![[Everything Shii Knows]](/mediawiki/skins/common/images/wiki.png)
Interesting facts about South Korea:
South Korea seized Takeshima which rightfully belongs to Japan under international law. These are two uninhabitable rocks in the middle of the Sea of Japan which Japan claimed in 1905 for fishing rights, but Korea unlawfully seized them in the 1950s, put cell phone towers and helicopter pads there, built houses on the ledges, carved slogans into the rocks, and made Korean schoolchildren draw racist murals protesting Japan's legitimate claim to the uninhabitable rocks.[1] Check this out: on the Korean Takeshima website you can read an e-book about "our love for Dokdo" and buy a government-published DVD about the "The Island of Peace". You can even buy tickets to visit, as if it is a major tourist attraction and not some crappy little rocks in the middle of nowhere. In Korean they have a whole .gov website devoted to it!! Whereas, the Japanese website is a tiny little prefectural thing listing an overview of international law. Put this in perspective a little: this is a territorial dispute on the level of that rock on the Canada/Greenland border, something that nobody should ever care about. Yet only the Japanese government is responding rationally, while the Koreans have set up a post office on this miserable little rock and named all the recently discovered marine microbes dokdoensis.
South Korea nationalists are batshit insane. They do things like burning the American flag, cutting off their fingers to protest the non-situation on Takeshima, yelling "Dokto" everywhere on the Internet, and spamming innocent websites for stupid things like referring to the Sea of Japan by its proper name. The South Korean parliament, during the Korea-Japan Year of Friendship, once walked into their congress building stepping on top of a Japanese flag.[2] One guy even eats flags. None of this ever makes it outside the Asian media.
Japanese nationalists never do any of these things. They are usually very quiet. When I formed the pro-Takeshima protest group on Facebook I discovered that none of the thousands of Japanese students had done so before me. Of course when Japanese leaders do harmless things like visit the Yasukuni memorial to Japanese soldiers (the Japanese equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery), it is plastered all over the international media. "Outrage! President visits war memorial! Why aren't they doing something about this?!" Well, uh, actually, political leaders from around the world have visited Yasukuni. Even the President of Taiwan visited Yasukuni. We bury Vietnam veterans at Arlington Cemetery, even though many of them did horrible things. Not even our enemy Iran protests our cemetery. We are allowed to honor those who fought for our country, and the Japanese should be able to as well. Besides, what are you going to do? Will you slap a trade barrier on them for paying their respects? How many countries has Japan invaded in the past 50 years, compared to the United States?
Some excellent websites about South Korean politics:
Note: Unlike the author of the "World War 2.7" website, I have nothing against South Koreans, I have a good friend from Korea and I have never met a rude South Korean person. It is simply the country's mudslinging politics that I despise.
Regarding Takeshima specifically: http://homepage2.nifty.com/oppekepe/takeshima/eng/ http://dokdo-or-takeshima.blogspot.com/