SEOUL, South Korea "strongly protests" Japan's repeated claims to its easternmost islets of Dokdo, the foreign ministry said Tuesday, after Japan's top diplomat renewed the claim in a speech before the parliament. Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa reiterated the claims to the islets, called Takeshima in Japan, during a speech on this year's foreign policy objectives in a parliamentary session earlier in the day. "The government strongly protests against the Japanese government's repeated unfair territorial claims over Dokdo, which is clearly our own territory historically, geographically and under international law," ministry spokesperson Lim Soo-suk said in a commentary. Lim restated that such unreasonable claims by Japan have no impact on South Korea's sovereignty over the islets that are Korea's inherent territory. He said Japan should realize that repeating these claims about Dokdo would not be helpful in moving the bilateral relations forward in a future-oriented way. "We urge Japan to immedi ately withdraw the statement," Lim said. On Kamikawa's mention of a former Japanese gold mine that Tokyo is pushing to register as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Seoul's foreign ministry again called for reflecting "the entire history," including its forced mobilization of Koreans into hard labor during World War II, when Korea was a Japanese colony. "The Sado mine has a painful history of wartime forced mobilization. We reiterate that it is most important to reflect the entire history in order to discuss the registration," Lim said. Source: Yonhap News Agency