Nearly half of Japanese voters want Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to halt his visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, seen by China as a symbol of Japan's past militarism, a newspaper poll published yesterday showed.
Forty-eight percent of the 808 respondents to the survey by the liberal Asahi Shimbun newspaper said Koizumi should stop visiting the shrine, where convicted war criminals are honored with Japan's war dead, up from 39 percent in a previous poll.
In contrast, 36 percent said Koizumi should keep going to the shrine, down from 38 percent in the survey last November.
The poll was conducted one day after Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) agreed to mend ruptured ties during talks in Jakarta on the sidelines of an Asia-Africa summit in Indonesia.
Sino-Japanese ties chilled after Koizumi took office in 2001 and began annual visits to Yasukuni.
Koizumi has not visited the shrine yet this year.
Relations recently deteriorated to their worst level since the normalization of relations in 1972, putting at risk some US$212 billion in annual trade.
Last Friday Koizumi expressed "deep remorse" and offered a "heartfelt apology" for Japan's wartime wrongdoings in Asia in a speech at the Asia-Africa summit.
But he has dodged the question of whether he will continue to visit Yasukuni, a practice he says is intended to pray for peace and honor those who lost their lives in war.
"The prime minister has repeatedly said he will make an appropriate decision after taking all factors into account, so all I can say is that he will make an appropriate decision," Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura told public broadcaster NHK on Sunday.
Fifty percent of those responding to the Asahi poll said they did not expect progress toward improving Sino-Japanese ties while 46 percent did expect things to get better.
Fifty-six percent were unhappy at Koizumi's decision not to press for an apology and compensation for damage done to Japanese property by the demonstrations.
Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said demands by Chinese for Japan to show remorse for wartime atrocities were "unconvincing," with most respondents blaming Chinese nationalism for recent anti-Japanese riots.
Seventy-one percent of the 808 respondents said demands for an apology were "unconvincing;" 19 percent said they understood the anger shown in China and the remaining didn't answer.
Asked to what extent they thought China's education system influenced the recent anti-Japanese riots, 51 percent said "greatly," while 32 percent said "to a certain extent."
Meanwhile, Japan also insisted yesterday that its textbooks reflected its pacifist ideals.
"There is no textbook published in Japan which tries to glorify or beautify Japan's history of aggression, colonization or atrocity in any country," Hatsuhisa Takashima, the foreign ministry's press secretary, told a press conference.
"There is strong wording on Japan's aspiration to become a nation of peace," he said.
The controversial textbook -- whose last edition approved in 2001 was adopted by fewer than 1 percent of schools -- refers to the notorious 1937 massacre of Nanjing as an "incident" in which "many" Chinese died.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but