This would have been the stupidest reason ever to boycott the Olympics:
South Korea is not considering boycotting the Tokyo Olympics, the foreign ministry said Tuesday, after presidential hopefuls of the ruling Democratic Party mentioned the possibility of a boycott amid a renewed territorial spat with Japan over the East Sea islets of Dokdo.
Korea Times
Rep. Lee Nak-yon and former Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun raised the need to mull boycotting the Games, slated to take place from July 23-Aug. 8, should Japan not revise the map of the Olympic torch relay route that included Dokdo as its territory.
You can read more at the link.
Here is the latest shot fired in the never-ending Dokdo debate:
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday refuted Japan’s renewed claims to South Korea’s easternmost islets of Dokdo and warned of stern a response to the unsubstantiated claims.
“Dokdo is our inherent territory, historically, geographically and by international law,” the ministry said in a statement. “We want to make it clear that whatever attempt Japan makes cannot have an influence over our firm territorial sovereignty.”
Earlier in the day, the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) unveiled on its website aerial charts from the 1950s made by the United States Air Force in what it claimed to be evidence that South Korea was illegally occupying the islets.
The JIIA is a security think tank affiliated with Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and also collects and studies materials related to their history, territory and sovereignty.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
This is an unfortunate accident:
Rescue workers found three bodies believed to be among the seven missing people aboard a crashed chopper near the Dokdo islets in the East Sea on Saturday.
A helicopter belonging to the fire agency crashed Thursday night, a few minutes after it took off from Dokdo, with seven people on board, including an injured person from a fishing boat.
Rescue workers found three bodies and retrieved one of them as part of an underwater mission by a submarine rescue ship of South Korea’s Navy.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
I would love to know what the context is in regards to these maps that were found on these government websites. This sounds like more stirring of the pot to get anti-Japanese issues back in the headlines:
President Moon Jae-in ordered disciplinary action against three government-affiliated agencies Monday for their description of the waters between Korea and Japan as the Sea of Japan, not the East Sea.
The East Sea is South Korea’s official name for the waters, and the country is campaigning hard to publicize that name internationally.
But the three organizations, under the wing of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, were found to have used the name, the Sea of Japan, on their Korean or English websites. They are Korea Forestry Promotion Institute, National Plant Quarantine Service and Agricultural Policy Insurance & Finance Service.
They also called Dokdo, a set of rocky islets in the East Sea, “Liancourt Rocks.” The naming of the Seoul-controlled islets is a highly sensitive and important issue for South Koreans, as Japan claims the sovereignty over them.
Yonhap
This Japanese lawmaker is an outcast within Japanese politics because he has made past statements about going to war with Russia over the Kuril Islands which Russia has occupied since the end of World War II. However, stupid comments like this are a gift to the anti-Japan leftists in South Korea:
Japanese lawmaker Hodaka Maruyama caused a sensation on social media after he recommended Saturday to go to war to claim the Dokdo islets as Japan’s.
“Takeshima, the territory unique to Japan, is occupied by illegal occupants,” he wrote on his Twitter account on Saturday, using the Japanese name for the islets. “How do you get it back by means other than eliminating illegal occupiers by dispatching the Self-Defense Forces in various contingencies?”
Maruyama wrote the post after a group of Korean lawmakers visited the islets on Saturday. Six lawmakers, including three from the ruling Democratic Party, visited Dokdo and criticized the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games for marking the islets as Japanese territory on its website.
Korea effectively controls Dokdo, an islet in the East Sea also referred to as Liancourt Rocks, and maintains that there is no territorial dispute as it is Korean territory, historically, geographically and under international law. Japan also claims Dokdo as its territory.
“Look to this lawmaker Maruyama,” wrote a Korean user on Twitter on Sunday. “He thinks that Japan can claim Dokdo by going to war. Remember what it was like back in 1592 – they said there will be no war between Korea and Japan, yet there was. We have to be prepared for war now.”
Joong Ang Ilbo
You can read more at the link, but I always find it amazing how the news media uses random Twitter messages as some kind of justification of what public sentiment is on issues.
