South Korea at the 2012 Summer Olympics and the team were granted exemption to two years of mandatory military service but still required to do four weeks of basic training. Park Jong-Woo was not present at the medal ceremony after the gold medal match between Mexico and Brazil and did not receive the bronze medal with the rest of his team due to his political position on the Liancourt Rocks, which are disputed both by South Korea and Japan by having a claim on the islands, after FIFA was notified about Park holding a sign of South Korea having claim on Dokdo, the Korean name for the
Liancourt Rocks dispute North Korean propaganda essentially ignored the problem of the Liancourt Rocks. However, if Pyongyang felt threatened by Japanese-South Korean rapprochement (as in 1965–1968) or sought to cooperate with Seoul against Tokyo (as in 2000–2001), the North Korean media promptly raised the issue, with the aim of causing friction in Japanese-ROK relations. In August 2018, following the Japanese decision of describing the Liancourt Rocks as “pertaining to Japan” and “illegally occupied” by Korea on high school textbooks effective 2019, KCNA published a news piece condemning the Japanese claim to the islands, once again using historical arguments to back the Korean standpoint.