TOKYO (Reuters) - South Korea said on Monday it would recall its ambassador from Tokyo in protest after Japan said it would write about a longstanding island dispute in school teaching guides.
South Korea and Japan both lay claim to a group ofdesolate, rocky islets which Seoul calls Dokdo and Tokyo callsTakeshima. The area surrounding the islets has fertile fishinggrounds.
The Japanese government said it had informed Seoul thatTokyo would refer in a middle school teaching guide to theislands as Japanese territory.
"President Lee Myung-bak said he cannot help being deeplydisappointed and feeling regret, considering the agreementbetween the two leaders to face past history and build aforward-looking Korea-Japan relationship," South Korea'spresidential office said in a statement.
"Japan should not repeat its behaviour of promising aforward-looking relationship with Korea but then stirring up adispute such as the Dokdo issue once in a while when thegovernment changes."
Yonhap news agency reported that South Korea would step upits defence of the islands, citing a presidential official, butJapan's chief government spokesman called for composure.
"Needless to say, South Korea is an important neighbour forJapan," Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura toldreporters.
"We want to avoid a situation where Japan-South Korearelations are influenced by each and every issue, and I hopeboth sides will calmly respond."
The document for teachers and textbook publishers, thoughnon-binding, will likely influence classroom teaching andtextbook contents, an official from Japan's education ministrysaid.
"It is necessary to touch on the fact that our country andSouth Korea have different claims over Takeshima and to deepenthe understanding of our territory," the ministry said in theteaching guide.
The dispute is one of a number of long-running territorialrows involving Japan and its neighbours.
Last month a row over ownership of another group of tinyislands called the Senkaku isles in Japan, the Diaoyu in Chinaand the Tiaoyutai in Taiwan, flared up when a Japanesecoastguard vessel collided with a Taiwan fishing boat, sinkingit and injuring one person.
School textbooks, seen as an expression of government viewsin many Asian countries, sometimes lead to international spats.In 2005, thousands of Chinese took to the streets to protestwhat they said was Japan's whitewashing of its World War Twohistory in schoolbooks.
(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz and Kim Junghyun in Seoul andYoko Kubota and Isabel Reynolds in Tokyo; Editing by DavidFogarty and Rodney Joyce)
