As a scholar who has studied sovereignty issues relating to the Dokdo islets, I need to find a perfect way to make not only Korea but also Japan, the United States and the entire world accept the fact that Dokdo is Korea’s territory.
That is not an impossible task.
We need to persuade one country after another, step by step. I felt a strong wish to pursue this goal, even if I only help a little. The wish came to me on the way up to the temple, and by the time I walked back down it had become a concrete thought.
Unbelievably, my wish eventually started to materialize into reality.
My first step was to get approval to give lectures to Japanese students who had come to Korea to study. The initial lecture focused on the history of relations between Korea and Japan; the next covered the Dokdo islets.
After listening to my lecture about the islets, Japanese students said they did not know much about the issue before, but could now understand why the islets could be Korea’s territory.
I felt proud and fulfilled.
In September, some 120 Japanese will visit Korea in order to listen to my lecture.
My university has earned a permit to open a research center on Dokdo and planning for the opening ceremony is under way. Requests to hold lectures, presentations and seminars in the United States and Australia came in as well.
My title is ambiguous; is he a professor of Japanese, or a Japanese person employed as a professor? Both, but as this piece from Arirang shows, Dr. Yuji Hosaka is a naturalized Korean.
Fascinated by Korean culture, he listened to Korean radio broadcasts in the '70s and studied the Korean language.
In 1988 he came to Korea to get advanced degrees and began to think more about Korea-Japan relations.
Today he teaches about Korea-Japan history, politics, and, the Dokdo dispute.
His students say they like his approach to teaching.
He wrote a rather lengthy piece on the Dokdo dispute for the Korea Herald last fall, and found a 19th-century map "proving" that Dokdo is Korean.
No comments:
Post a Comment