At 4:55 a.m. on July 9th, a 62-year-old man from Seongnam City, South Korea drove a 1-ton truck into the front gate of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. Attached to the truck was a sign that read, "Dokdo Is Our Land." The man has been arrested.(Photo from Joong-ang Ilbo Article HERE)
According to Seoul police, there were no injuries, but the front gate of the embassy has been pushed in about one meter.
The man told police that he was protesting a recent incident in which a Japanese man videotaped himself standing next to a "Comfort Women" memorial in front of the embassy with a stick that read, "Takeshima is Japanese Territory." Takeshima is the Japanese name for Dokdo, a small group of rocky islets that is the subject of a territorial dispute between Japan and South Korea. South Korea has illegally occupied the islets since the 1950s.
According to THIS Wall Street Journal blog article, police said the man had a hand-written note in his pocket that read as follows:
“... driving a stake at the comfort woman’s statue is doomed to God’s wrath. If I die please cremate me and scatter my ashes in the waters near Dokdo.”The name "Comfort Women" was a euphemism that was once used by both Koreans and Japanese to refer to prostitutes, especially prostitutes for the military. Japan provided comfort women for its troops during World War II, and South Korea provided them for Korean and UN troops during the Korean War and beyond. The Korean newspaper Dong-a Ilbo reported in an October 1959 article HERE that there were 261,089 "comfort women" working in Korea in 1959 and that 66% of them were infected with a venereal disease.
KOREAN LINK
JAPANESE LINK
