China, SK warn Japan not to edit its apology
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CHINA and South Korea have warned Japan not to backtrack on an apology issued 20 years ago for its wartime past when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe makes a statement on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Japan’s ties with its two neighbors have worsened sharply as Abe has adopted a conservative agenda, including a less apologetic tone toward the wartime past and bolstering Japan’s defenses.
Abe has said he intends to express remorse over the war in his statement and his cabinet upholds past apologies, including the landmark 1995 remarks by then-premier Tomiichi Murayama but suggested he was not going to stick with the original wording.
“I would like to issue a statement with the focus not on whether the same terms will be used but on the Abe government’s thought on the occasion,” he said in an NHK broadcast at the weekend.
The anniversary of Japan’s defeat falls on August 15, but no date has been set for the release of the Abe statement.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Monday that Beijing was concerned about “what type of attitude the Japanese government and leaders adopt with respect to the past period of aggression and the type of information” it sends out to the outside world.
“Will it play down the history of aggression and continue to carry that negative asset? Or will it show profound and sincere remorse over its history of invasions and travel lightly forward? The international community waits and sees,” she told a media briefing in Beijing.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Noh Kwang-il has already accused Japan of trying to undermine a separate 1993 apology to Asian women it forced to work as wartime sex slaves in Japanese brothels by conducting a review of it last year.
The Japanese government “should reflect carefully, looking squarely at history how the international community and neighboring countries will react if it takes key parts out from statements by Murayama on the 50th anniversary and (Junichi) Koizumi on the 60th,” Noh told a news briefing in Seoul yesterday.
Koizumi issued a similar statement in 2005.
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