Why Dokdo is Important to Korea

 

Well, as the Digital Dokdo Ambassador, my role is to promote why Dokdo is the territory of Korea. In fact, there should be no controversy of this island - the Korean government has controlled this island as the sovereign territory since our independence from the Japanese empire. Of course, historically, even before the Japanese invasion, countries in Korean Penninsula had control over this island. Many primary sources support our sovereignty. That is why Korean people do not have any problem with considering Dokdo as our territory.
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I am entirely sure that all the Korean people know the existence of Dokdo (among the other 300+ islands in Korea) and why Dokdo is valuable to us. Since Japan made the false claim about our sovereignty on Dokdo, Dokdo has been the symbol of our independence from Japan and our resistance towards the revival of Japanese imperialism (or extremism). As well, Korean people view Japan’s notion of denying Korean sovereignty over Dokdo as their starting point to deny all their war crimes during World War II and the Japanese invasion of Korea. That is why Korean people are so impassioned to promote Dokdo as our sovereign territory.

The problem, though, is that Japan - actually Japanese government - does not agree with this bold facts. They also have the evidence supporting their argument; however, most of them either do not have legal jurisdictions or are mostly from the era of the Japanese invasion, which Japanese empire fabricated many documents in their favor. More importantly, the majority of them can be refuted by the evidence that the Korean government has collected for a long time. Overcoming the inferiority in historical evidence, they are using the media to mislead the public. They are placing the tremendous amount of budget on their promotion of “Takeshima (Japanese name for Dokdo)” and the international lobbying process to get more support.