An education ministry panel's approval last April of a history textbook, which critics denounced as attempting to glorify Japan's wartime past, drew a quick response from South Korean politicians.
Four South Korean lawmakers flew to Japan and lodged a complaint with the ministry, staged a sit-in before the Diet building in protest, and filed a lawsuit the following month with the Tokyo District Court, demanding that Fuso Publishing Inc., the publisher of the textbook, stop its publication and sale.
"This textbook denies Japan's past aggression and colonial rule, and the damage caused by such acts," Ham Seung Heui, a member of the ruling Millennium Democratic Party, told a news conference in May after filing the suit. "It is clearly an illegal act that defamed the people of South Korea."