일본의 독도침탈 120년과 일본국제법학회의 국제법 왜곡 조명 - 1905년 독도침탈과 한국침략정책의 비연계론을 중심으로 -

The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of Korea's liberation and the 60th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan. However, Japan's provocative invasion of Dokdo, a symbol of Korean territorial sovereignty, continues to this day. Furthermore, the overt expansion and reproduction of Japan's ongoing attempts to invade Dokdo, which have persisted for the past 120 years since 1905, not only contradicts the most fundamental principle of postwar settlement—the restoration of territories plundered through "violence and greed" during the colonial imperial era—but also runs counter to the building of a Northeast Asian peace community, raising the seriousness of the problem. Tracing the lineage of the Japanese Society of International Law's international legal title research, which has laid the policy foundation for the Japanese government's claim to Dokdo, and identifying the fundamental problems of the legal distortions inherent in such title research is both a historical calling and an international legal task entrusted to us today. It is noteworthy about the 120 Years of Japan's invasion of Dokdo is that Shigeki Sakamoto, who has studied sovereignty issues in the Japanese Society of international law, cited Takashi Tsukamoto's argument for the international legal legality of the Invasion of Dokdo, thereby promoting the argument that it is not connected to the policy of invasion of Korea. Based on this premise, this study focuses on the argument of the terra nullius preemptionists in the Japanese international law community, in relation to the timing of Korea's independence as stipulated in Article 2 (a) of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, that Dokdo became Japanese territory in 1905, prior to the forced annexation of Korea in 1910. This argument argues for the international legal legitimacy of the incorporation of Dokdo based on the terra nullius occupation theory, arguing that the 1905 invasion of Dokdo was not connected to the policy of aggression against Korea. However, Japan's illegal invasion predates the arbitrarily imposed annexation of Korea by Japan, and the Korean Empire declared wartime neutrality on January 21, 1904. The Japanese navy's invade of Dokdo after the forcible occupation of the telegraph stations in Jinhae Bay and Masan Port on February 6, 1904, is a grave illegal act that is fundamentally null and void, even though it is being attempted to be legalized through the Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty. Moreover, it should be noted that the international law at the time of Japan's invasion of Korea's Dokdo sovereignty was a time when Japanese legal positivism, an extreme nationalism colluding with the aggressive state practices was declining and the normativity of universal international norms was increasing, and the Eulsa Treaty was presented as a null treaty due to coercion against individual national representatives in the 1935 "Harvard Law School Draft" announced during the process of codifying the Convention on the Law of Treaties by the United Nations International Law Commission in 1963. Therefore, it should be noted that the theory of terra nullius occupation separated from this is nothing more than a distortion of the overall legal theory regarding Korea's sovereignty over Dokdo.