Newspaper answers latest Japanese slur with bizarre attack on Koizumi's visits to war memorial
Mainland media stepped up attacks against Japan yesterday following a controversial remark by Foreign Minister Taro Aso, who credited Taiwan's high education standards to 50 years of Japanese rule - and called the island a country.
A signed commentary carried by the People's Daily described war criminals as 'rat droppings' and compared Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine to Japan's war dead, including war criminals, to someone knowingly eating such droppings.
Xinhua, meanwhile, highlighted the public rebuke of a Japanese deputy foreign minister by a mainland official at a conference in the German city of Munich.
In the People's Daily commentary, headlined 'Rat droppings, good soup, and Yasukuni Shrine', writer Wu Ming - probably a pseudonym - wrote: 'China has an old saying: one pellet of rat droppings spoils a pot of soup.
'Applying this sentence to the Yasukuni Shrine perhaps is not correct because Yasukuni Shrine is by no means a good soup and it is notorious, whether it has rat droppings or not, because it has long been regarded as a symbol of the resurrection of militarism.
'However, it is not a mistake at all to compare war criminals, especially class-A war criminals, to rat droppings.'
