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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS