SEOUL \u2013 <\/p>\n
South Korea on Sunday protested a Japanese government \u2060event regarding a cluster of disputed islands between the two countries, calling the move an unjust assertion of sovereignty over its territory.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the foreign ministry said it strongly objected \u200bto the Takeshima Day event held by Shimane prefecture, \u200cand to the attendance of a \u200bsenior Japanese government official, urging Japan to immediately abolish the ceremony.<\/p>\n
The tiny islets, known as Takeshima in Japan \u2060and Dokdo in South Korea, which controls them, have long been \u2060a source of tension between the two neighbors, whose relations remain strained by disputes rooted in \u200bJapan’s colonial rule of \u2060the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.<\/p>\n
“Dokdo is clearly South Korea’s sovereign territory historically, \u2060geographically and under \u200binternational law,” the ministry said, calling on \u200bJapan to drop what it described as groundless \u200bclaims and \u200cto face history with humility.<\/p>\n
The ministry summoned a top Japanese diplomat to the ministry building in Seoul to lodge a protest.<\/p>\n
A person at Japan’s \u200cforeign ministry said no one was available on Sunday to comment. A call to the Prime Minister’s Office went unanswered. The government sent a vice-minister from the Cabinet Office, not a \u200bcabinet \u200bminister, to the ceremony.<\/p>\n
Seoul has repeatedly \u200bobjected to Japan’s territorial claims over the islands, including a \u2060protest issued on Friday over comments by Japan’s foreign minister during a parliamentary address asserting Tokyo\u2019s sovereignty over the islets.<\/p>\n
The territory lies in fertile fishing grounds \u200band may sit above enormous deposits of natural gas hydrate that could be worth billions of dollars, Seoul has said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL \u2013 South Korea on Sunday protested a Japanese government \u2060event regarding a cluster of disputed islands between…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[176],"tags":[660,177,179,180,178,659,661,657,658,656],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-disputed-islands","tag-japans-politics","tag-japanese-politics","tag-politics","tag-politics-of-japan","tag-seoul","tag-shimane","tag-south-korea","tag-south-korea-japan-relations","tag-takeshima"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}