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The South Korean military has launched another round of annual air and sea exercises around the Dokdo islets, a sprinkling of rocks in the Sea of Japan that lie at the center of an ongoing territorial dispute between Korea and Japan. The exercises come amid heightened rhetorical tensions between Seoul and Tokyo over sovereignty of the rocks and begin just one day after South Korean Prime Minister Han Seung Soo visited Dokdo, a first for a sitting South Korean prime minister.
The current tensions over Dokdo follow a Japanese decision to have public school textbooks include the islets among other territorial disputes that Japan still faces. Such small gestures have commonly elicited fairly robust reactions from the South Korean public, particularly since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Seoul transitioned from a military-backed government to a more liberal civilian regime. Sometimes the South Korean government will downplay such issues; at other times it will ratchet up the tensions to serve domestic purposes.
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