Rocky relations

摘要

There is nothing like a few rocks to excite national passions, and Asia has plenty of them. The latest lot to hit the headlines, at least in South Korea, are some volcanic islets that lie between Korea, where they are known as Tokdo, and Japan, where they are called Takeshima. A long and tedious disagreement over sovereignty erupted into open anger recently after Shimane, a Japanese prefecture, passed a bill designating February 22nd as "Takeshima day", to mark the date in 1905 when Japan first claimed the miserable little outcrop.