Search Results for: dokdo

If South Korea had a trilateral alliance with Japan it would take away the best political foil that ROK politicians have.  How many times have we seen a ROK politician get into domestic political trouble and then suddenly they show up at Dokdo or push past historical issues:

President Moon Jae-in said Friday military cooperation with the United States and Japan is needed to rein in the rising threat from North Korea but was skeptical over elevating it to a trilateral defense alliance.

“South Korea-U.S. military cooperation as well as Japan has become important, but the cooperation is aimed at countering North Korea’s nuclear and missile provocations,” Moon said an interview with Singapore’s Channel NewsAsia at his office. “But I don’t think it is appropriate to develop the cooperation to a level of (trilateral) military alliance.”

Japan has increasingly sought a bigger international role in global military conflicts in recent years against China’s growing assertiveness in Asia. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is reconsidering its traditionally pacifist stance on defense in the face of threats from Pyongyang, which has shot two missiles over Japanese territory in the recent months.

“If Japan uses a nuclear-armed North Korea as an excuse for its military expansion, it would not be appropriate for ASEAN nations as well.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

I wonder if the jets have “Dokdo is Our Land” painted on the side of them 😉  :

Six South Korean F-16 jet fighters have made an emergency landing at a U.S. military base in Tokyo after a refueling aircraft malfunctioned, U.S. Forces Japan officials said Thursday.

U.S. Forces Japan spokesman Air Force Lt. Col. Kenneth Hoffman said the aircraft are headed to Alaska to participate in the annual Red Flag exercise.

The emergency landing was forced by “a mechanical issue with an air-to-air refueler that was scheduled to support their movement,” Hoffman said.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.

Here is yet another example of someone in Korea doing something wacky to show their displeasure with something:

An elderly man unsatisfied with the capital city’s development policy stabbed himself while Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon was delivering a congratulatory speech at an opening of an exhibition at the city hall Friday, municipal officials and witnesses said.

The 79-year old man, identified only by his last name Lee, approached Mayor Park with a weapon at around 10 a.m. and stabbed himself in the abdomen, after shouting “Can you say you are a mayor?” and “I need to die,” according to the witnesses. He was drunk when the incident took place.

Lee was rushed to a nearby hospital and is in stable condition.

He reportedly had conflicts with a district office after the city government decided not to carry out a development project. The amount of compensation suggested by the district office fell short of what was asked by a development committee headed by Lee.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but I wonder if this guy was inspired by this brave defender of Dokdo?

Council members of South Korea’s Gyeonggi provincial government hold a rally to criticize “Takeshima Day” in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul on Feb. 22, 2017. The Shimane prefectural government enacted Takeshima Day on Feb. 22, 2005, and lays claim to South Korea’s easternmost Dokdo Islets, known as “Takeshima” in Japan. (Yonhap)

If Tokyo can keep some of their political leaders from making controversial statements about the comfort women and Dokdo issues maybe the negotiations this time will actually get completed:

The South Korean government on Thursday announced it will resume negotiations on a sensitive military intelligence-sharing pact with Japan for the first time in four years to better respond to Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile threats.

“North Korea conducted two nuclear tests and launched over 20 ballistic missiles this year alone, and its nuclear and missile threats are escalating by the day, so our security situation is becoming more critical,” said Moon Sang-gyun, spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense, as he announced Seoul’s decision to restart talks on signing a General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) with Tokyo.

A meeting of the National Security Council at the Blue House was convened earlier in the day to reach the decision to resume negotiations.

Sealing a bilateral intelligence-sharing agreement with Japan has been a sensitive issue for Korea in the past, and efforts to negotiate a GSOMIA between Seoul and Tokyo were halted since June 2012, when negotiations broke off.

A deal to share information with Tokyo fell apart at the last minute amid domestic outcry over the secretive nature of the closed-door negotiations and ongoing bilateral tensions and mistrust over unresolved historical and territorial disputes with Japan stemming back to colonial rule.

South Korea has continued to hesitate to sign a bilateral GSOMIA to share intelligence directly with Tokyo, though it agreed to a trilateral information-sharing arrangement with Washington as an intermediary in December 2014.

“The decision to resume talks that would allow the two countries to exchange military intelligence came in the face of unprecedented nuclear and missile threats from North Korea,” said Vice Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam in a press conference in Tokyo Thursday.

