Korean National Identity, Civic Activism and the Dokdo/Takeshima Territorial Dispute

This article joins the debate on the territorial dispute between South Korea and Japan over the Dokdo/Takeshima islets. The extant literature tends to attribute the continuous importance of the dispute for Korean politics to the collective historical memory of Japanese colonialism. This article seeks to offer a more nuanced interpretation of the symbolic role of Dokdo in Korean national identity. By focusing on the largest civil society organization engaged in ‘Protect Dokdo’ activism, this article examines the similarities and differences between the Dokdo related narrative and the ideas of the democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The argument of the article is twofold. First, it argues that there are important similarities between the ways Korean national identity has been constructed in the two discourses. At the same time, the article identifies important differences between the two. These differences, it argues, enable the Dokdo related identity construct to bridge between the democratization movement’s conception of Korean identity and the conception of national identity advocated by the pre-1987 ruling elites. In other words, the article argues that the symbolic importance of Dokdo lies not only in the historical memory of Japanese colonization but is directly related to post-independence domestic processes in South Korea.