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From The Times
October 18, 2005

Koizumi defies fury to revisit war shrine

From Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo
JAPAN’S delicate relations with its Asian neighbours were again thrown into turmoil yesterday when Junichiro Koizumi, the Prime Minister, offered prayers at a nationalist Shinto shrine where war dead are worshipped as Shinto deities.

Ignoring repeated and angry demands from China and South Korea, and pleas from among his own political supporters, Mr Koizumi made his fifth pilgrimage as Prime Minister to the Yasukuni Shrine, in central Tokyo. He avoided the ritual aspect of previous visits and his aides insisted that, unlike those previous occasions, he went in a personal, not an official, capacity. His appearance at the shrine provoked immediate anger in Beijing and Seoul. Wang Yi, the Chinese Ambassador to Tokyo, described it as a serious provocation. In Seoul weeping protesters set fire to photographs of Mr Koizumi.

Yasukuni enshrines as Shinto deities 2.5 million Japanese who have died in war since the 1860s. Among them are 14 men hanged as war criminals after the Second World War.

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