There are open moves to set up an office exclusively dealing with Tok Islets issue within the government amid the claim that "it is necessary for a sovereign state to set up a system for imparting the territorial issue to the people at home and abroad".

There is a move to hold the event of "Day of Takeshima" slated for February 22 on a government level with the involvement of Prime Minister Abe and other cabinet ministers.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Education Committee plans to significantly increase the contents dealing with Tok Islets in history textbooks for senior high schools run by the metropolis from this year.

This is a shameless act that can be done by the Japanese reactionaries only.

Tok Islets are part of the inviolable territory that have been possessed and controlled by the Koreans along with their time-honored history.

The islets are clearly specified as land of Korea in maps produced by European and U.S. scholars after the middle ages, to say nothing of Korea's state documents and historical data.

In January 1696 the Edo government of Japan admitted that Ullung Island and Tok Islets belonged to Korea. "Map of eastern coast of Korea" drawn by the Ministry of Navy of Japan in 1876 and maps of waterways drawn by the Bureau of Waterway of Japan and other Japanese maps that were produced till 1905 all marked Tok Islets as the territory of Korea. This proves that Tok Islets are part of the territory of Korea from the olden times.

Tok Islets are not territory whose owner is not clear as clamored by the Japanese reactionaries.

Japan makes a far-fetched assertion that the territory of Korea is its land. This despicable behavior is a hysterical fit of those obsessed by the territorial ambition.

By making the Japanese convince that Tok Islets are "land of Japan", Japan seeks to get them ready for the Korean war for the territorial expansion and turn those islets into an advanced base and a military bridgehead for realizing the territorial ambition and reinvading Korea. Herein lies Japan's sinister intention in persisting in its moves for grabbing Tok Islets.

By building up public opinion to make the international community convince in Japan's dominium over Tok Islets, Japan seeks to put not only the islets but the whole territory of Korea under its military control and realize its old dream of "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere."

Japan's bid to set up an office exclusively dealing with the Tok Islets issue within the government indicates that its moves to grab the islets have entered a more dangerous phase.

Japan's territorial claim to Tok Islets can never be tolerated as it is a criminal act of wantonly violating the dignity and sovereignty of the DPRK.

Japan should stop the useless act, pondering over the serious consequences to be entailed by its reckless territorial ambition.