OSAKA -- The Osaka Prefectural Government will discard new booklets aimed at raising students' awareness of human rights after a Korean organization and the prefectural board of education complained that a cartoon in it would reinforce Japanese prejudice against Koreans, informed sources said.

The booklets were compiled by Osaka Prefecture's Human Rights Affairs Office.

The cartoon depicts a Korean mother asking her son, who cannot get a job because he has used his Korean name, "Why don't you use your Japanese name while seeking a job?"

Korean residents of Japan are officially registered under their Korean names, but many use Japanese names to disguise their ethnicity for fear of discrimination.

The 36-page cartoon booklet is aimed at helping students learn about the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the government ratified in 1995.

The Osaka Prefectural Education Board found that the controversial illustration -- which appears on two facing pages under the title "What? Can't foreigners get a job?" -- may violate guidelines it revised two years ago to create an environment in which Korean minorities can use their real names freely.

The pro-Seoul Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan) said the cartoon "confirms the status quo of Japanese society, which forces Koreans to use their (Japanese) names."

The human rights office asked the two bodies about the contents of the booklet and their criticism prompted the recall.

Some had already been distributed to Osaka government officials.

The office said the cartoon "could cause misunderstandings" and canceled its plan to distribute the material to public schools, the sources said.

The Osaka International Understanding Education Research Center produced 5,000 copies at the request of the prefectural government, which paid about 1.75 million yen for the job.

Yoshikatsu Tsuji, head of the human rights office, said he is "bitterly ashamed" to have OK'd the booklet.

"I thought the entire handbook had no problems because a case in which a company lost a legal battle on job discrimination against foreign residents of Japan also appeared on the same page," Tsuji said.

There are 630,000 permanent foreign residents of Japan, many of whom are ethnic Koreans who were born in Japan.