South Korea protests "distorted" Japan textbooks

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

SEOUL, May 9 (Reuters) A South Korean minister sent Japan a letter of protest today over textbooks he said distorted wartime history, a day after Seoul expressed regret for an offering by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to a war shrine.

''It is truly regrettable that some textbooks that recently passed your ministry's certification carry contents about this country that can damage our two countries' ties of friendship and undermine trust,'' Education Minister Kim Shin-il wrote.

A copy of the letter addressed to Japanese Education Minister Bunmei Ibuki was released by South Korea's education ministry.

Kim said in the letter that Japan was harming its students by approving the textbooks with their ''distortion'' on claims to islands disputed by the two countries and the ''evasion of responsibility'' on wartime sex slaves.

Memories of Japanese military aggression, which included colonisation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, run deep in South Korea and also in China.

News emerged this week that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made an offering last month to a war shrine many in Asia consider a symbol of Japan's past militarism, although he stopped short of visiting it.

A South Korean foreign ministry official described the shrine yesterday as something that ''beautifies the past war of invasion'', adding that it ran counter to ''establishing an accurate perception of history''.

The memorial and textbooks have been frequent flashpoints for Chinese and Korean criticism of Japan.

In March, Japan's education ministry ordered high school textbook publishers to change descriptions of controversial subject matter, including sex slaves and the Nanjing massacre.

Japanese leaders have sparked outrage in South Korea by sporadically questioning whether Tokyo's military or government had forced women into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers.

South Korea also sees Tokyo's territorial claims to the islands called Tokto in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan, which lie about halfway between the mainlands of the two countries, as rooted in Japan's militarist history.

Reuters AM DB1120

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