Earlier in the day, Lim held a trilateral meeting with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Shinsuke Sugiyama to discuss a coordinated response to the threat posed by the North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Sugiyama said Japan will “sincerely respond” to the decision to resume GSOMIA negotiations.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

Definitely not a good way to enter the Korean market by Tesla Motors, but it did give their website a lot of free publicity:

Tesla Motors launched its Korea website Friday and began preorder sales of its products online as well as reservations for test drives. But in less than a week the automaker has already drawn harsh public criticism for its web translations that contain misspellings and show its lack of understanding of the Korean market.

Tesla has been especially pounded by the Korean public for the map the electric-car manufacturer earlier used on its website that labeled the East Sea as the Sea of Japan and the controversial islet between Korea and Japan Dokdo as Takeshima, its Japanese name.

As of Tuesday, the American company had upgraded the Korean website, changing Sea of Japan to East Sea. However, the map on its U.S. website still has both the Sea of Japan and East Sea.

An online automobile community user said the level of Korean on the local website was equivalent to that of Google’s translator.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but pretty clearly the Tesla website for Korea is in a beta stage and I would think they would have people working on updating the website to meet Korean marketplace standards.

Considering that the article states this group is practicing “hate speech” it looks like it is probably the Zaitokukai group that has been protesting not only North Korea, but also South Korea’s claims to Dokdo and the comfort women issue:

The Japanese city of Kawasaki, where anti-Korean rallies are often held, has refused to allow an anti-Korean organization from using a park to hold a demonstration.

Japan’s Kyodo News reported on Tuesday that the city government decided not to allow an anti-Korean group to hold a protest on Sunday at a park in the city.

The city government’s decision marks the first such case since Japan legislated the antihate speech law aimed at preventing rallies against a specific race or country of origin.

Kyodo reported that the organization held 13 anti-Korean rallies in the city since 2013.

Kawasaki Mayor Norihiko Fukuda said that it is very regrettable that hate speech rallies have been held around the city, adding that the latest decision was made to ensure the safety of citizens who are targeted by unfair and discriminatory words and acts.  [KBS World Radio]

Here is an example of what the Zaitokukai group says during their protests:

But despite their purported political nature, a “significant” number of the demonstrations in reality featured a string of derogatory invective against ethnic minorities, Maeda said.

Prominent examples of vitriolic language favored by the protesters include violent slogans such as “You should all be massacred,” phrases such as “Get the hell out of Japan,” and insults calling Koreans “cockroaches,” according to video analysis of 72 such rallies conducted by the ministry.

In the rallies, participants typically brandish placards and yell epithets while marching on the streets of neighborhoods home to large numbers of ethnic Koreans such as Shin-Okubo in Tokyo and Tsuruhashi in Osaka.

The ministry, meanwhile, attributed a recent drop in the frequency of these rallies to a 2014 Osaka High Court ruling that ordered Zaitokukai to pay about ¥12 million in damages for a series of hateful rallies it organized in front of a Kyoto-based Korean school.

The survey also followed an unprecedented move by the ministry last December to issue an official warning to Zaitokukai to halt its hateful activities.  [Japan Times]

You can read more at the link, but that is pretty provocative to march down Shin-Okubo and say stuff like that.  Whenever I go to Tokyo I usually find a place to stay in Shin-Okubo because it is a fairly cheap to find a place to stay there with one of the Korean owned hotels.

I wonder how much not selling this shoe in South Korea impacts Nike’s bottom line?  I would think not much considering they are moving forward with the sale of this shoe world wide.  It seems to me that they will have problems trying to sell this shoe in China as well:

A professor at a university in Korea has sent a letter of protest to key executives at Nike about its iconic Michael Jordan shoes, calling for the sportswear giant to stop using the Japanese Rising Sun flag as a design on its sneakers.

Professor Seo Kyoung-duk at Sungshin Women’s University, who is also a dedicated Dokdo campaigner, said Thursday that he sent the letter to Nike President and CEO Mark Parker, Vice President for Design Tinker Hatfield, six other executives of the company and also Jordan.

He said the multinational market player and its high-profile shoes should consider the overwhelming impact of its products on young people worldwide.

This is the third time for the company to use the flag’s design on their shoes, a symbol of Japan’s militarism and imperialism in the late 19th and 20th centuries, despite criticism here in Korea, with the previous incidents occurring in 2009 and 2013.

