Seoul, April 4 (IANS): South Korea slammed Japan Friday for its renewed sovereignty claims to the disputed islets, known as Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan.
Japan's education ministry Friday approved the revised school textbooks that described the islets as Japan's territory "illegally occupied by South Korea", Xinhua reported.
The revised textbooks, which will be used from April 2015, depicted the Dokdo islets as integral part of Japanese territory illegally controlled by South Korea, while illustrating the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea, claimed by Japan as Senkaku, as areas where Chinese vessels are operating illegally.
Among five Japanese textbooks approved in 2010 for elementary school students, only one textbook mentioned the Dokdo and Diaoyu islands.
On Jan 28, Japan infuriated South Korea and China by revising its teaching manuals for junior and senior high school students to describe the Dokdo and Diaoyu islands as "integral parts" of Japan's own territory.
"Our government strongly censures the Japanese government for pushing through the screening of elementary school textbooks, which raised provocations further on Dokdo than in 2010, after revising the teaching manuals for junior and senior high school students on Jan 28," South Korea's foreign ministry said in a statement.
If Japan sought to teach a distorted and concealed history of its imperialistic aggression even to elementary school students, it would result in isolation of Japan's future generations from the international community, the statement said.
The ministry said it would also be equal to Japan backing down on a promise made by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just three weeks earlier that he would inherit past apologies for that country's wartime atrocities.
Abe said March 14 that he and his cabinet would inherit the Kono and Murayama statements, or past apologies for the Japanese military's sex slavery and wartime aggression.
Abe's comments resulted in South Korean President Park Geun-hye agreeing to sit down face-to-face with Abe under the arbitration of US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit held in March in the Netherlands.
It was the first meeting between Park and Abe since they took office more than a year earlier. Park, earlier, had refused to meet one-on-one with Abe citing his wrong perception of history.
Abe infuriated Japan's Asian neighbours by paying respect at the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, which honours 14 executed Class-A war criminals during World War II, in December last year. Ties between Seoul and Tokyo turned sour after Abe returned to power in December 2012.
Seoul's foreign ministry said in a separate statement that it was very regrettable for Japan to lay its repeated, preposterous sovereignty claims to the Dokdo islets through the so-called Diplomatic Bluebook for 2014 released earlier in the day.
The diplomatic paper, passed Friday by the Japanese cabinet, reiterated its claim that the Dokdo islets were Japan's own territory on historical facts and international law.
The Diplomatic Bluebook is Japan's foreign policy guideline that has been annually released since 1957.
To protest Japan's repeated provocations, South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yong summoned Japanese Ambassador Koro Bessho in Seoul Friday afternoon.