South Korea blasts Japan over 'distorted' textbooks

South Korea has condemned Japan's approval of textbooks that it said distort history by claiming disputed islands, summoning Japan's ambassador and warning that the approval was a sign Japan was prepared to repeat its colonial wartime past.

The strongly worded protest came just over two week after the foreign ministers of the neighbours and China pledged to improve ties and overcome tension over history and territory, and to try to work for a summit meeting of their leaders soon.

South Korea's foreign ministry said the book approval was "yet another provocation that distorts, reduces, and omits clear historic facts to strengthen its unjust claims to what is clearly our territory".

"The Japanese government is in effect saying it will repeat its mistakes of the past when it injects distorted historical view and territorial claims based on that to a generation of Japanese who are growing up," a statement said. South Korea controls the disputed islands, called Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese, which have been the focus of a long dispute. Japan colonised the Korean peninsula from 1910 until Japan's defeat in 1945.

Koreans remember Japanese rule with bitterness, saying many people were conscripted into forced labour and women were forced into military brothels.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency said Japan's education ministry had approved the textbooks that made a direct territorial claim over the islands.