Posted on 08/01/2011 11:54:55 PM PDT by GeronL
Three right-wing Japanese lawmakers who arrived in Korea yesterday in an apparent move to bolster Japan’s territorial claim over the Dokdo islets were denied entry and returned home after waiting for hours at a Seoul airport.
The Korean government refused their entry over their plan to visit Ulleung Island to counter Seoul’s tightened grip of nearby Dokdo.
The territorial dispute between the two neighbors could take a turn for the worse today with Japan scheduled vote on its annual defense white paper, which contains fresh claims over the rocky outcroppings.
Yoshitaka Shindo, Tomomi Inada and Masahisa Sato, all from the the conservative opposition Liberal Democratic Party, were denied entry after landing at Gimpo International Airport at 11:10 a.m. on an All Nippon Airways flight.
The Ministry of Justice said it gave an ultimatum to the lawmakers at 6:50 p.m. to board an 8:10 p.m. flight back to Japan or be transferred to an airport facility that processes illegal immigrants. At that point, the lawmakers decided to leave, the ministry said.
(Excerpt) Read more at joongangdaily.joins.com ...
BUMP.
Looks like Japan needs to settle down.
Something else I saw seemed strange.
Seoul is going to have a referendum on providing free lunches to school kids. Apparently the only choices voters have is whether to give it to everyone immediately or just the poor, at first.
Shouldn’t there be a NO option? or at least Just the Poor period?
NK Spy Probe reaches National Assembly
Five people including an IT company president and an aide to the former National Assembly speaker have been arrested on charges of creating an underground political party at Pyongyang’s directive as part of a massive espionage probe involving dozens of politicians, scholars and labor activists, the prosecution said Friday.
According to the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, a 48-year-old IT businessman, only identified as Kim, was arrested on charges of organizing an antistate group and carrying out espionage operations.
Among the four others arrested include a former aide to former National Assembly Speaker Lim Chae-jung of the Democratic Party. The prosecutors said Lim is not involved.
They have one screwed-up sense of priority. It seems that , in the midst of earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima crisis, they want to propel it as the most important issue. Talk about timing. Rising Chicom must be a less important problem for them.
I know. They are ignoring the giant elephant in the room while trying to step on a bug.
By the way Dokdo Island has been Korean since about 512 AD and was “independent” before that
Stupid publicity stunt that is not going to gain them any favors among most of the Japanese electorate. The country has far more important things to worry about right now.
According to Korea anyways. lol
I have a fond memory of my naivete 35 years ago. I was about to sail to the Orient on my first WestPac cruise with the Navy, and went to a used book store in San Diego to stock up on reading material, especially books about things Oriental. Besides Snow Country, The Sound of the Mountain, and a few others by Yasunari Kawabata, I was attracted to some books on Buddhism, about which I knew little. I had this image of Buddhism as a belief system populated by very kind people throughout Asia practicing equanimity and universal compassion.
Hah! The people of all these countries, steeped in Buddhism for two millennia, simply hated each other! The frequent recent rejection of Buddhism in a number of countries, in favor of a more secular attitude, had no demonstrable effect on the phenomenon either. Everywhere I went, those people hated the people of the countries across their borders speaking a different language. The Japanese hated everybody, and everybody hated the Japanese. Everybody admired the Chinese, or at least some fantasy of the old Chinese culture, but nobody liked them. The Chinese, in turn, looked down on everybody, and hated the Japanese more than everybody else. Everybody looked down on the Filipinos, who hated the Japanese but no one else (they were never influenced by Buddhism).
The Buddhists in Cambodia, if I recall the details correctly, would only go to a temple run by a Cambodian or Vietnamese monk. The Vietnamese would only go to a Vietnamese monk’s temple. Thais would have nothing to do with Cambodian or Vietnamese monks, but would tolerate a Burmese monk, and vice versa. (I saw this STILL played out years later when I began going to a Buddhist temple in Nashville, in an abandoned church purchased by some world federation of Buddhists or some such: It was set up to serve the Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, but the federation had made the mistake of putting U Vimila, a Burmese monk, in the outpost. None of the refugees would go to his “Burmese” temple, so he had nothing to do until a few of us Westerners came along asking him to teach us meditation. LOL!).
So now the big boys of East Asia are ratcheting up the pre-hostilities in their time-honored, multi-factional, mutual hatred society. Doesn’t surprise me in the least, but I hope like hell we stay out of it and just let them kill each other off this time.
