Anger over visit to shrine after Pearl Harbor
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JAPANESE Defense Minister Tomomi Inada, just back from Pearl Harbor, yesterday visited a Tokyo shrine that honors Japan’s war dead, including convicted Class-A war criminals.
The visit, and one by another Cabinet minister the day before, drew rebukes from neighboring South Korea and China.
Inada accompanied Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during his visit this week to Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, where he offered condolences to those who died in the 1941 Japanese attack.
Japan’s Asian neighbors harbor bitter memories of the country’s atrocities before and during World War II, when it colonized or invaded much of the region. So visits by top Japanese leaders to the war shrine often draw protests from countries including China and South Korea that see them as attempts to whitewash Japan’s wartime aggression.
Abe’s visit to Yasukuni in December 2013 caused such an uproar that he has since instead sent gifts of money and religious ornaments.
Japan’s Kyodo News service reported that Abe, golfing outside Tokyo, refused to comment on Inada’s visit.
Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters it was the ultimate irony that Inada had visited the war shrine a day after her visit with Abe to Pearl Harbor, which has been dubbed by Tokyo as a “tour of reconciliation.”
Some reports suggested that Abe’s visit was a political show aiming to strengthen the Japanese-US alliance.
Other than offering his “sincere and everlasting condolences” to the souls of the Americans killed by troops of the Japanese imperial empire, Abe issued no apology.
Hua said Inada’s move once again reflected that a number of Japanese people were being bullheaded by straying from the historical truth, and that such activities would only make the international community more cautious toward Japan.
“We once again urge Japanese leaders to squarely face and deeply reflect upon the history of invasion,” said Hua, calling on Japan to deal with issues regarding its attitude toward shouldering responsibility, both for history and the future.
South Korea’s foreign ministry said it was “deplorable” that Inada had visited a shrine that “beautifies past colonial invasions and invasive war and honors war criminals.”
The ministry summoned Kohei Maruyama, a minister at the Japanese Embassy in South Korea, to lodge a protest over the Yasukuni visit.
The country’s defense ministry expressed “serious concern and regret.”
Inada’s visit was her first since becoming defense minister, though she has regularly visited it in the past.
A lawyer-turned-lawmaker with little defense experience, she is an Abe protege and backs his long-cherished hope to revise Japan’s Constitution.
Inada has defended Japan’s wartime atrocities, including the forcing of many Asian women into sexual servitude, and has led a committee to re-evaluate the judgment of war tribunals led by the Allies.
Her link to a notorious anti-Korea group was acknowledged this year in a defamation case she lost. Inada was also seen posing with the leader of a neo-Nazi group in a 2011 photo that surfaced in 2014.
Masahiro Imamura, Japan’s disaster reconstruction minister, went to Yasukuni on Wednesday, also drawing criticism from China.
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