Koizumi Lashes Out Against South Korea and China

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has released a New Year’s broadcast that is sure to cause a strong reaction from China and Korea:

In a nationally broadcast news conference marking the start of the new year, Mr. Koizumi defended his annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, the memorial to Japan’s war dead, although the visits have frozen Japan’s diplomatic relations with its neighbors. The leaders of China and South Korea have refused to meet Mr. Koizumi in protest over the visits to the shrine, which also honors top-ranked war criminals and is considered a symbol of Japanese militarism throughout Asia.

“I’ve never once closed the door to negotiations with China and South Korea,” he added.

I think Prime Minister Koizumi is a good leader that has been managing his country very well and has been a great ally for the United States which I appreciate, however when it comes to this whole Yasukuni Shrine nonsense I can not find any common ground with him. I have been to the shrine and I did find it offensive. It wasn’t offensive for the war criminal aspect often mentioned by Korea and China because a war criminal like General Tojo for example is not glorified at the shrine from what I could see.

What did offend me was the outrageous interpretation of history during World War II. You can check out my posting on the shrine for more details, but Koizumi is definitely wrong visiting the shrine. The history is so skewed I can understand the Korean and Chinese perspective. However, I still don’t think this should cause the sometime childish reactions from China and Korea, but I can see why it would strain diplomatic relations.

With that said Koizumi made this New Year’s message for a reason and I think it is safe to say that Koizumi is pissed off about what happened to the Japanese diplomat in China:

There was no immediate comment from Beijing. The growing rivalry between China and Japan, Asia’s two great powers, was punctuated in recent days by the feud over the diplomat’s suicide in 2004. A Japanese newsweekly reported recently that the diplomat killed himself after he was blackmailed into providing sensitive information by a Chinese agent who threatened to reveal his affair with a bar hostess.

The Japanese foreign ministry attributed the death to “regrettable actions by local Chinese security authorities” in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. China denied the charge, accusing Japan of trying to “smear China’s image.”

I doubt China will ever come clean on this, but it is a tad bit hypocritical for the Chinese if they did do this, to say that Koizumi is provoking the Chinese with the shrine visits when they are blackmailing Japanese diplomats. Koizumi knows this and wanted to make a point to the Chinese with his statemetns that the Japanese aren’t going to back down from Chinese provocations as well.