China, South Korea not pleased with Japanese Cabinet members’ shrine visits
South Korea on Sunday disapproved of Japanese government leaders’ offerings and visits to the war-linked Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo over the weekend, as the country prepares to host a trilateral summit with Japan and China in early November.
China’s official media, meanwhile, criticised the visits by two Japanese Cabinet members earlier Sunday to the Shinto shrine, saying that such moves heighten tensions in the region.
A South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman issued a statement condemning the Cabinet ministers’ visits as well as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s sending a ritual offering to the shrine on Saturday.
The statement said the moves “contradict” efforts by South Korea to improve relations with Japan through actions such as arranging the trilateral summit.
The visits and offerings are “nothing but acts to try to beautify (Japan’s) colonial usurpation and war of aggression,” it said.
“Only if Japan has a correct recognition of history and shows its humble reflection through action is it possible to see the stable development of bilateral relations which the people of Korea and Japan wish for,” it added.
Earlier Sunday, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported that the international community, including South Korea and China, sees the shrine visits as acts to justify Japan’s aggression before and during World War II and that the two ministers’ shrine visits “could cast a pall on the planned summit” of China, Japan and South Korea.
Xinhua said that continued visits to the shrine by some Japanese politicians are causing tensions in relations between Japan and its Asian neighbours such as China and South Korea.
Xinhua’s English article, noting that Abe sent a ritual offering to the shrine on Saturday, remarked that even though he did not visit the shrine, his offering “is still deemed provocative” at a time when a trilateral summit with China and South Korea is being arranged for next month.
A day after Abe sent the “masakaki” tree offering, Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Sanae Takaichi and Justice Minister Mitsuhide Iwaki separately visited the Shinto shrine which has been a source of diplomatic friction with China and South Korea, both of which suffered under Japan’s wartime aggression.
South Korea and China view Yasukuni Shrine as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism.
The shrine honours wartime Japanese Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo and other convicted Class-A war criminals, along with over 2.4 million of war dead.
