South Korean high school students expect rows between Seoul and Tokyo

Most South Korean high school students said they expect continued diplomatic rows between Seoul and Tokyo over territorial and historical issues, a poll showed Thursday.According to the survey of 334 high school students conducted earlier this month by the Korean Teachers and Education Workers' Union, 95.5 percent said South Korea and Japan are likely to "continue to suffer conflicts down the road."Of the respondents, 74.3 percent said they expect "some level of conflict," and 21.2 percent thought diplomatic rows "would dominate the bilateral relationship," the survey showed.The figure of 95.5 percent is around 17.7 percentage points higher than that shown in the similar survey the union conducted in 2002 involving the country's 960 primary and secondary school students, according to the union.With some 79.6 percent of the students regarding the current Seoul-Tokyo relations negatively and being riddled with tension, most of the students cited historical and territorial strife over South Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo and enforced sex slavery by Korean women for the Japanese soldiers during World War II, among others, as reasons for their forecasts, the survey showed.Some 96.4 percent of the students said the Japanese government "should apologize to South Korea for its past wrongdoings," up from 87.6 percent of the respondents during the 2002 survey.One of the respondents wrote in a survey sheet, "The two countries would cooperate with each other as key players of East Asia, but conflicts as a victim and an assailant will continue as long as the two fail to make it clear about what took place in the past and settle thorny issues."The neighboring nations have yet to come to terms with Japan's 1910-1945 forced occupation of the Korean Peninsula as South Koreans still harbor deep resentment toward Tokyo's brutal colonial rule.Souring the relations further, the new Tokyo government has taken a far-right stance that includes pledges to more aggressively lay claim to the South Korean islets of Dokdo, where South Korea keeps a small police detachment, effectively controlling them, and revise a former government's apology for Japan's sexual slavery. In a controversial move, Japan recently approved high school textbooks that carry territorial claims to the islets, drawing a strong protest from Seoul.