Japan's ambassador to China dies amid rising tensions
Japan's new ambassador to China has died, only five days after being appointed to the post and as relations between the two Asian neighbours sink to new lows.
Shinichi Nishimiya, Japan's new ambassador to China, as found collapsed on a street in Tokyo on Thursday morning but died in hospital on Sunday Photo: REUTERS
By Julian Ryall
6:22AM BST 17 Sep 2012
Shinichi Nishiyama, 60, was found collapsed on a street in Tokyo on Thursday morning but died in hospital on Sunday. Police in Japan have ruled out foul play but hospital authorities have yet to confirm the cause of Nishiyama's death.
An experienced and long-serving diplomat, Nishiyama was scheduled to take up his post in Beijing in the next few weeks. His first order of business was to have been measures to calm the growing ill-feeling between the two nations over the disputed islands that Japan marks on its maps as the Senkakus but which China claims and calls the Diaoyu chain.
Tokyo nationalised the entire chain earlier this month by purchasing three of the five islands not already under state control from the Japanese family that owned them.
As many as 100,000 people took part in protests in at least 85 cities across China on Sunday, with demonstrators clashing with riot police outside Japanese consulate in Guangzhou.
In Shenzhen, police fired tear gas at rioters as they ransacked a Japanese-owned department store. Elsewhere, Japanese cars were torched and Japanese restaurants and offices were damaged.
Similar protests took place on Saturday and Uichiro Niwa, the present Japanese ambassador to Beijing, has called on the Chinese government to take all possible measures to ensure the safety of Japanese nationals and the property of Japanese companies in China.
Koichiro Gemba, the Japanese foreign minister, cut short an overseas trip to convene a meeting of senior ministry officials to draw up measures to deal with the largest and most widespread protests in China since the two nations normalised diplomatic relations in 1972.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has responded by saying it is attempting to defuse the situation and has asked its citizens to "express their demands in a legal and rational way."
In an editorial, the state-run Xinhua news agency said the Japanese government needs to "take note of mainstream Chinese public opinion, as voiced in these protests, and think twice about their illegal activities."
