Tensions over Koizumi visit to controversial war shrine

REGIONAL tensions rose amid speculation that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi would visit a shrine for war dead tomorrow, on the anniversary of Tokyo’s World War Two surrender, which is seen by critics as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism.

China and the two Koreas, where bitter memories of Japan’s aggression runs deep, were expected to react with outrage to the visit to Yasukuni Shrine, where Japanese leaders convicted as war criminals are honoured with the country’s 2.5 million war dead.

“If Japan continues acts of provocation and tries to glorify its war of aggression in the face of repeated protests by South Korea and other neighbouring countries, then it must not be overlooked,” Kim Han-gill, a senior lawmaker of South Korea’s ruling Uri Party said yesterday.

“The government must take the strongest diplomatic response possible if the Japanese prime minister goes ahead with the Yasukuni shrine visit,” Mr Kim added.

Mr Koizumi, who is set to step down in September after more than five years in office, promised during his campaign to become party chief in 2001 that he would visit the Shinto shrine on the August 15 anniversary.

He has visited every year since then, but never on that date. “Because he made the promise so clearly, I think he will visit Yasukuni,” LDP lawmaker Kato Koichi, a one-time Koizumi ally who has criticised the shrine visits, told reporters.

North Korea’s official news agency has published a report detailing Japan’s past military aggression.

“During their 40-year-long occupation, the Japanese imperialists kidnapped and forcibly took away some 8.4 million innocent Korean people, cruelly killed more than a million and forced 200,000 women to serve the Japanese army as sexual slaves,” KCNA said.

China unveiled plans to make a movie about the 1937 Rape of Nanjing yesterday. China says 300,000 Chinese men, women and children were slaughtered by invading Japanese troops in wartime capital Nanjing, formerly known as Nanking. The 1948 Tokyo war crimes trial found Japanese troops killed about 155,000 people.