Barren Rocks Fuel Korean Passion in Island Spat With Japan

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Holding a notepad full of questions, 15-year-old Ko Yu Jeong rushes up to a South Korean diplomat after his speech, asking how she can better argue the case for her country’s control of a set of islands also claimed by Japan.

Ko was one of hundreds of high-school students to be told in a lecture by Foreign Ministry officials that Japan’s claims to the islets, called Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese, amount to “nonsense.”