[Courtesy of fesival organisers]
Japanese brewers will hold a major open festival this weekend to promote sake for the first time in South Korea despite a thorny territorial row over disputed islets controlled by Seoul, officials said Friday.
The two-day festival for Japan's national beverage will be held from Saturday at a Coex exhibition center in Seoul's affluent southern area. On display will be more than 400 brands from about 100 Japanese sake brewers.
"Such a large-scale festival will be held for the first time in South Korea," Kim Sang-chul, who heads an association of sake importers in Seoul, told Aju News.
There has been no decision on whether to make it a regular annual event, he said. "It depends on how South Korean consumers will respond."
The festrival is being sponsored by the Japanese embassy, Irie, an embassy press official, said, expressing his hope that it would help Japan expand exports of sake and other brands.
Sake is a Japanese rice wine made by fermenting rice that has been polished to remove the bran. Its popularity has been growing especially among young people in South Korea.
The festival comes after relations between Seoul and Tokyo were strained again by Tokyo's approval of school textbooks echoing Japan's claims to the sparsely populated islets, known as Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan, in the Sea of Japan (East Sea).
Ties between the two Asian neighbours have been in the doldrums for years, with South Korea insisting that Japan should apologize and make amends for abuses during its 1910-45 rule over the Korean peninsula.
Especially, Seoul has urged Tokyo to address the issue of Korean women forced to work in Japanese wartime military brothels. Japan insists the issue of the so-called "comfort women" was settled in a 1965 agreement that restored diplomatic ties.
Last December, the two countries reached a landmark agreement on comfort women, with Tokyo apologizing and agreeing to provide one billion yen (8.9 million US dollars) for a foundation to be established in South Korea to support the surviving victims.
The deal, however, has yet to be implemented because the victims refused to accept it.
Aju News Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
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