South Korea said Monday it was recalling its ambassador to Japan in protest at Tokyo's decision to approve school history textbooks which gloss over Japanese wartime abuses.
Ambassador Choi Sang-Ryong had been ordered to return home by Tuesday, said foreign ministry spokesman Kim Eui-Taek as Seoul raised the stakes sharply in the row over the schoolbooks.
"The ambassador will stay at home temporarily to discuss the textbook issue," Kim told AFP.
The move was the toughest diplomatic action against Tokyo yet by the government of President Kim Dae-Jung, who has sought to warm up chilly ties across the Sea of Japan since taking office in 1998.
Tensions have risen anew after the Japanese government last week approved textbooks which avoid mention of Japan's pre-World War II invasion of neighbors and Japanese troops' use of sex slaves.
South Korean lawmakers on Monday called off an annual gathering with their Japanese counterparts, and protestors in Seoul and the southern port of Pusan burned a Japanese effigy in street rallies.
The Korea-Japan Parliamentarians' Union conference, scheduled to be held in Seoul from May 4 to 6, has been "delayed indefinitely," Park Sang-Cheon of the ruling Millennium Democratic Party said.
Park, the vice president of the lawmakers' union, told a news conference the move was in protest at the textbooks.
A four-member delegation of South Korean deputies led by Park would visit Japan on Tuesday and Wednesday to file a complaint, Park and Yoo Heung-Soo of the main opposition Grand National Party (GNP) said.
The South Korean team is scheduled to meet Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, education ministry officials and parliament members during the two-day protest visit, officials at the union said.
The Korea-Japan parliamentarians' conference has been held for 27 years as a forum to improve bilateral relations fraught with mistrust over Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule of Korea.
The GNP has called for a boycott of Japanese goods in protest at the schoolbooks. China, Taiwan and North Korea have also condemned the approval of the books intended for junior high school students.
At a downtown park in Seoul, scores of protestors set fire to an effigy of a Japanese man and cigarette packs made in Japan.
"Let's not buy Japanese cigarettes and electronic goods and let's not import Japanese films, cartoons and animation movies," the demonstrators chanted.
President Kim has lifted a decades-old ban on the import of Japanese films, music and books.
The protestors appealed to the government to pull out of co-hosting the 2002 World Cup finals with Japan, in protest at Japan's "beautifying its past wrongdoings."
At the Pusan demonstration, a Japanese effigy and the Rising Sun flag were burned, Yonhap news agency said -- SEOUL (AFP)
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