South Korea rebuked Japan Wednesday over the distribution of a Korean-language version of its defense white paper depicting Seoul's easternmost islets of Dokdo as Japanese territory.
The defense ministry said it summoned the military attache from the Japanese Embassy in Seoul earlier in the day to protest Japan's act to hand out the summary of its defense paper that laid territorial claim to the Dokdo islets.
"The Seoul government lodged a strong protest against Japan in order to prevent such an unjustifiable act from being repeated," an official at the defense ministry told reporters.
The Dokdo islets, which lie closer to South Korea than Japan in waters between the two countries, have been a thorny bilateral issue. South Korea keeps a small police detachment on the islets.
South Korea has rejected Japan's claim to Dokdo as nonsense because the country regained its independence from Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule and reclaimed sovereignty over its territories, including Dokdo and many other islands around the Korean Peninsula.
Tokyo has asserted its claim to Dokdo in its defense report for the past 10 years, but this marks the first time that Japan has unveiled the Korean version of its white paper containing the claim.
The summary for 2014 has a map showing the Dokdo islets marked as Japanese territory. In 2013, the report translated into the Korean language did not include such a territorial claim.
A Japanese military attache delivered about 50 copies of the summary to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff last week, which passed them on to the defense ministry earlier this week, according to the ministry.
"We returned the copies when summoning the Japanese envoy," the official said.
Relations between Seoul and Tokyo have reached their lowest ebb in recent years due to Japan's stance on historical grievances and its territorial claims to Dokdo.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the normalization of bilateral ties, but Japan's refusal to sincerely apologize for its wartime atrocities has impeded the improvement of the relations, clouding the possibility of a summit among the nations' political leaders. (Yonhap)
