'Japan proposed secret deal over Dokdo'

By Lee Tae-hoon Tokyo secretly made a proposal to Seoul that it would withdraw plans to conduct a maritime survey near Dokdo if Korea temporarily stops addressing issues over the name of the sea between the two countries, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable exposed by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. The document classified as secret and written by the U.S. embassy in Tokyo reveals that Shotaro Yachi, then Japanese vice foreign minister, made the secret suggestion on April 28, 2006 to Ra Jong-il, Korea’s ambassador to Japan at that time. “Under that proposal, the Japanese government would halt plans to conduct a bathymetric survey of the seabed adjacent to the Liancourt Rocks (Takeshima/Dokdo islands), and within the overlapping area claimed by both countries as a part of their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ). “If the Republic of Korea agrees to shelve the naming proposal it reportedly intends to table at the June 14 to 23 meeting of the 19th Subcommittee on Undersea Features Naming (SCUFN),” it read. Korea and Japan have been at odds over Dokdo, which Japan refers to as Takeshima, and the East Sea, which Tokyo calls the Sea of Japan. Dokdo lies 87.4 kilometers east of Korea’s Ulleung Island and 157.5 kilometers from the closest Japanese territory of Oki Island in Shimane Prefecture. Seoul maintains that due to the legacy of Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule Tokyo has been claiming territorial sovereignty over Dokdo and insisting on naming the body of water between the two nations after its country. The then Roh Moo-hyun administration reportedly turned down Japan’s offer and even ordered the Coast Guard to fire at Japanese survey ships if they approached the country’s easternmost rocky islets. However, a classified cable by the U.S. Embassy in Seoul shows that Korea eventually came to a compromise over Japan’s push to carry out a maritime survey near Dokdo about a month prior to Pyongyang’s first nuclear test in October 2006. It said that the Japanese Embassy’s political counselor Yamamoto Yasushi claimed that Tokyo made all-out-efforts to reach an agreement on a scientific survey in bilateral negotiations over the issue in early September. Yasushi claimed that Japanese delegation spent “all summer preparing a telephone-book-size dossier backing up Japan’s legal right to conduct the surveys.” “At one point in the negotiations, the Japanese side put the dossier on the table and told the Korean side that Japan would seek international arbitration under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea if no agreement could be reached,” he was quoted as saying. “We showed them the gun but we did not pull the trigger.” Yamamoto claimed that the Korean side came up with the idea of conducting a joint survey not only at the three seabed sites inside the disputed waters, but also at three additional seabed sites in Japanese waters. “The three additional sites were arbitrary: the Korean negotiator had taken a pen and drawn three dots on the map,” he said. “From the Japanese point of view, the three additional sites were a waste of resources, since there was no known radioactive contamination there and since there is no data series for comparison.” The compromise drew strong criticism from the Korean public as it was considered a step backwards from Seoul’s earlier position that it would not allow Tokyo to trespass in its territorial waters near Dokdo. In this regard, Yamamoto commented, “The problem has always been President Roh Moo-hyun, who has a tendency to play to traditional anti-Japanese sentiments in Korea. We understand that it took several days for Roh to give his consent to this agreement.”