Planned shrine visit in Japan fuels China feud

Inflaming already tense relations with China, Japanese lawmakers said Tuesday they plan to visit a shrine that critics say glorifies Japan’s militarist past, and a Tokyo court ruled against Chinese victims of wartime atrocities.

Such developments would ordinarily infuriate the Chinese, but in the current atmosphere they could be explosive.

Sometimes violent anti-Japanese demonstrations involving tens of thousands of protesters have erupted in several Chinese cities in recent weeks over a government-approved Japanese textbook that critics say whitewashes the country’s past militarism.

The protesters, who also oppose Tokyo’s bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, smashed windows of Japan’s diplomatic missions in Beijing and Shanghai and damaged Japanese restaurants and cars.

China has refused to apologize or pay compensation, saying Japan sparked the protests by offending the Chinese people.

The textbooks approved earlier this month condense or omit references in earlier volumes to the Japanese military’s germ warfare and sex slavery of Asian women. They only briefly mention the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, when Japanese soldiers killed tens of thousands of Chinese civilians.

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Beijing, meanwhile, said Tuesday it wanted U.N. heritage protection for a germ warfare laboratory in northeastern China, to serve as a reminder of “horrible atrocities” committed by Japanese troops.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urged Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet this weekend in Jakarta, Indonesia, where all three will be attending the Asia-Africa summit.

“They have lots of relationship on all fronts — political, economic and social — and I hope those important aspects of their relationship will encourage them to resolve their differences,” Annan said Monday.

But Japan showed no sign of backing off.

Nationalist lawmakers, headed by a former defense minister, announced plans to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s 2.5 million war dead, on Friday, an aide to lawmaker Yasu Kano said on condition of anonymity.

He said the visit was planned well in advance and had nothing to do with the anti-Japanese riots rocking China.

But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang noted that the dead honored at the Tokyo shrine include executed war criminals, whom he called the “planners and conspirators” of World War II.

“We hope the Japanese leaders could fully respect the people in the victimized countries in Asia, including the Chinese people,” Qin said in Beijing. He called on Japanese leaders to “refrain from doing anything that might harm the feelings of Asian people.”

Also Tuesday, the Tokyo High Court rejected demands to compensate Chinese victims of atrocities committed by Japan’s military in the 1930s and ‘40s, including the use of biological weapons, which historians estimate killed as many as 250,000 people.

The ruling upheld a 1999 lower court ruling that international law barred foreign citizens from seeking compensation from the Japanese government for wartime actions.

“We hope the Japanese side will approach this issue in a responsible manner and handle this appropriately,” Qin said, though he would not say what outcome China wants.

China’s leaders also are alarmed at proposals to give Japan a permanent seat on an expanded U.N. Security Council. Such status, with power to veto U.N. actions, is now held by only China, the United States, Russia, Britain and France, and Beijing is reluctant to dilute its influence as the only Asian member of that elite.

The rhetoric and demonstrations have raised worries about the potential effect on the economic relationship between Asia’s two biggest economies, which are linked by billions of dollars in trade and investment.

Japan’s Trade Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said he doubted China could be trusted as a law-abiding nation.

“It is only natural for anyone to offer an apology and compensation if he or she damages other people’s property,” he said Tuesday. “When there is no response despite our request, we cannot help but doubt (China’s) reliability as a state governed by the law.”

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