Japan ministers visit controversial war shrine
TOKYO—Two Japanese cabinet ministers visited a war shrine on Wednesday on the anniversary of Tokyo’s World War II surrender, a move set to inflame regional tensions amid increasingly bitter territorial disputes.
The visits come as Japan is embroiled in a worsening spat with South Korea over islands that lie half way between the two nations and as pro-Beijing activists approach another archipelago at the center of a simmering row.
Jin Matsubara, who handles the issue of Japanese kidnapped by North Korea, and land minister Yuichiro Hata made separate visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors 2.5 million war dead—including 14 leading war criminals from World War II.
Visits to the shrine by government ministers spark outrage in China and on the Korean peninsula, where many feel Japan has failed to atone for its brutal expansionist adventurism in the first half of the 20th century.
The pilgrimages were the first on the sensitive anniversary by any government minister since the center-left Democratic Party of Japan came to power in 2009.
All three prime ministers since then have asked their cabinets to stay away.
Matsubara, dressed in a western-style business suit, said he had gone to the shrine “in a personal capacity” and had used his visit to “remember ancestors who established the foundations of the prosperity of present-day Japan.”
Those enshrined at Yasukuni include General Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor and was convicted of war crimes and hanged by a USled tribunal.
Seoul had on Tuesday urged the ministers not to go to Yasukuni on the date it marks as Liberation Day, commemorating the end of Japan’s often harsh colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
Japan’s diplomatic relations with South Korea and China are becoming increasingly tense as the territorial rows intersect with rising nationalistic sentiment.
South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak last week traveled to Seoul-controlled islands in the Sea of Japan (East Sea), known as Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japan, despite calls by Tokyo for him not to do so.
Tokyo recalled its ambassador to Seoul in protest and made noises about canceling planned summits.