South Korea Wednesday called on Japan to remove from the Internet a video clip challenging the country's sovereignty over a pair of islets in waters between the two countries.

Park Joon-yong, director of the Northeast Asian department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called in Takashi Kurai, deputy chief of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, to protest the video footage and demand its removal from a number of Japanese government websites and Youtube. 

The 87-second video claims that Japan has had ownership of the islets, called Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese, since the 17th century.

The footage was posted in 10 languages: Korean, English, Chinese, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.  

The recent posting of the clips comes despite South Korea's protests last month when Japan put up an English version on YouTube and other websites.

Tokyo's repeated claim to the islets has long been a major hurdle to amicable ties between the two neighbors.

South Korea, which has maintained a small police force on the islets for the past several decades, sees Japan's claim to Dokdo as a revival of its past militarism.

Japan took control of Dokdo in 1905 when it successfully mobilized its military to nullify Korea's diplomatic sovereignty ahead of the full colonization of the Korean Peninsula in 1910.

Dokdo is one of the thorniest issues between Seoul and Tokyo.

Seoul also considers Japan to have so far failed to adequately apologize for its mobilization of hundreds of thousands of young women, mostly Koreans, as sex slaves for frontline Japanese soldiers during World War II.

Another issue is frequent visits by senior Japanese government officials and politicians to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo which honors 14 class A war criminals, executed for their role in World War II, together with millions of other war dead.

(Yonhap News)