South Korean minister cancels Japan visit over war shrine: Yonhap
By Ju-min Park
SEOUL | Sun Apr 21, 2013 11:03pm EDT
(Reuters) - South Korea's foreign minister has canceled a trip to Japan after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made an offering to a shrine seen as a symbol of Japan's former militarism, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported on Monday.
Abe, an outspoken nationalist, on Sunday made a ritual offering of a pine tree to the Yasukuni shrine where 14 Japanese leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal are honored, along with other war dead.
He did not visit the shrine but two Japanese ministers and a deputy chief cabinet secretary did visit it on the weekend.
Such gestures upset Asian victims of Japan's war-time aggression, including China and South Korea.
A South Korean official told the Yonhap news agency that Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se had aimed to set out the direction of bilateral relations with Japan during his planned visit.
"Amid this kind of atmosphere, our stance is that it will be difficult to hold a productive discussion and Yun decided not to visit to Japan this time," said the official, who declined to be identified.
A South Korean Foreign Ministry official confirmed that Yun had canceled the trip but declined to say why.
In Tokyo, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a regular news conference that arrangements had been made for Yun's visit, while adding: "But it is also true that nothing has officially been decided."
Suga said visits to the shrine should not disrupt relations between Japan and its neighbors.
"Each country has its own position. We should not let it affect diplomacy."
Suga said the ministers' visits to the shrine were private.
"Cabinet ministers paying visit as private individuals is their private conduct. The government refrains from commenting," he said.
China's Foreign Ministry did not respond to faxed questions but the People's Daily newspaper, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, criticized Abe's offering to the shrine.
"It doesn't matter what form worshipping at Yasukuni takes," the newspaper said in an editorial. "This persists in taking a wrongheaded view of history, and deals a great blow to peace and stability in Asia."
It is not clear how Abe made his offering.
The Global Times, a sister paper of the People's Daily, said the shrine gesture was evidence that Japan was "a troublemaker and provocateur among Asian countries".
"This is yet another time that Japan has gone out of its way to manipulate Asian politics," it said.
(Additional reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka in TOKYO and Sally Huang and Megha Rajagopalan in BEIJING; Editing by Robert Birsel)
