South Korea's Culture, Sports and Tourism Minister Hwang Hee (in foreground) observes a map of the Tokyo Olympics torch relay route that includes the East Sea islets of Dokdo as Japanese territory during a parliamentary committee meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul last Monday. (Yonhap)
A South Korean parliamentary committee on Wednesday passed a resolution denouncing Japan's renewed claim to sovereignty of Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo on the Tokyo Olympics website.
Dokdo, located in the East Sea, has appeared on the map of the route of the torch relay, posted on the Tokyo Olympics website, in an apparent territorial claim to the South Korean islets by the Japanese government.
The National Assembly's culture committee held a plenary session and passed the resolution condemning the Japanese Olympic Committee for including Dokdo as part of Japan on its Olympics map. The resolution was endorsed by a group of 234 bipartisan lawmakers.
In the resolution, lawmakers described the inclusion of Dokdo on the map as a move that violates the sovereignty of South Korea and which regresses the Seoul-Tokyo relationship, and called for the immediate removal of Dokdo from the map.
The resolution also called for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to take proactive measures against the map controversy, and also stressed the need for the South Korean government to engage in diplomacy with Japan and the IOC on the matter.
Dokdo has long been a recurring source of tension between the two neighbors, as Tokyo continues to lay claim to the East Sea islets, which have been under the effective control of Seoul since the Korean liberation from Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule. (Yonhap)