ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the gap in representation of who is at fault for prolonging the disputes over Dokdo, or Takeshima, or Liancourt Rock, between the Republic of Korea and Japan. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasizes the role of international law and the arbitration mechanism. In doing so, the role of law is rendered as neutral and ahistorical, and the repeated Korean refusals to take the matter to court appear unreasonable. The Korean counterpart has emphasized Japan’s past as a colonizer. Noting what is amiss in the Japanese representation of the dispute is the account of Japan’s colonization of Korea, this chapter interrogates the ways in which the advent of Eurocentric conceptions of territoriality, sovereignty, and law, and Japan’s appropriation of the legal language to colonize Korea, are effaced. I reread the Korean refusals as a question of agentically decolonizing international law by the language of preferring not to.
