An Jung-geun calls for your action

In celebration of the 25th Dokdo Day, Jeski Social Campaign and cyber diplomatic mission VANK plan to mount a campaign at home and aboard to help correct where Dokdo and East Sea are wrongly marked on overseas websites. They adopted an interesting way of delivering a message to encourage citizens to make sure that Dokdo and East Sea are properly called across the globe by designing posters of pro-independence fighters against colonialist Japan such as An Jung-geun, Yun Bong-gil and Yoo Gwan-sun holding smartphones or laptops and calling for action.

Scanning a QR code on posters via smartphone leads you directly to the VANK website to get notified of how to report appellation errors and make a request for correction. “We chose pro-independence activists as models to encourage citizens to report appellation errors for correction, which is as meaningful as their efforts 100 years ago to protect the country,” said Lee Je seok, the head in charge of ad production. “We prefer providing a concrete solution to merely claiming that Dokdo is part of our territory.”

While asking citizens to engage aggressively in getting things right, VANK emphasized that East Sea is wrongly marked as Sea of Japan while Dokdo as Takeshima on online maps available on websites of many international organizations, governments and portal web service providers such as Google. Recently, the United Nations became a center of controversy as it reportedly named East Sea as Sea of Japan on maps of its geographic information website available globally.

This campaign plans to proceed on websites of VANK and Jeski Social Campaign, social media accounts and offline posters.


yunik@donga.com