I saw that too back in the 60s, although I encountered Thais, but not Vietnamese, Cambodians or Burmese. Had a very ugly incident in Japan - pure race or ethnic or historical hatred.
The only mellow people I encountered in Asia back then were the Thais, and obviously things have gotten seedier and nastier in the past 4 decades for them too.
Oh, some ROK officers took care of us when they realized were were returning unaccompanied; carried out bags and cleared the way for us. Whether that was because of the war or because we were dependents and they were military I don’t know. Wherever they are I wish them well. Their kind gestures were more important for their courtesy and moral support than for any material effect.
Odd places and circumstances. Your post triggered a host of bizarre recollections.
Somebody needs to advise them there are better ways to settle this Japan/Korea issue. I can even think of some ways to bring the two sides together over it...its rather out of the box; but it is far superior than just flying over to the other side and showing up at their airport, hoping for a ringside seat at one of most sensitive bilateral locations for those two countries. (not taking sides here).
How in the hell was that NOT on your jacket?
What the hell was going on when they were doing the evals?
How in the F could they be THAT wrong to NOT consider YOUR lame-ass?
My next post was “at least according to the Koreans”
The date came from one of the two editorials on the topic at the JoonAng Daily website.
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2011/08/02/72/0301000000AEN20110802004400315F.HTML
Mainstream Japanese scholars doubt Tokyo's claim to Dokdo
TOKYO, Aug. 2 (Yonhap) — Despite the ongoing diplomatic tension over Japan's territorial claim to South Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo, most mainstream Japanese scholars remain skeptical or cautious about the claim.
In its latest provocation, Japan's government on Tuesday referred to Dokdo as Japanese territory again in its 2011 defense white paper issued one day after a trio of Japanese lawmakers were denied entry at a Seoul airport due to their attempt to lay claim to the set of rocky outcroppings in the East Sea.
Hori Kazuo, an economics professor at Kyoto University, is among the Japanese scholars who do not agree with the Tokyo government.
In 1987, he found and unveiled to the public an ancient Japanese government document from 1877 clearly showing that Japan did not consider Dokdo as part of its territory back then.
The document then contained a directive from the Japanese Cabinet to Shimane Prefecture, the closest Japanese region to Dokdo, that it should keep in mind that the Korean islands of Ulleung and Dokdo have nothing to do with Japan.
Park Byeong-seop, a Korean-Japanese watcher of Dokdo, noted in his 2008 book titled “Dokdo-Takeshima Dispute” that even when Shimane Prefecture angered South Koreans in 2005 by establishing “Takeshima Day” to reassert Japan's claim to Dokdo, it did not post the claim on its official Web site. Takeshima is the Japanese name for Dokdo.
At the center of recent Japanese academic debates on Dokdo is the Japanese government's claim that in 1905 Japan occupied the uninhabited islets at the request of a fisherman in Shimane.
Ikeuchi Satoshi, professor of Nagoya University who has studied the Dokdo issue from a neutral point of view, said in a recent study published in a Japanese history magazine that the fisherman tried to contact Korea first to ask for exclusive rights to catch sea lions in the seas off Dokdo, an indication that the Japanese knew Dokdo belonged to Korea. The fisherman, however, did not actually carry out the plan.
The fisherman filed a civil complaint with the Japanese government asking that the islets be made part of the country's territory. The government initially rejected the request, the historian said.
In 1905, however, Japan unilaterally declared the Korean islets as part of its territory, putting Dokdo under the jurisdiction of Shimane.
He also said that Korean officials dismissed the territorial claims as “groundless” when Shimane residents visited Ulleung Island, the administrative base of Dokdo, in 1906 and informed them that Dokdo was now part of their region.
The diplomatic tension between Seoul and Tokyo resurfaced last month after the Japanese government took a punitive measure against Korean Air for flying a test flight over Dokdo. Tokyo ordered its diplomats to boycott Korean Air flights for one month from July 18 in protest over the test flight of the Airbus A380 in June.
Earlier this week, an ultra right-wing Japanese professor and three conservative opposition lawmakers were denied entry to South Korea before embarking on trips aimed at reasserting the claim to Dokdo through a visit to Ulleung Island. Ulleung is the closest South Korean territory to Dokdo.
South Korea rejects Japan's sovereignty claim over Dokdo as nonsense because the country regained independence from Japan's 36-year colonial rule in 1945 and reclaimed sovereignty over its territory, including Dokdo and many other islands around the Korean Peninsula.
Cool. Uh, what’s the frequency, Kenneth??
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