Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama vowed on Wednesday to face up to the bitter memories of his country’s wartime past that still stir distrust in Asia, an official said.
Hatoyama made the pledge during a meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and ahead of a G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Japanese government official said.
“The new government has the courage to keep a firm eye on history,” Hatoyama told Lee, the official said. “Based on it, we would like to jointly develop our future-looking relationship.”
Lee said he also wanted to forge relations of trust with Japan’s new government, which will be “one step higher” than their past bilateral ties, the official said.
Hatoyama, who has pledged to reach out to Asia, took office a week ago ending more than half a century of almost uninterrupted conservative rule.
The leader of the center-left Democratic Party of Japan has proposed that Japan build a new, non-religious state war memorial to serve as an alternative focus of national war remembrance to the controversial Yasukuni shrine.
Past visits by Japanese politicians and leaders to the Shinto shrine in Tokyo, which honors 2.5 million war dead but also 14 convicted war criminals, have badly rocked Japan’s relations with China, the Koreas and other neighbors.
During a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) on Monday, Hatoyama also said he would follow a landmark statement of apology for Japan’s wartime aggression issued in 1995 by then-prime minister Tomiichi Murayama — one of the few other left-leaning leaders in modern Japan.
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