A cluster of rocky outcrops in the sea between South Korea and Japan has again pushed two of Asia’s closest economies into a diplomatic standoff. Seoul this week rejected Tokyo’s complaints over a South Korean survey around the islets, known as Dokdo in Korea and Takeshima in Japan, reviving a dispute that never truly sleeps.
The islands themselves are almost beside the point. Barely habitable and strategically modest, their value is symbolic, freighted with the unresolved history of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea. For Seoul, control of the rocks is a matter of sovereignty and memory; for Tokyo, a legal claim it refuses to abandon.
What makes the quarrel maddening is how it undercuts a relationship both sides need. South Korea and Japan are democracies, US allies and industrial powerhouses with every reason to cooperate on trade and security. Yet the moment one side moves on the islands, nationalism flares and cooperation stalls.
The latest exchange will pass, as these flare-ups do, without anyone firing a shot. But it is a reminder that in East Asia the hardest disputes are not always about power or resources. Sometimes they are about a handful of rocks and the century of grievance they carry.
