[ad_1]
TOKYO (Reuters) – Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine for the war dead on Saturday, his first visit since December 2013, after refraining from doing so for most of his term to avoid angering China and South Korea.
Abe announced the visit on his official Twitter account along with a photo of himself at the shrine, just days after Yoshihide Suga succeeded him as leader of Japan. Japan’s oldest leader announced his resignation in late August, citing health problems.
The shrine is viewed by Beijing and Seoul as a symbol of Japan’s past military aggression because it honors 14 wartime Japanese leaders convicted as war criminals by an allied court, as well as killed in the war.
Abe had visited the shrine in person once during his last tenure as prime minister, but regularly sent offerings through an attendant on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II and during the shrine’s spring and fall festivals.
His pilgrimage to the shrine in 2013 sparked outrage in South Korea and China and an expression of “disappointment” in the United States.
On Saturday, the South Korean Foreign Ministry issued a statement expressing “deep concern and regret” that Abe paid respect at the shrine “immediately” after his resignation as prime minister.
Suga, who was the main spokesman for the Abe government, was not among Abe’s cabinet ministers who visited the shrine on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II on August 15.
Suga paid a visit to the shrine in August 2011, according to a post on his official blog, long before he became the chief cabinet secretary of the Abe government in December 2012.
Washington and Tokyo have become close security allies in the decades since the end of the war, but their legacy has left scars in East Asia.
Ties between Tokyo and Seoul have remained strained due to bitter memories of Japanese colonization of the Korean peninsula in 1910-1945, including a dispute over compensation for Koreans forced to work at Japan’s sites during the war. Tokyo says the matter was settled by a 1965 treaty that normalized bilateral relations.
(Reported by Chris Gallagher and Daniel Leussink in TOKYO, Joyce Lee in SEOUL; Edited by William Mallard and Michael Perry)
