Minister Yoo In-chon invited OKIS Chairman Choi Yoon during the expo schedule to visit Korean educational sites such as Taekwondo classes
![Culture, Sports and Tourism Minister Yoo In-chon (left) and OK Financial Group Chairman Choi Yoon are looking at OKIS school facilities. [Photo = OK Financial Group]](https://wimg.mk.co.kr/news/cms/202505/14/news-p.v1.20250514.a96ba5c84b904dcc8f36bd56f554bb00_P1.png)
The Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Yoo In-chon visited the world’s first overseas Korean school, “Osaka Geumgang International School,” where OK Financial Group Chairman Choi Yoon, known as the third generation of Koreans in Japan, is serving as the chairman of the board.
OK Financial Group, which has affiliates such as OK Savings Bank and OK Capital, said Minister Yoo visited OKIS in Osaka, Japan on the 14th to examine the educational site in person and observe in-school classes.
The visit was made when Minister Yoo, who was visiting Japan for the official schedule of the Osaka Expo “Korea Day,” accepted Choi Yoon’s invitation.
Chairman Choi Yoon is the owner of the “OK Savings Bank Eutman Professional Volleyball Team” and the “OK Eutman Rugby Team,” and served as the 24th president of the Korea Rugby Association and the director of the Korea Sports Council.
He also served as the deputy head of the South Korean squad for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the head of the 2022 Hangzhou Asian Games, serving as a bridge between Korea and Japan in sports diplomacy.
In particular, it is known that he has continued to pay attention to revitalizing school sports and shared a consensus with Minister Yoo on the “importance of school sports.”
On this day, Minister Yoo visited major facilities and school sites such as classrooms, grass fields, and gyms of OKIS with a total of 10 people, including Kim Hye-soo, head of the Osaka Korean Cultural Center, and officials from related organizations of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
He showed interest in national education programs to build students’ self-esteem by attending Taekwondo classes and customized foreign language classes by level, including Korean.
Minister Yoo delivered the Taekwondo Songpan as a commemorative gift to the school and delivered words of encouragement to OKIS students.
The most notable achievement of this visit is the “Recruitment of Local Principals” recently introduced by OKIS.
Since 1972, OKIS has been operated under the Ministry of Education’s “dispatch principal system,” which allows principals from domestic public schools to work for a certain period of time to support the Korean-style curriculum of overseas Korean schools.
However, Choi Yoon has consistently suggested the need to hire local principals to the Ministry of Education since he took office as chairman of OKIS in 2019 as the principal’s limited tenure revealed limitations such as educational consistency, gaps with local educational environments, and language communication problems with local faculty and parents.
After five years of continuous requests from Chairman Choi Yoon, OKIS was able to directly hire local principals, just like major national schools in the government office such as Konkuk Korean School and Kyoto International School, in recognition of the school’s special educational environment and the need to reform the personnel system that fits local sentiment.
Through this system transformation, OKIS has established the foundation for establishing an operating system suitable for the local educational environment in Japan.
“The visit of the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Yoo In-chon was a great encouragement to the educational innovation journey that OKIS has taken, and it was a valuable time to give pride to students and faculty,” said Choi Yoon, chairman of OK Financial Group. “We would like to thank the minister again for visiting in person despite his busy schedule, and we will use the pine boards you delivered meaningfully for Taekwondo classes.”
“OKIS will continue to reform its educational model so that students can grow into internationally competitive talents based on Korean identity,” he said. “In particular, the long-cherished task of ‘Recruitment of Local Principals’ will be realized and it will lay the groundwork for further educational reform in close connection with the local educational environment.”
Meanwhile, OKIS is a national educational institution established by the first generation of Koreans in Japan in 1946 for the descendants of the Korean people in Japan, and is the “No. 1 Overseas Korean School in Korea” approved by the Korean government in 1961.
It is one of only four overseas Korean schools in Japan, along with Kyoto International High School, which won last year’s Koshien. It was also approved by the Japanese government as a regular school in 1985 and operates as an integrated international educational institution with all elementary, middle, and high schools.
In addition, since Chairman Choi Yoon’s inauguration as chairman of the board in 2019, OKIS has simultaneously promoted reforms in the hardware and software sectors on campus, making it a global educational institution both in name and reality.
OKIS is also continuing to improve its educational infrastructure, such as ▲ overhaul of the School Identity (SI) such as school name, school uniform, school song, and emblem ▲ customized ‘no-grade foreign language education’ by level ▲ curriculum innovation such as introduction of foreign language-oriented classes (emergency programs) ▲ creation of artificial grass playgrounds ▲ installation of gym air conditioners. As a result, OKIS once suffered a crisis of existence as the number of students decreased to 190 due to the lack of a curriculum and difficulty in securing excellent teachers, but it achieved a practical result of recovering the number of students to the 300 level in 12 years.
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