The contents of this video were collected from the official documents archived by the National Archives of Japan and published newspapers and journals at the time.
In 1904, a resident of the Oki Islands, Yozaburo Nakai, requested the government to incorporate Takeshima as a territory and lease it out for the purpose of sea lion hunting.
In response to this, the government officially named the islands Takeshima, by a Cabinet Decision on January 28, 1905, and designated them as belonging to Japan under the jurisdiction of the Oki Islands Branch, Shimane Prefectural Government.
Based on this Cabinet decision, the Governor of Shimane Prefecture announced the details in the Shimane Prefectural Notice NO.40 on February 22 of the same year.
The islands were entered in the State Land Register in the same year, sea lion hunting was approved in accordance with fisheries supervision rules, the Governor inspected the islands, and in the next year, site surveys by officials from Shimane Prefecture were carried out.
And these measures were carried in the newspapers of the day and were widely publicized. The requirement under international law for acquisition of a territory is effective possession of the land. In addition to the historical title over Takeshima, the aforementioned measures reaffirmed the Japanese title under modern international law.
In accordance with international law, Takeshima clearly belongs to Japan
The United States responded by a letter from Dean Rusk, United States Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs to Ambassador Yang.
The content of the response was, "..... the United States Government does not feel that the Treaty (San Francisco Peace Treaty) should adopt the theory that Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration on August 9, 1945 constituted a formal or final renunciation of sovereignty by Japan over the areas dealt with in the Declaration.
As regards the island of Dokdo, otherwise known as Takeshima or Liancourt Rocks, this normally uninhabited rock formation was according to our information never treated as part of Korea and, since about 1905, has been under the jurisdiction of the Oki Islands Branch Office of Shimane Prefecture of Japan. The island does not appear ever before to have been claimed by Korea."
