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Japanese minister of defense receives razor blade in mail

Japan's defense minister was mailed a razor blade and a letter criticizing his US policy, police and news reports said yesterday, in the latest of several threats and attacks against Japanese politicians.

An aide found the blade in an envelope in Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma's parliament mailbox on Monday, a Tokyo Metropolitan Police official said on condition of anonymity, citing protocol. No one was hurt, the official said.

The envelope also contained a handwritten letter criticizing Kyuma for being too soft during a recent visit to the US, Kyodo News agency quoted Kyuma's personal office as saying.

The office could not be immediately reached for comment.

Kyuma returned from Washington last week after talks with top US officials on North Korea, cooperation in missile defense and a sweeping agreement to reshuffle the 50,000 US forces that have been stationed in Japan since World War II.

Some nationalist groups have criticized the government for not doing enough to pressure the North to come clean on its past abduction of Japanese citizens.

Tokyo has also come under fire for the US troop reshuffle plan, which some say does not go far enough to alleviate the burden on host communities.

The threat came just a few weeks after a gangster fatally shot the mayor of the southern city of Nagasaki over a traffic dispute -- the most dramatic of recent attacks and threats against politicians.

Although the shooting did not appear to be politically motivated, other cases of threats or violence against politicians have raised some concerns that the country's freedom of expression is under assault.

Last year, a right-wing extremist burned down the house of a prominent lawmaker who had criticized former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's pilgrimage to a war shrine with close links to Japan's past militarism.
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