School textbooks have long been a symbolic bone of contention between Seoul and Tokyo, as they argue over how history should record Japan’s 35-year occupation of Korea. Now, the dispute has dragged in the classrooms of Virginia in the US.
The lower house of the Virginia state legislature will on Thursday vote on a bill that would require new school textbooks to use both of the terms “East Sea” and “Sea of Japan”, when referring to the body of water between Japan and Korea.
If passed, the law would be a rare victory on the matter for the South Korean government, which has struggled for more than two decades to gain international acceptance of its preferred name for the sea.