Gov't to give tuition waiver to pro-Pyongyang high schools+

TOKYO, Aug. 29 Kyodo -
Prime Minister Naoto Kan instructed education minister Yoshiaki Takaki on Monday to resume screening procedures to give a tuition waiver to pro-Pyongyang high schools in Japan, which have been frozen since North Korea's artillery shelling of a South Korean island last November.
In response to the instruction, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has begun procedures to make the Korean schools subject to the national program in order to provide financial assistance to students attending high schools.
If the ministry decides to apply the tuition waiver to the Korean schools with the approval of its expert panel by the March end of fiscal 2011, the ministry plans to provide the assistance retroactive to April this year to 10 Korean schools in Japan.
The ministry will also study measures to compensate about 700 students who graduated from the Korean schools this spring without the tuition waiver.
After meeting with Kan, Takaki told reporters he was asked by Kan to resume the screening procedures as the situation on the Korean Peninsula has apparently returned to the state before the artillery shelling.
The education ministry has resumed screening procedures as ''North Korea has held dialogues with South Korea and the United States since late July,'' Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a press conference.
The government has since April last year waived tuition for students who attend Japanese public senior high schools. Private and other foreign or international schools equivalent to Japanese senior high schools also receive stipends for their students under the national program, but the pro-Pyongyang schools have so far been excluded.
The stipend amounts to 118,800 yen per student per year in principle.
Pro-Pyongyang schools have close ties with the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongryon, which serves as a de facto government mission for North Korea in Japan in the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
==Kyodo