A court dismissed Wednesday a claim by a pro-Pyongyang school operator in western Japan that it is entitled to participate in a government tuition waiver program covering most high schools in the country.

The Hiroshima District Court turned down the demand by the operator of the Hiroshima Korean School and other plaintiffs including its graduates that the government pay 56 million yen ($500,000) in damages and revoke the "discriminatory" decision to exclude Korean schools from the tuition benefit scheme.

The ruling was the first among five lawsuits filed around the nation against the state seeking to reverse the treatment of pro-Pyongyang schools with regard to the tuition waiver program for high schools in Japan. The school is expected to appeal the ruling.

The court basically backed the government's stance that since pro-Pyongyang schools are under the influence of North Korea and the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, also known as Chongryon, there is a risk that subsidies provided through the tuition waver program may not be spent appropriately.

"We find the state's decision to exclude it as not deviating from the scope of its discretion and not an abuse of power," Presiding Judge Hiroshi Konishi said in the ruling.

In April 2010, the Japanese government introduced the high school tuition waiver program as one of the key policies of the then ruling Democratic Party of Japan, the predecessor of the current Democratic Party.

The waiver program basically applies to all students, including those attending foreign schools with curricula similar to Japanese high schools.

The Hiroshima Korean School applied to join the program in November 2010, but the government postponed deciding whether to include pro-Pyongyang schools in the program, partly due to a lack of progress on the issue of North Korea's abductions of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s.

In February 2013, the government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party which took over power from the DPJ, decided not to extend the tuition waiver program to pro-Pyongyang schools.

The Hiroshima Korean School protested the decision as "unjust discrimination" against Korean schools, saying: "It is a cruel act that gives disadvantages to students who have nothing to do with the abdication issue and promotes discrimination against them."

The school also criticized the government for infringing their students' equal rights and right to an ethnic education.

Excluding universities, as of May 2016 there were 66 Korean schools in Japan teaching in Korean and providing a Korean ethnic education, according to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Their nearly 6,200 students include those with South Korean or Japanese nationality.

Similar lawsuits have been filed with district courts in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka as well as the Fukuoka District Court's Kokura branch. The Osaka court is scheduled to hand down a ruling on the matter on July 28.