TOKYO (AP) – Japan’s Defense Minister Tomomi Inada, just back from Pearl Harbor, on Thursday visited a Tokyo shrine that honors Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals.
The visit, and one by another Cabinet minister the day before, drew rebukes from neighboring South Korea and China.
Inada accompanied Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during his visit this week to Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, where he offered condolences to those who died in the Japanese attack there in 1941.
Japan’s Asian neighbors harbor bitter memories of the country’s atrocities before and during World War II, when it colonized or invaded much of the region. So visits by top Japanese leaders to the shrine often draw complaints from countries such as China and South Korea that see them as attempts to whitewash that history of wartime aggression.
Abe’s visit to Yasukuni in December 2013 caused such an uproar that he has since instead sent gifts of money and religious ornaments.