Policy chief of Japan's ruling party defends war shrine visits

The policy chief of Japan's ruling party has vowed to keep paying homage at a controversial war shrine despite anger and diplomatic protests by China and South Korea.

Nearly 170 Japanese lawmakers made a pilgrimage last month to the Yasukuni shrine, a flashpoint in a bitter dispute between Japan and Asian neighbours which were victims of its 20th century militarism.

For foreign critics, the shrine is a stark reminder of Tokyo's brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula and imperialist expansion leading up to the second world war. Among the 2.5 million honoured there are 14 men convicted of war crimes by a United States-led tribunal after Japan's 1945 surrender.

Sanae Takaichi, head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's policy affairs council, was one of the senior lawmakers who joined the April visit and yesterday defended the practice.

"It's an internal affair [of a nation] how to commemorate the people who sacrificed their lives for the national policy," Takaichi told NHK.

China agreed to the principle of non-interference in each other's internal affairs when Tokyo and Beijing established diplomatic ties in 1972, argued Takaichi, who also voiced doubt about a 1995 landmark statement Japan issued under then-prime minister Tomiichi Murayama, which acknowledged it followed "a mistaken national policy" and advanced along the road to war.