
(Asahi Shimbun, 10/04/2002; The Japan Times, 09/03/2005).121 Yet, despite the relatively mild wording of the 2008 guidelines (in the same publication the Northern Territories were defined as Japan’s “inherent territory”), and the fact that the ministry apparently produced one hundred proposals on the wording regarding the rocks in order to minimise the diplomatic effects, the result was not only a diplomatic protest and the recall of the South Korean ambassador from Tokyo, but also a visit by the South Korea Prime Minster to the rocks, and large-scale military exercises around the rocks (The Japan Times, 17/07/2010).
2011 was another eventful year in the dispute: it began in March with another set of protests over textbooks claiming the territory as Japanese, followed by the announcement of further construction on the rocks in April; Seoul planned to build a Maritime Science Facility, which the Japanese government duly protested. Then, in May, three South Korea members of parliament made a high profile trip to the Northern Territories, ostensibly to learn about the way in which Russia exercised sovereignty over its disputed territory (Yomiuri Shimbun, 25/05/2011). July saw a Korean Air test flight of its new Airbus A380, which flew out to the rocks and back again the day before it went into operation on the Tokyo-Seoul route. As a result, the central government instructed its officials to boycott the airline – an example of how, unlike in previous cases (such as the ‘Dokdo stamps’), the government was now responding directly to South Korea exercises of sovereignty. Finally, in August three Diet LDP politicians, who went on a ‘fact-finding’ trip to Ulleungdo, were refused entry to South Korea (Asahi Shimbun, 01/08/2011).
121 While the 2002 textbook incident saw protests from Seoul, with the 2002 World Cup coming up the need for good relations prevented any major flare-up. 2005, on the other hand, was a terrible year for relations between Japan and South Korea as it was: Seoul protested, calling for the textbook to be amended, while a foreign ministry spokesman added that
“Japan’s claims [to the rocks] amount to an attempt to justify its colonial invasion and negate the history of our liberation” (The Japan Times, 06/04/2005).
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The naming issue reflects the massive weight South Korea puts on the international recognition of its sovereignty over the Liancourt Rocks. The change in designation by the BGN carried no apparent political weight, the US State Department reiterated its neutrality in the disptue and its hope that the two sides could resolve the issue diplomatically between themselves (The Japan Times, 01/08/2008). Yet, despite this apparent lack of political meaning behind the change, the State Department did say that the change to “nondesignated sovereignty” was carried out “to be in conformity with US government efforts to standardise the filing of all feature to which we do not recognise the claims of sovereignty” (The Japan Times, 01/08/2008). With Bush scheduled to make an official visit to South Korea just a week later, and to do so against a backdrop of anti-US protests over the resumption of beef imports that very month (US beef had been banned since 2003 follow a BSE outbreak), Seoul was in a position to make use of its diplomatic capital and pressure Washington to reverse the move even though it reflected the actual policy of the US. While South Korea spent diplomatic capital on the naming issue – just as it does on the East Sea/Sea of Japan issue, Tokyo remained silent; Chief Cabinet Secretary, Machimura Nobutaka, stated that “we don’t think we have to react excessively each time a US government organisation does something”
(The Japan Times, 01/08/2008).
The textbook controversies of the 2000s contribute to the thesis outlined earlier in this chapter (Section 3.3.2) that the symbolic value of the Liancourt Rocks on the Japanese side is increasing, and is likely set to increase further in the future. Again, whether this will result in the rocks actually becoming part of the ‘national homeland’ is difficult to say, but certainly it is no longer seems as improbable as before 1996, or even 2005. Meanwhile, the events of 2011, in particular the trip to the Northern Territories by the South Korean members
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of parliament, illustrate the continuing relevance of the dispute as well as the links between Japan’s disputes. This point is developed in the Conclusion to the dissertation.
3.10 Summary
The timing of the incorporation of the Liancourt Rocks into Shimane Prefecture – in 1905, the same year as Korea was made a Japanese protectorate – resulted in the highly emotional nature of the modern dispute in South Korea. In Japan the secret pact, agreed in the negotiations in advance of the 1965 Normalisation Treaty, meant that the rocks were largely forgotten about until 1996, the abrogation of the pact, and the ratification of UNCLOS. The reasons behind the abrogation of the pact suggested in this chapter focused on the relationship between Korean nationalism and democratisation, as well as the ratification of the UNCLOS and the resulting overlapping EEZs claims in the Sea of Japan. The latest phase of the territorial dispute, then, dates from 1996.
The Hashimoto administration’s response to the construction of the wharf on the rocks follows the logic not of international law but of the sovereignty game. Such a powerful and direct exercise of sovereignty (construction of state infrastructure) had to be protested at a level much higher than the usual note verbale protesting South Korean occupation of the rocks, or else Japan’s political claim would seem weak. This led to Foreign Minister Ikeda’s protests. Yet, the emotional nature of the dispute in South Korea created an anti-Japanese backlash against not only the protest but also the later inclusion of the issue in the LDP’s lower house election manifesto. The result was that while the Hashimoto administration did protest South Korea’s new activity on the rocks, it also acquiesced politically in what was
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essentially a fait accompli: Seoul would never back down in response to a foreign minister’s protest, even if that was an unusually high-level protest in the recent history of the dispute.
Of course, the economic, diplomatic or military capital which Japan would have had to expend in order to prevent a fait accompli was prohibitive; rather, the level of protest was commensurate with ensuring that Japan’s interests in the dispute were maintained: preserving its negotiating position for the surrounding disputed maritime territory, maintaining the overall claim to the rocks from a legal perspective (and thus maintaining its precedential value with regard to the Pinnacle Islands), and sending a message to China, with whom further EEZ problems were looming.
The 1998 Fisheries Agreement was a temporary EEZ compromise as neither side would allow the rocks to be surrounded by the others’ sovereign maritime territory (i.e. their EEZ); the waters surrounding the rocks became a joint administration zone. While article 15 of the agreement – “no provision of this Agreement shall be deemed to prejudice the position of each Contracting Party relating to matters on international law other than matters on fisheries” – was included to prevent the agreement having any effect on the territorial dispute itself, there was some consternation in South Korea due to a perception that, somehow, the agreement involved South Korea acquiescing in the existence of the dispute and thus strengthened Japan’s claim. The consternation came from a sense of a political acquiescence rather than a legal one, given that the article clearly states that the agreement did not prejudice the position in other matters, and does not even specify the nature of these other matters. Despite the construction of the wharf, the increased size of the garrison on the rocks, and other developments, South Korea enjoyed no gains on the maritime territory issue: the agreement was basically along the same lines as previous Korean-Japanese fisheries agreements.
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After the fisheries agreement the government maintained its low-level protest, thus preserving its position vis-à-vis the EEZ issue and the precedential value of the dispute.
Despite coming under nationalist pressure to take a tougher line in 1996 and 1997, when various issues arose in the early 2000s the then Koizumi administration dealt with them quietly and carefully; the response to the ‘Dokdo stamps’ well illustrates this point. Whereas, in 1954, the government had investigated various possible responses, even considering returning any mail with the stamps affixed, in 2002 and 2004 the reaction was muted.
Foreign Minister Kawaguchi Yoriko did protest but there was no actual attempt to prevent Seoul from going ahead with the stamp issuance, nor any suggestion that future similar acts
Foreign Minister Kawaguchi Yoriko did protest but there was no actual attempt to prevent Seoul from going ahead with the stamp issuance, nor any suggestion that future similar acts