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Japan must bridge gulf with China, North Korea

TOKYO: Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said on Tuesday that Japan must bridge a gulf in understanding with its communist neighbours amid Chinese anger at his visits to a war shrine and North Korea’s threats to end bilateral talks.

Japan’s relations have deteriorated in recent months with both countries on a standoff with North Korea over its kidnappings of Japanese citizens and growing competition with China.

China has strongly opposed Koizumi’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which venerates Japan’s war dead including convicted war criminals, due to its bitter memories of Japanese aggression before and during World War II.

“I do not think that only the Yasukuni visit is a big issue between Japan and China,” Koizumi told a New Year press conference.

“I want to make efforts patiently to gain understanding from the Chinese side on this matter,” he said.

Koizumi last year chose New Year’s Day for his annual visit to the shrine. Asked if and when we would go to Yasukuni in 2005, Koizumi said only that he would make up his mind “appropriately.”

The populist premier has defended his pilgrimages to the shrine as his right as a Japanese person to choose how to honor the dead.

Tension has been mounting between the Asian powers after a Chinese submarine intruded into Japanese waters in November and Tokyo revised its defense guidelines to list Beijing as a potential threat.

Koizumi noted, however, that economic ties have also taken off between the neighbors, saying that the countries’ history of friendship has been longer than the “unfortunate relations in one period of the past.”

As for North Korea, Koizumi said Japan could not take Pyongyang’s remarks at face value after the reclusive state threatened to end dialogue with Tokyo and warned of war.

“North Korea has been saying various things but apart from their remarks on the surface we need to make fully sure of what their true intentions are,” he said.

Japan on December 25 handed to North Korean diplomats in Beijing a report concluding that Pyongyang presented false evidence including human remains to prove that eight Japanese people it abducted during the Cold War era were dead.

A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman, quoted by the regime’s official Korean Central News Agency, said Friday the probe findings were “peppered with words totally negating the sincere efforts” of Pyongyang.

“Now that it has become clear that the Japanese government has openly joined the ultra-right forces in their moves against the DPRK (North Korea) it no longer feels that any DPRK-Japan inter-governmental contact is meaningful,” KCNA said. afp

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