The foreign ministry called in the top Japanese envoy to Seoul on Friday to protest Japan's approval of school textbooks diluting the degree of wartime atrocities and reinforcing its territorial claims to South Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo. First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Hong-kyun summoned Japanese Ambassador to South Korea Koichi Aiboshi to lodge a protest and voiced strong regrets over the matter, the ministry said. Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology approved 18 school textbooks in the social studies category, which includes geography, civics and history, for use at middle schools starting 2025. Compared with the previous editions approved in 2020, the textbooks were revised to further water down the coercive nature of wartime wrongdoings and reinforce its territorial claims to Dokdo. "The government expresses deep regret over the approval of middle school textbooks by the Japanese government based on unjust claims regarding Dokdo," ministry spokesperson Lim Soo-suk said in a commentary. Lim emphasized that Dokdo is South Korea's own territory historically, geographically and by international law and said that no sovereignty claims by Japan about Dokdo can be accepted. Lim also expressed strong regret over the descriptions of sexual slavery and forced labor by the Japanese military in a way that "does not reveal the coercive nature," urging Tokyo to put the history education into practice based on the spirit of the apology and repentance it made on the past history. Citing the warming of bilateral relations, Lim said that South Korea expects the Japanese government to approach education "with a more responsible attitude." A history textbook was revised to state that the conscription was "partly" applied to Korea and Taiwan during the Pacific War, in an apparent attempt to weaken the forcible nature of the mobilization. Another textbook deleted the phrase "military comfort women" in the part where it describes the sexual slavery victims from Korea, China and the Philippines who were forced to serve Japanese soldiers at military brothels. Instead, it added Japan alongside the three countries to mean that Japanese women were also among the sexual slavery victims. In 2021, the Japanese government advised publishers to use "comfort women" rather than "military comfort women." Another history book stated that Japan annexed and colonized Korea in 1910, removing "against the backdrop of its military power" from the sentence. Fifteen out of the 18 approved textbooks continued to introduce Dokdo as its own territory and say that South Korea is "illegally occupying" them. Except for two publications, the textbooks describe the islets, called "Takeshima" in Japan, as its indigenous territory that "has never been a foreign territory." Source: Yonhap News Agency