The Republic of Korea (ROK)'s President Roh Moo-hyun urged Japan
Wednesday to stop all actions that diluted its apology for past
aggression, saying Tokyo's neighbors were justifiably upset.
Japan's ties with the ROK and China have been strained over
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni war shrine
and cabinet members' comments that critics say justify and
embellish Japan's war of aggression.
"Japan has already apologized," Roh said in a speech marking a
1919 uprising in the ROK against Japanese colonial rule. "We are
objecting to actions that negate that apology," he said.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama apologized for
the country's colonial past in 1995 and Koizumi repeated it last
year.
Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula from 1910 until its defeat
in World War II in 1945.
Many in the ROK and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
(DPRK) and China see Japanese leaders' visits to Yasukuni shrine,
where some convicted war criminals are honored among its 2.5
million war dead, as deeply offensive.
About 100 protesters rallied in front of the Japanese Embassy in
Seoul, some setting fire to the Japanese flag and pictures of
Koizumi before police moved in and doused the flames.
A group of former ROK commandos rallied with a battering ram,
calling for Koizumi's ouster, but they did not use it or try to
storm the embassy compound.
Roh noted he had made a call a year ago for Japan to overcome
its militarist legacy and make sincere efforts to improve ties.
"But in the past year, with the shrine visits, distortion in
history textbooks and the Tokto issue, nothing has changed much,"
he said.
The ROK has protested against Tokyo's approval of history
textbooks that Seoul says whitewash atrocities committed in Korea,
China and other parts of Asia.
The ROK and Japan are also locked in a territorial dispute over
two rocky islets called Tokto in Korean and Takeshima in Japan and
occupied by the ROK midway between the two countries.
"It is natural, when the situation is like this, for our people
to believe Japan may be trying to justify its history of aggression
and control and to return to the road of domination," Roh said.
Later Wednesday, Koizumi was defiant. "I want him (Roh) to
closely look at the course Japan has taken in the 60 years since
the end of the war," Koizumi told reporters.
"In any country, it is natural to pay a tribute to the war
dead," he said.
Koizumi has said his annual visits to the shrine are to pray for
peace and "a matter of the heart." He has also described outside
criticism as abnormal.
Roh rejected the logic and said what counted was how neighboring
countries that had been victimized felt and not what the Japanese
leader said.
Japan needed to act with conscience and win the trust of the
international community, rather than trying to reinforce its
military, if it wanted to become "an ordinary country" and a true
world leader, Roh said.
(China Daily March 2, 2006)