“I wanted to let the company know what it did was wrong and why,” he said. “I would like to encourage the executives to avoid making the same mistakes in the future by helping them realize their insensitivity, indifference, and ignorance of historical facts.”

Alongside the letter, he sent a picture and video footage in English explaining that Japan’s Rising Sun flag symbolizes Japan’s wartime atrocities like the Hakenkreuz, or swastika, the symbol used by the Nazi Party in Germany.  [The Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

The yearly Takeshima Day nonsense has concluded with nothing much of interest occurring.  I miss the good old days of the Great Dokdo War.  I can still remember the hard days when those of us in Korea had to stock up on food and supplies to survive the initial declaration of war from President Roh.  We made it through multiple cease fires, close calls, and even the failure of the Daemado campaign.  Times had been so desperate that even talk about recruiting North Korea to fight off the evil Japanese Imperialists was announced.  Though the casualties on the Korean side have been heavy at times, through it all the brave defenders of Dokdo have continued thwart the massive Japanese armada descending on Dokdo.  We were also treated back then to such Korean patriots like Flag Eater Man, Chung Dong-young, the Finger Chopping Lady, the Knife in the Gut Man, Weed Killer Man, the Dokdo Riders, and most importantly that great general of all things Dokdo, Bee-Man.  Now all we have is this:

South Korea condemned Japan’s dispatch of a senior government official Monday to a local event aimed at publicizing its claim to Dokdo, a pair of outcroppings in the East Sea.

In a statement, the Foreign Ministry stressed that Dokdo is South Korea’s territory historically, geographically, and under international law.

It called on Japan to immediately stop such a territorial provocation and “humbly face up to its history” of aggression and imperialism.

The ministry called in Hideo Suzuki, a minister at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, to deliver a message of protest. Lee Sang-deok, director-general handling Northeast Asian affairs at the ministry, had a closed-door meeting with Suzuki.

Earlier in the day, the Shinzo Abe administration sent Yasuyuki Sakai, parliamentary vice minister of the Cabinet Office, to the controversial yearly event hosted by the Shimane Prefecture.

In 2005, the western prefecture, which claims administrative sovereignty over the islets, designated Feb. 22 as “Takeshima Day.” Takeshima is the Japanese name for Dokdo.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

With all the negative press that Japan constantly gets beaten with over historical issues it is actually a bit surprising that Japan is not only the most favorably viewed nation in Asia by other Asian nations, but by a wide margin over #2 China.  I was surprised to see China at #2 considering the various territorial land grab schemes they have going on with various neighboring countries:

The coming decades promise to be the Asian Century, when the most populous region, with some of the world’s fastest growing economies, is likely to become the global nexus of commercial, cultural and geopolitical activity. For this reason, how people in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, see each other and their leaders is of growing importance.

Overall, despite historical and territorial frictions, Asia-Pacific publics tend to view their regional neighbors in a positive light, with Japan judged most favorably. But these same publics also express limited confidence in the region’s most prominent national leaders when it comes to their handling of international issues. These are some of the findings from a new Pew Research Center survey of 15,313 people in 10 Asia-Pacific nations and the U.S. conducted from April 6 to May 27, 2015.

No Leader Has Majority’s ConfidenceA median of 71% in the region have a favorable view of Japan, with positive views exceeding negative sentiment by more than five-to-one.1 A median of 57% voice a favorable opinion of China. Roughly half (51%) see India in a positive light. And just under half (47%) give South Korea a thumbs-up, in part due to a higher proportion of those surveyed who express no opinion. Nevertheless, favorable views of South Korea outweigh negative sentiment by two-to-one.  [Pew Research Center]

You can read more at the link, but something else of interest from the poll is that 61% of South Koreans have a favorable view of China and only 25% have a favorable view of Japan.  This shows the power the media and the political class have had in South Korea in shaping public opinion about Japan.  China is the nation with its own territorial squabble with South Korea, tried by military force to destroy the Republic of Korea, responsible for the killing of more Koreans during the Korean War than Imperial Japan ever committed, continues to enable the Kim regime committed to destroying the ROK, interferes in ROK internal affairs, and maintains a modern day comfort women system of Korean women.  This is all overlooked by the ROK public because of the constant sensationalism given to Dokdo and historical issues with Japan that pail in comparison to what the Chinese have done to Korea more recently.