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

The latest flare-up in tensions over Dokdo stems from Tokyo’s top diplomat recently renewing Japan’s claim to what it calls the Takeshima islands

Yoon’s new defence minister has acknowledged the dispute, in a break from the official line – raising concerns about a pro-Japan ‘undercurrent’

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Seoul’s official stance remains that Dokdo, which Japan claims as the Takeshima islands, is the “inherent territory” of South Korea. Photo: AP

Published: 12:20pm, 6 Feb 2024Updated: 12:22pm, 6 Feb 2024

Critics have accused South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s government of playing into Japan’s narrative on a group of disputed islets that both countries claim, amid pressure from Washington for the two to set aside their historical quarrels and focus on security cooperation in light of an increasingly assertive China.

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.

South Korean Defence Minister Shin Won-sik speaks during an interview at his office in Seoul last month. Photo: Yonhap via EPA-EFE

South Korea’s official stance remains that Dokdo is the country’s “inherent territory”, with Seoul’s foreign ministry responding to Kamikawa’s “unjustified claims” in a statement warning that repeating such assertions “is not conducive to building a future-oriented bilateral relationship”.

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criticised liberal politicians of the opposition Democratic Party of Korea for fuelling anti-Japan sentiment based on “outdated animosity towards the long-gone Imperial Japanese militarism”.

For the government of deeply unpopular Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, disputes with South Korea are one of the few available arenas to score a political win in the minds of voters, analysts say, as Cold War-style confrontations put the prospect of bettering ties with China or Russia increasingly out of reach.