Agencies/Tokyo

Scores of Japanese lawmakers visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine yesterday, just weeks before premier Shinzo Abe is to meet with his counterparts from China and South Korea, which blast the site as a symbol of Tokyo’s militarist past.
The Tokyo shrine honours millions of Japan’s war dead, but also controversially includes several senior military and political figures convicted of war crimes.
An attached museum portrays Japan more as a victim of US aggression in WWII and makes scant reference to the extreme brutality of invading Imperial troops when they stormed across Asia.
Visits to the shrine by senior Japanese politicians routinely draw an angry reaction from Beijing and Seoul, which yesterday said the latest trip was tantamount to “glorifying Japan’s forcible colonisation and war of aggression”.
The group of 73 politicians and 96 representatives of other lawmakers went to the shrine yesterday to mark the autumn festival, ahead of trilateral talks among China, Japan and South Korea expected in two weeks’ time.
Katsunobu Kato, tapped earlier this month as minister in charge of a newly created portfolio aimed at boosting employment, made a visit to the shrine in the afternoon to mark the autumn festival, local media said.
The visit came after internal affairs minister Sanae Takaichi, a close associate of Abe, and justice minister Mitsuhide Iwaki paid homage on Sunday, while Abe, a passionate supporter of the shrine, made a ritual offering on Saturday.
“We are firmly opposed to the wrong actions taken by the Japanese politicians,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Monday, in response to the weekend visit.
“We urge the Japanese side to face honestly and deeply reflect upon (its) history of aggression.”
The conservative Japanese prime minister, who did not visit the shrine yesterday, is due to hold talks next month with the leaders of China and South Korea, the countries that bore the brunt of Japanese military aggression in the 20th century.
Abe is also expected to hold his first official bilateral meeting with South Korean President Park Geun-Hye on the sidelines of the three-way summit, as well as his third bilateral face-to-face with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“With the (parliament) session closed, the group was smaller this time. Still, we prayed and paid our sincere respects,” Hidehisa Otsuji, a former health minister who led yesterday’s shrine visit, told a press briefing.
He said he hoped Abe would visit the shinto sanctuary himself.
“I feel that it wouldn’t be so bad if he visits the shrine once in a while, but the decision is up to the prime minister,” he said.
The nationalist Abe has visited the shrine once during his time in office, in December 2013. That sparked anger among Japan’s neighbours and a diplomatic slap on the wrist from the US, which said it was “disappointed”.
Politicians who visit insist they are doing what their counterparts in most other countries do when honouring fallen soldiers, and compare the shrine to Arlington National Cemetery in the US.
“I support them,” said 74-year-old Yukiko Kato who lost her father in the bloody Battle of Iwo Jima.
“Soldiers fought for the country so of course politicians visit the shrine.”
China does not seek to change the existing status of territorial claims in the South China Sea with its newly built lighthouses, the foreign ministry said yesterday, arguing that Beijing already had “indisputable sovereignty” in the contested waters.
China says its lighthouses on Cuarteron Reef and Johnson South Reef in the Spratly islands will assist navigational security, but experts and diplomats call them a shrewd move to buttress Beijing’s territorial claims.
China claims most of the energy-rich waters of the South China Sea, through which about $5tn in shipborne trade passes every year. But neighbours Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam also have overlapping claims.
On Monday, the Philippines’ foreign ministry said the lighthouses were “obviously intended to change actual conditions” and that Manila would not accept China’s “unilateral actions as a fait accompli”.
China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying defended the structures as “completely within China’s sovereignty” and said they had no relation to “some people’s” comments that China was trying to bolster its hold over the islands.
“I want to stress that China has indisputable sovereignty over the Nansha islands and surrounding waters,” Hua said, using the Chinese name for the Spratlys. “We absolutely do not need to build lighthouses to strengthen our sovereignty claims.”
She added, “there is no issue of changing the status quo”.
The United States, which has criticised China’s building on artificial islands, has said it would sail or fly wherever international law allows.
While the US and other navies mostly rely on electronic instruments to confirm their ships’ positions, visual fixes from lighthouses are still used in certain conditions.
References to the lighthouses are likely to find their way into international shipping charts and registers and the logbooks of foreign navies.
Experts say that could help China to build a long-term legal picture of effective occupation, despite any formal diplomatic objections of rival claimants.
Japan’s defence chief yesterday sought to ease South Korea’s concerns about Tokyo’s shift to allow its military to fight overseas, saying it won’t do anything to contravene international law.
Japanese defence minister Gen Nakatani met his South Korean counterpart, Han Min-koo, amid a diplomatic push by South Korea, Japan and China to resume a three-way summit, with a meeting possibly as early as next month in Seoul after a more than three-year break.
“Minister Nakatani explained Japan’s security legislation and the fact that when the Self Defence Force operates in other countries’ territories, the relevant countries’ approval will be sought under international law,” a joint statement said.
South Korea has expressed concern about Japan’s move to allow its troops to fight overseas in a shift away from the limits placed by its pacifist constitution drawn up after the war, saying Japanese forces will not be allowed on to the Korean peninsula without its agreement.
The legacy of World War two still haunts Japan’s relations with China and South Korea, which suffered under Japan’s sometimes brutal occupation and colonial rule before Tokyo’s defeat in 1945.
Japan’s new security law, passed last month by parliament, has triggered protests from ordinary Japanese and others who say it violates the constitution and could ensnare Japan in US-led conflicts.
The United States is keen to encourage better relations between South Korea and Japan, its two biggest allies in Asia, given concerns about North Korea and an increasingly assertive China.
China defended the actions of its air force yesterday after Japan said its scrambled fighter jets to prevent possible incursions by Chinese planes a record high number of times in the summer.
Japan jets scrambled 117 times from July to September, up from 103 in the same period of last year, although it was lower than the all-time high of 164 times recorded in the final quarter of 2014.
“The actions of China’s aircraft in the airspace over the relevant sea are justified and legal,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing.
“We call on Japan to cease all interfering actions targeting China and make constructive efforts to safeguard China-Japan relations and regional peace and stability.”
Japan has long been mired in a territorial dispute with China over a group of tiny, uninhabited East China Sea islands, called the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.
Patrol ships and fighter jets from Asia’s two biggest economies have been shadowing each other on and off near the islets, raising fears that a confrontation could result in a clash.
Sino-Japanese ties, also plagued by the two countries’ wartime past, concerns over Tokyo’s bolder security stance and Beijing’s increasing military assertiveness, have thawed a little in the last year.