Premier offends neighbors

last updated 8 January 2015

Tokyo

In what has become an annual event, China and South Korea expressed “anger and disappointment” this week over Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to a shrine that honors his country’s war dead. Japanese troops killed thousands of Chinese and Koreans in a brutal imperialist period before and during World War II. Diplomats from the two countries say that honoring those soldiers is insensitive to the millions who suffered under Japanese occupation. But Koizumi, who has gone to the shrine each year since he was elected in 2001, said his visits filled him “with a new feeling of gratitude about peace and with the thought that we must never start a war again.”