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July 22, 2008
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| Korean students are becoming victims of the Dokdo feud. Twenty middle and high school students in Seoul’s Seocho District were scheduled to visit Japan for four days beginning July 31 to participate in a youth camp jointly sponsored by Seocho District Office and its sister district, Suginami-ku of Tokyo. The students handed in applications in April and were selected out of a field of 80. They took Japanese history and language lessons. But it was all for naught. Because of the Seoul-Tokyo dispute over Dokdo, Seocho canceled the event. Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi, was going to invite 100 students from its sister city Shibata, Niigata, for a sports event in early August. The event has been held every year since 1981. However, the city’s mayor, Kim Moon-won, notified Shibata that the event is being indefinitely postponed. In a letter to Shibata’s mayor he said he is postponing the program due to worsening the Korean public sentiment. With the conflict over Japan’s claim to the islets causing tensions between the two countries, youth exchange programs between the nations are grinding to a halt. Cities including Uiwang in Gyeonggi, Cheongju in North Chungcheong and Chuncheon in Gangwon also canceled similar programs. Singi Elementary School in Yeosu, South Jeolla, originally planed to send 52 people including 40 students to Nagasaki, Japan as part of a five-year old exchange program but canceled it last week. “We had been preparing for it since this spring but parents didn’t want to send their children because of the controversy,” said the school’s principal, Park Ie-seon. Some said canceling youth programs unrelated to the Dokdo dispute is overreacting. Despite the controversy, Incheon decided to expand a youth camp for students from Korea, China and Japan on Ganghwa Island on Aug. 16. “We considered canceling the event but since this is an international event for youth, we decided to go ahead as planned,” said Go Geon-bae, youth program director at Incheon. “It’s wrong for the Japanese government to claim Dokdo but we need to separate adults and youths in dealing with the issue,” said lawmaker Hwang Woo-yea. “We need to keep youth exchange programs an exception so that we can train younger generations to understand and respect each other.” Meanwhile, Korea will hold two major military drills near Dokdo islets this year to establish a firm defense posture to safeguard the islets, the defense ministry announced yesterday. By Jeon Ick-jin, Sung Si-yoon JoongAng Ilbo [jbiz91@joongang.co.kr] |
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