South Korea on Friday lodged a formal protest regarding a reference in Japan's latest education guidelines to a territorial claim on a pair of disputed islets controlled by Seoul in the Sea of Japan.
"The (South Korean) government strongly condemns the Japanese government for ignoring our repeated warnings and for approving the education guidelines for its elementary and middle school social studies (curriculum) that include its unjustified claims to Dokdo, which is an integral part of (South Korean) territory," South Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
In a related move, Lee Jeong-kyu, deputy minister for political affairs at the ministry, called in Hideo Suzuki, minister of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, at around 10 a.m. to deliver the protest.
The protest was lodged in response to the Japanese government's approval of a set of revised education guidelines officially announced in Tokyo on Friday that call for teaching students in elementary and middle schools that the islets, known as Takeshima in Japanese and Dokdo in South Korea, belong to Japan.
Calling for the immediate withdrawal of the guidelines, the statement said the Japanese government should remember that Japan's younger generations will learn "false history" if they are given incorrect information through the revised guidelines.