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More Japanese want end to shrine visits

Nearly half of Japanese voters want Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to halt his visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, seen by China as a symbol of Japan's past militarism, a newspaper poll published yesterday showed.

Forty-eight percent of the 808 respondents to the survey by the liberal Asahi Shimbun newspaper said Koizumi should stop visiting the shrine, where convicted war criminals are honored with Japan's war dead, up from 39 percent in a previous poll.

In contrast, 36 percent said Koizumi should keep going to the shrine, down from 38 percent in the survey last November.

The poll was conducted one day after Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) agreed to mend ruptured ties during talks in Jakarta on the sidelines of an Asia-Africa summit in Indonesia.

Sino-Japanese ties chilled after Koizumi took office in 2001 and began annual visits to Yasukuni.

Koizumi has not visited the shrine yet this year.

Relations recently deteriorated to their worst level since the normalization of relations in 1972, putting at risk some US$212 billion in annual trade.

Last Friday Koizumi expressed "deep remorse" and offered a "heartfelt apology" for Japan's wartime wrongdoings in Asia in a speech at the Asia-Africa summit.

But he has dodged the question of whether he will continue to visit Yasukuni, a practice he says is intended to pray for peace and honor those who lost their lives in war.

"The prime minister has repeatedly said he will make an appropriate decision after taking all factors into account, so all I can say is that he will make an appropriate decision," Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura told public broadcaster NHK on Sunday.

Fifty percent of those responding to the Asahi poll said they did not expect progress toward improving Sino-Japanese ties while 46 percent did expect things to get better.

Fifty-six percent were unhappy at Koizumi's decision not to press for an apology and compensation for damage done to Japanese property by the demonstrations.

Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said demands by Chinese for Japan to show remorse for wartime atrocities were "unconvincing," with most respondents blaming Chinese nationalism for recent anti-Japanese riots.

Seventy-one percent of the 808 respondents said demands for an apology were "unconvincing;" 19 percent said they understood the anger shown in China and the remaining didn't answer.

Asked to what extent they thought China's education system influenced the recent anti-Japanese riots, 51 percent said "greatly," while 32 percent said "to a certain extent."

Meanwhile, Japan also insisted yesterday that its textbooks reflected its pacifist ideals.

"There is no textbook published in Japan which tries to glorify or beautify Japan's history of aggression, colonization or atrocity in any country," Hatsuhisa Takashima, the foreign ministry's press secretary, told a press conference.

"There is strong wording on Japan's aspiration to become a nation of peace," he said.

The controversial textbook -- whose last edition approved in 2001 was adopted by fewer than 1 percent of schools -- refers to the notorious 1937 massacre of Nanjing as an "incident" in which "many" Chinese died.
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