Is South Korea ‘adopting Japanese narratives’ on disputed islets under Yoon?

The latest flare-up in tensions over Dokdo, which Japan calls the Takeshima islands, stems from Tokyo’s top diplomat Yoko Kamikawa describing them as “Japanese territory under international law” in a speech she made to parliament last week.

This continued an 11-year-old tradition of Japanese foreign ministers using policy speeches to renew Tokyo’s claim to the islets, but it was given extra political heft by the South Korean defence ministry’s publication in December of a military training booklet that categorised the territory as “disputed” – the first time that Seoul had ever characterised the islands as such.

But this seemingly is at odds with the views of Defence Minister Shin Won-sik, a retired lieutenant general renowned for his extreme conservatism, who acknowledged “territorial disputes regarding sovereignty over Dokdo between Korea and Japan” in a Facebook post he wrote in March last year.

Shin, a People Power Party lawmaker who became defence minister in October, has also criticised liberal politicians of the opposition Democratic Party of Korea for fuelling anti-Japan sentiment based on “outdated animosity towards the long-gone Imperial Japanese militarism”.

Tokyo has long expressed its desire to refer the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute to the International Court of Justice – which would require Seoul’s consent – and is unlikely to abandon its claim to the islets for fear of the knock-on effect it would have on other territorial disputes it has with Beijing and Moscow, analysts say.

“We will continue to see periodic grumbling about Dokdo/Takeshima, but the complaints will quiet down and the status quo will remain,” predicted Daniel Pinkston, a lecturer in international relations at Troy University in Seoul, who said there