Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine for war dead on Thursday, a temple seen as an icon of Japan’s World War Two militarism, prompting a swift and sharp reprimand from China.
The first serving prime minister to visit the shrine in seven years, Abe however said he had no intention of hurting the sentiments of Japan’s neighbours.
China and South Korea have repeatedly expressed anger in the past over Japanese politicians’ visits to Yasukuni, where Japanese leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal are honoured along with war dead.
Tokyo’s relations with Beijing and Seoul are already stressed by territorial disputes stemming from Japan’s wartime occupation of large parts of China and its 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean peninsula.
Abe, who took office for a second term exactly one year ago, visited the shrine in central Tokyo around 0930 ET (0230 GMT). Television carried live video of his motorcade making its way to the shrine, built in 1896 by Emperor Meiji to enshrine the war dead, pray for eternal peace in Japan and to “foster friendly relations with people in the rest of the world”.
