S Korean minister drops Japan visit over shrine row

South Korea’s foreign minister today said it was inappropriate for him to travel to Japan now because of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s recent visit to a controversial war shrine, scuttling tentative plans for talks in Tokyo later this month.

Ban Ki-moon was reportedly planning to visit Tokyo in the next couple of weeks, although no date had been announced.

“It’s true that there have been consultations through diplomatic channels, but the schedule hasn’t been fixed,” Ban said. “In the current situation, however, the atmosphere is inappropriate to push for a visit to Japan.”

South Korea has protested against Koizumi’s Monday visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals.

The Japanese leader has visited the shrine every year since taking office in 2001 in disregard of strong protests from neighbouring countries, mostly South Korea and China, who view the shrine as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism.

After Monday’s visit, South Korea expressed “deep regrets” and filed strong protests after calling in Japan’s ambassador to Seoul.

The country’s presidential office said it would be “difficult” for President Roh Moo-hyun to hold summit talks with Koizumi in December as scheduled “unless there is a significant change in the situation”.

Since last year, the two leaders have held talks twice a year under what officials dubbed as a “shuttle summit”. It’s Roh’s turn to visit Japan in the second half of this year.

“Nothing has been decided, but we need to think more about whether it’s appropriate to push for a summit” under the current atmosphere, Ban said.

The shrine row comes at a time when North Korea’s neighbours, including South Korea, Japan and China, are trying to persuade the communist state to give up its nuclear program.

Ban said he would make sure the shrine dispute would not affect the nuclear issue.

“We need to think of the straining of South Korea-Japan and China-Japan relations separately from the process of resolving the North Korean nuclear issue,” he said. “Consultations among related countries on the nuclear issue should move ahead.”

Relations between South Korea and Japan had been on a recovery course after plunging earlier this year over a territorial dispute and anger over a history textbook that critics said minimised Japan’s wartime atrocities.

Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula as a colony from 1910-45. Resentment against Japan’s harsh rule still runs deep among many South Koreans.