The Japanese minister of defense visited a controversial shrine to the nation’s war dead yesterday, hours after accompanying Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on a historic visit to Pearl Harbor, where Japan’s attack brought the US into World War II.
Television footage showed a smiling Japanese Minister of Defense Tomomi Inada in a black jacket and skirt arriving at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese who lost their lives in the nation’s wars, including 30,304 Taiwanese soldiers killed in World War II.
Visits to the shrine by prominent Japanese officials anger neighbors China and South Korea, which consider Yasukuni a symbol of Japan’s militarism and a reminder of its wartime atrocities.
Photo: AFP
China and South Korea again voiced their disapproval yesterday, with Beijing saying it would make “solemn representations” to Japan.
“This not only reflects some Japanese people’s obstinately wrong view of history, it also forms a great irony with the Pearl Harbor reconciliation trip,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩) said.
The South Korean Ministry of National Defense called the visit “deplorable.”
“We express deep concern and regret over Japan’s defense minister visiting Yasukuni Shrine, even as our government has been emphasizing the need to create a new, forward-looking South Korea-Japan relationship,” it said in a statement.
Chinese ties with Japan have long been strained by what Beijing sees as Japanese leaders’ reluctance to atone for the nation’s past. China and South Korea were subjects of Japan’s sometimes brutal occupation and colonial rule before Tokyo’s defeat in 1945.
Inada joined Abe and US President Barack Obama on Tuesday for the first visit by a Japanese leader and a US president to Pearl Harbor to commemorate the victims of the Japanese attack 75 years ago.
The Hawaii visit followed Obama’s May visit to Hiroshima, the first by a serving US president to the spot where the US dropped the first atomic bomb in the final days of the war.
“This year the president of the country that dropped the atomic bomb visited Hiroshima and yesterday the prime minister made remarks of consolation at Pearl Harbor,” Inada told reporters at Yasukuni. “I am visiting the shrine wishing to firmly create peace for Japan and the world from a future-oriented perspective.”
It was Inada’s first Yasukuni homage since she became minister of defense in August.
A regular visitor to the complex, revered by Japanese nationalists, she was visiting Japanese troops in Africa on the Aug. 15 anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, a key date for commemorations.
Abe visited Yasukuni in December 2013, but has since refrained, instead sending symbolic offerings on key memorial dates.
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