South Korea might go ahead with maritime defense drills around a group of islands that the country and Japan have competing claims over, Yonhap news agency reported, citing unidentified military and government officials.
The islands, known in Korean as Dokdo and Takeshima in Japan, lie between the two countries.
The drills could begin as early as this month, Yonhap said.
The exercises involve the navy, air force and coast guard, and they are usually carried out in June and December, it said.
South Korea and Japan are embroiled in a complicated dispute over trade that is turning into one of the worst crises in the nations’ often-fraught bilateral ties since a 1965 treaty normalized relations. Carrying out the drills around the islands risks adding to the tensions, which have already been marked by a series of protests, boycotts and economic warnings.
While South Korea’s government had initially put off the twice-yearly drills to prevent worsening the relationship with Tokyo, as Japan is “continuing to exacerbate the situation,” the drills could no longer be postponed, Yonhap said, citing a person it did not identify.
Meanwhile, a Japanese exhibition featuring a controversial South Korean work of art depicting a wartime “comfort woman” has been canceled after threats of violence.
The exhibition, which was part of a major art festival in Aichi, central Japan, was shut down on Saturday after just three days.
Titled After Freedom of Expression?, the event was dedicated to showing works that were censored elsewhere and was originally to run for 75 days.
The statue — a girl in traditional South Korean clothes sitting on a chair — symbolises comfort women, who were forced to work in wartime Japanese military brothels during World War II.
Aichi Governor Hideaki Omura, lead organizer, said they received a number of threatening e-mails, telephone calls and faxes against the exhibition.
Omura said one of the faxes read: “I will visit the museum carrying a gasoline container,” evoking last month’s arson attack on an animation studio in Kyoto that killed 35 people.
“We made the decision as we fear that we can’t safely organize the exhibition,” the governor said.
Mainstream historians say up to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea but also other parts of Asia including Taiwan and China, were forced to work in Japanese military brothels.
Activists have in the past few years set up dozens of statues in public venues around the world, many of them in South Korea, in honor of the victims.
The statues have drawn the ire of Tokyo, which has pressed for the removal of one outside its embassy in Seoul.
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