South Korean experts Monday denounced the Japanese government for politically using school textbooks as it approved texts intensifying Japan's claim to South Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo.
  

The Japanese education ministry approved 13 sorts of middle-school level textbooks containing Tokyo's claim that South Korea is illegally occupying Dokdo, three times more than the four that passed Tokyo's regular review in 2011.
  

The move is seen here as the Abe administration's attempt to bolster its efforts to lay claim to Dokdo.
  

"Japan is expanding and reproducing its history of the past, including the Dokdo issue, into one that is far from fact," Kim Young-soo, a researcher at the Seoul-based Northeast Asian History Foundation, said during an academic conference on the Japanese textbooks.
  

The conference was held shortly after Tokyo approved the controversial textbooks for use at schools.
  

"Japan is educating its students about Dokdo in a nationalistic way, without any repentance on its past history," Kim said.
  

Nam Sang-goo, also a researcher at the foundation, said textbook authors, publishers and history teachers of South Korea and Japan should meet to discuss ways to correct Tokyo's history distortion in school textbooks so the dispute over textbooks cannot recur.
  

The Seoul government, for its part, should consider making its suggestion to Japanese authors of history textbooks, he added. (Yonhap)