A Chinese man was arrested and two others placed on a wanted list for allegedly defacing a Japanese war shrine, Tokyo police said yesterday.
The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo honors 2.5 million people who died fighting on behalf of the emperor of Japan, including 30,304 Taiwanese soldiers killed in World War II.
Jiang Zhuojun (姜卓君), 29, who lives north of Tokyo, was arrested “on suspicion of vandalism and disrespect for a place of worship,” a Tokyo metropolitan police spokesman told reporters.
Photo: AFP
Police also issued arrest warrants for two other Chinese men, Dong Guangming (董光明), 36, and Xu Laiyu (許來玉), 25, placing them on wanted lists, but the spokesman said the two seem to have left the country.
Jiang and Dong allegedly spray-painted the word “toilet” in red on a pillar of the shrine on May 31 while Xu filmed them, the spokesman said.
A video posted on Chinese social media showed a man appearing to urinate on the stone pillar before spray-painting it, local media reported.
The police spokesman said that officers had seen the video.
Dong earlier told Japanese broadcaster TBS that he admits the vandalism, but would not report to police because the conduct was a protest against Japan’s release of treated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.
The UN atomic watchdog says the discharge, which began in August last year, is harmless, but China banned all Japanese seafood imports, saying that Tokyo was treating the Pacific Ocean “like a sewer.”
Additional reporting by staff writer
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