Politics in Asia. London; New York: Routledge [an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business], 2019. viii, 149 pp. US$150.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-08523-7.
Islands easily pose among the thorniest of territorial disputes. They are often considered indivisible entities, are often utilized by the nation-state as tools of domestic political rhetoric, and hold the promise of valuable material and strategic resources (Godfrey Baldaccino, “Diaoyu Dao, Diaoyutai or Senkaku? Creative solutions to a festering dispute in the East China Sea from an ‘Island Studies’ perspective,” Asia Pacific, 55, no. 1 [2016]). Japan’s disputes with China and Taiwan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and with Korea over Takeshima/Dokdo are no exception, which makes it all the more surprising how few academic treatments of these disputes there have been. When they exist, current treatments tend to be ahistorical, limited in scope, and made by politicians partial to their respective nationalist agendas.
The interdisciplinary volume Japan’s Island Troubles with China and Korea seeks to fill this gap in treatment of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and Takeshima/Dokdo disputes by bringing together scholars from a variety of fields to brainstorm novel ways of framing the disputes and to seek potential resolutions by eschewing narrow nationalistic perspectives. The volume is organized by topic, and after an introduction, presents three essays on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and three on Dokdo/Takeshima.
According to the volume editors, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute is more volatile than the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute and has more potential to lead to military conflict for several reasons, including the involvement of the United States as a Japanese ally and the actual administration of the islands by Japan. Yoneyuki Sugita’s essay places this island dispute directly in the context of the US-Japan alliance and posits that this exemplifies Japan’s efforts to “undertake initiatives to minimize its military contribution and emphasize its nonmilitary contribution” (14). Considering scenarios based on the Abe Cabinet’s approach, Sugita makes several concrete suggestions for the Japanese side in dealing with the dispute.
Victor Teo places the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute in the context of domestic politics, arguing that at the root of the conflict are the very different visions for Japan and China that Shinzo Abe and Xi Jinping currently have. Only when the leaderships of these countries demonstrate the political will to resolve the issue will the current political deadlock be broken. As tensions arise from domestic politics, Abe and Xi must resolve the dispute through reframing the situation domestically, as public opinion plays a crucial role. Amongst the possible resolution outcomes, Teo suggests that the best way forward is “joint administrative control and building a project on the islands that represents Sino-Japanese friendship” (84).
Yih-Jye Hwang and Edmund Frettingham examine the ideational rather than material interests of Japan, China, and Taiwan and convincingly argue that the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute is much more complex than either the IR models of realism or liberalism would posit. Rather, the islands draw into question the “ontological security” of China, Taiwan, and Japan, and “threaten to undermine powerful contemporary narratives of victimhood at the heart of their respective national identities” (42). Hwang and Frettingham suggest that only by challenging the use of history for contemporary sociopolitical purposes can all three sides speak truthfully about the past and engage in a diplomacy based on respect and equality.
Similarly, Hitomi Koyama also deals with the ideational interests of Korea regarding the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute by drawing a brilliant analogy between Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street and South Korea’s insistent refusal to take the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute before the international court of law. Koyama argues that without proper historical context surrounding international law, the tension in the region is in danger of worsening. Korea’s “I prefer not to” response to Japan’s attempts at cajoling it towards arbitration must be interpreted in the context of the specific historicity of sovereign territorial control, which ultimately benefitted Japan in colonizing Korea in the early twentieth century.
Jaewoo Choo examines the implications of history in the current Dokdo/Takeshima dispute as well, focusing in particular on the 1951 San Francisco Treaty. Choo suggests that one of the main impediments to resolution of the conflict is Japan’s continued reliance on this treaty, from which Korea was excluded and by which the United States first implemented a “double-standard practice in claiming sovereignty by some states in Northeast Asia” (92). He argues that most of the blame for the current friction over Dokdo/Takeshima lies with the rise of Japanese nationalism, and that the best way forward would be for Japan to recognize Korea’s territorial sovereignty but also to “designate Dokdo’s surrounding areas as a peace zone and granting Japan free access to it” (103).
Lastly, Yuji Hosaka focuses on legal documents, particularly from the 1965 Korean-Japanese Conference, to question whether or not Japan ever “gave up” Dokdo/Takeshima. Hosaka argues that the escalation of the Dokdo issue by Japan in the 1990s was largely in response to the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) coming into play (115). He suggests that the best way forward is for both Korea and Japan to claim that Dokdo is a rock, thus eliminating the possibility of Dokdo serving as the basis for Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
The essays in this volume provide novel and intriguing ways through which to view the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and Dokdo/Takeshima disputes and move towards potential resolutions. However, it is surprising that other island disputes from around the world are barely mentioned, as they could be utilized as valuable standards of comparison to make the volume more broadly relevant to island studies globally. Furthermore, it would be useful to include a few maps in the volume in order to assist the reader in better visualizing the geographical parameters of the disputed islands. Overall, however, the essays are extremely well-written and provide invaluable new perspectives to resolving Japan’s island troubles, which have been on the table for far too long.
Emily Matson
University of Virginia, Charlottesville