S.Korea denounces Japan for adopting history-distorting textbook guideline

SEOUL, March 30 (Xinhua) -- South Korea on Friday denounced Japan for adopting a guideline for high school student textbooks that distort wartime history by claiming sovereignty over disputed islets, called Dokdo here and Takeshima in Japan.

Seoul's foreign ministry said in a statement that despite the South Korean government's repeated warnings, the Japanese government eventually adopted the guideline for high school textbooks that lay an undue territorial claim over the Dokdo islets that are an inherent territory of South Korea.

The statement strongly condemned the adoption, urging Tokyo to immediately scrap it.

Dokdo is a couple of rocky outcroppings lying halfway between South Korea and Japan, which were forcibly incorporated into Japan during its 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

South Korea restored its sovereignty over the islets after its liberation in 1945 from the colonization. Seoul has since maintained a small police detachment there.

South Korean people regards Japan's territorial claim over the islets as its denial of the wartime history. Hundreds of thousands of Korean people were forced, kidnapped or duped into sexual servitude for Japan's military brothels or forced labor for Japan's arms manufacturers during the Pacific War.

The Seoul ministry said Dokdo was the first South Korean territory that was forcibly occupied by the Imperial Japan in the process of its Korean Peninsula pillaging.

Despite the historical fact, the Japanese government attempted to insert a wrong perception of history into future generations, and it was an attempt to deny the Imperial Japan's invasion into the peninsula, the statement said.

The denial will make Japan lose an opportunity to learn lessons from the past history and move forward into the future, the statement said, adding that Dokdo is an indigenous territory of South Korea historically, geographically and in accordance with the international law. Enditem