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)