Bags from about 100 dry cleaners stake Korea’s claim in a land dispute with Japan.

By KAREEM FAHIM


The islands began appearing last fall, detailed in pleasing shades of blue on the plastic bags that drape New York’s dry cleaning. Busy residents fetching their shirts might have glanced at the picture and taken it for a travel ad.

Those who looked closer saw a manifesto.

“Dokdo Island is Korean territory,”the ad declared.“The Japanese government must acknowledge this fact.”

To understand the message on the bag is to go back more than a century, to the beginning of an emotional land dispute between Japan and Korea.

The conflict is over a cluster of barely inhabitable islets and reefs in the sea between the countries - called Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan - and much more, especially the legacy of Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea.

Foreign arguments like these often persist in New York City, where more than a third of the population is foreign- born. Many dry cleaners in the city are owned by Koreans.

The dispute over the islets was barely noticed by many New Yorkers. That is, until last year, when Chang-Duck Jeon, president of the Korean Dry Cleaners Association, assumed the role of publicist: He ordered 250,000“Dokdo bags”from a South Korean manufacturer and solicited orders from the approximately 3,000 Korean-owned dry cleaners in the city. About 100 of them ended up stocking the bags.

“It was a way to speak out,”Mr. Jeon reasoned.“What’s ours is ours.”

It was not the first effort by Koreans to argue their case in the United States, but it might be the most ambitious.“This is the first attempt I’ve heard of to commercialize this,”said Alexis Dudden, a professor of modern Japanese and Korean history at the University of Connecticut who follows the Dokdo-Takeshima debate closely.

The real action lies elsewhere. Protesters in South Korea have cut off their fingers, stabbed themselves and, in a particularly inventive move, burned large cardboard effigies of the Japanese Ministry of Education (to protest Japan’s teaching of its version of the dispute).

Japanese-Americans have, for the most part, stayed out of the fray. Gary S. Moriwaki, the president of the Japanese American Association of New York, said the Japanese community in the city was small and not very politically active, at least on the question of the islets.“The conflict doesn’t really come up,”he said.

It is not clear what Mr. Jeon thought would happen when his dry-cleaning bags hit the streets of New York. The association’s previous activism had centered on matters central to the business, like the rise in the prices of hangers imported from China, and donating leftover clothes to charity. Still, he worked with what he knew.

“The whole world lives together in New York,”he said.“And we use a lot of poly bags.”