Electorate will reverse swing to right, says Korean official

The South Korean ambassador to Tokyo predicted yesterday that the recent swing to the right in Japanese politics would be reversed when the electorate rediscovers its voice.

'Yes, there is a right-wing leader of Japan at the moment, but I am not worried,' said Ra Jong-yil, who has been Seoul's representative in Tokyo since March last year. 'I have many friends in Japan and I know how polite and peace-loving the Japanese people are.

'They may have been misled in past history, but I do not believe they will be easily misled by misguided leaders now, and in due time they will reassert their own voices.'

For a year that was billed as 'Japan-Korea Friendship Year', the past 12 months have been a difficult time for relations between the two neighbours.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine in October was criticised in Seoul, which has also expressed its displeasure over the authorisation of school history books that critics say play down Japan's brutal colonisation of large parts of Asia in the early decades of the last century.

Even booming trade relations and cultural links have been overshadowed by a territorial dispute over islands controlled by South Korea known as Tokdo. Japan refers to the uninhabited islands in the Sea of Japan - a title that Seoul also disputes - as Takeshima.