Seoul condemns Tokyo for approving distorted textbooks

Hideo Suzuki, minister and deputy chief of the mission at the Japanese embassy in Seoul, arrives at the foreign ministry, Friday, as the ministry called him in to lodge a protest over Japan's authorization of new high school history textbooks. / Yonhap

Korea calls in Japanese Embassy minister to lodge protest

By Chung Hyun-chae

The Korean government condemned Japan for authorizing new high school textbooks reinforcing its territorial claim over Korea’s easternmost islets of Dokdo.

According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) on Friday, 27 of the 35 new social studies textbooks for high school freshmen, or 77 percent, described Dokdo as Japanese territory illegally occupied by South Korea. The books will go into use April 2017.

This number is up from 69.2 percent, or 27 out of 39 books in current use after a previous authorization in 2012.

The Japanese government’s approval of the textbooks came after the two countries struck a deal on Dec. 28 to settle the decades-old issue of Japan's wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women.

The Korean government issued a statement urging Japan to “rectify the distorted content.”

“It is deplorable that the Japanese government again authorized textbooks containing distorted and unjust claims to Dokdo, which is Korea’s territory historically, geographically and by international law. We demand immediate correction,” MOFA spokesman Cho June-hyuck said in the statement.

“It is the Japanese government’s responsibility to teach correct history for its future generations and the neighboring countries that suffered from Japan’s actions,” he said.

He called for Japan’s sincere actions to open a new chapter in Korea-Japan relations.

MOFA protested the Japanese government’s approval of the distorted textbooks to Hideo Suzuki, minister and deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

As a countermeasure, it also decided to translate promotional footage of Dokdo into 13 languages, including Vietnamese and Turkish, in addition to the 12 languages in which it is currently available.

Korea’s Ministry of Education also reacted strongly against its Japanese counterpart, saying the new textbooks may give students the wrong historic perception and develop nationalistic ideas, which could lead to history repeating.

“Adhering to a distorted historical view, the new textbooks play down Japan’s occupational rule and intensify its claims to the sovereignty of the Korea-controlled Dokdo, which are outrageous assertions,” education ministry spokesman Lee Seung-bok said in the statement.

The ministry said it will send the Japanese government an official request to correct the textbooks by June, as well as intensify education on Dokdo for Korean students by developing and distributing teaching materials about the islets.

In one of the Japanese textbooks, the book describes Japan and Korea having a territorial dispute over Dokdo. But the Japanese government demanded that the publisher change that part, saying students may have trouble understanding, so the publisher changed it to say Korea is illegally occupying Dokdo and thus the Japanese government has been trying to resolve the issue, according to the ministries.

About wartime sexual enslavement, the books use vague expressions to say “women were sent to frontline brothels” instead of stating they were forced to do so by Japan.

The books did not reflect the agreement between the two countries on the sexual slavery issue, because the application for the screening was made in the first half of last year.