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.
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
The Bolivian government on Friday struck a deal with protesting miners, but was still grappling with blockades and demonstrations by other workers across La Paz. Other groups are still blocking access roads into the city, which is also the seat of the government. Police on Thursday prevented the miners from entering the main square by using tear gas, while the demonstrators hurled stones and explosives with slingshots. Protests against the policies of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz have convulsed the Andean nation since early this month, and roadblocks were choking routes into La Paz throughout Friday, the national road authority said. Miners demanded that Paz
The Philippines said it has asked the country’s Supreme Court to allow it to arrest former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s chief drug war enforcer to stand trial in an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last week unsealed an arrest warrant against Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, accusing him along with Duterte and other “coperpetrators” of the “crime against humanity of murder.” Dela Rosa briefly sought refuge in the Philippine Senate last week while asking the Philippine Supreme Court to stop an ongoing attempt by government agents to arrest him. “By his own conduct, he has placed himself outside the protection of
The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English. The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.” Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, Caedmon’s Hymn appears within some copies of
RSS