Thursday, June 02, 2005

Hashimoto Ryutaro, a Tokyo Missi Dominicus to Beijing.

Former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto of the Liberal
Democratic Party will visit China from June 8 and 13.

Mr. Hashimoto will visit China on an exchange program
for defense officials between Japan and China, according
to the LDP.

("The missi dominici were the last attempt to preserve
centralized control in the Holy Roman Empire. In the
course of the ninth century, the forces which were
making for feudalism tended to produce inherited
fiefdoms as the only way to ensure stability, especially
in the face of renewed external aggression in the form
of Viking attacks...")

When I interviewed R. Hashimoto a couple of times, he always
complained that Junichiro Koizumi never listened to nobody
about top subject on foreign affairs, Iraq, China, Yasukuni...
Ex prime minister Hashimoto is known to have closed relations
with Chinese leaders, and with Chinese ordinary citizens...

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Territorial disputes in the East China Sea: "We should just sit down and talk" Shoichi Nakagawa, Japanese Trade Minister

After our press conference this morning with METI
minister Nakagawa, related to the discussions Tokyo
Beijing held in China and my questions on the risk of
collision course between the two neighbors:

Quotes:

China has turned down a Japanese request to stop its
exploration of a gas field in the East China Sea, but
the two powers agreed to continue talks over the
dispute, Japanese officials said on Tuesday.

A Japanese delegate to the two-day talks that began in
Beijing on Monday said China had offered to jointly
develop the gas field in the disputed East China Sea
area.

"We pointed out problematic points about it, and we told
them it was hard for us to accept it as is," Kenichiro
Sasae, the head of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asia
and Oceania Bureau, said after the talks on Tuesday.
"But Japan and China agreed to continue to discuss what
we can do about it."

The disagreement over exploration of the seabed for oil
and gas has added to tensions between the two
energy-hungry nations, which also are seeing a
resurgence of controversy over Japan's actions in
invading and occupying parts of China between 1931 and
1945.

China has criticized Japan for moving precipitously and
starting to award exploration rights to private
companies. In response, Japan said Beijing's decision
to go ahead with construction in the region was
"outrageous."

Tokyo has demanded that China stop energy exploration
and provide data on its gas projects in the area.

"First of all, we strongly demanded China halt
exploration, Japan's biggest concern, and provide data,"
said Nobuyori Kodaira, head of the Japanese Agency for
Natural Resources and Energy. "The Chinese side told us
that they were taking full note of Japan's concern, and
therefore we will continue to talk with China on this
issue."

China and Japan are the world's second- and
third-largest oil consumers. They have said they are
committed to the natural gas talks, but they traded
accusations last week ahead of the two-day meeting in
Beijing.

Deputy Prime Minister Wu Yi of China last week canceled
a meeting with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan
and ended a visit to Japan a day early after Koizumi
refused to stop visiting a controversial war shrine.

The East China Sea dispute is just one of several
irritants in relations between the Asian heavyweights.

China was angered this year when Washington and Tokyo
declared that Taiwan, which China considers to be a
breakaway province, was a mutual security concern.

Thousands of people demonstrated across China last month
over what many see as Japan's refusal to acknowledge
wartime atrocities and over its bid for a permanent seat
on the United Nations Security Council.

Strains grew when Koizumi defended his visits to the
Yasukuni shrine, which China sees as a symbol of Japan's
militarism, while Wu Yi was visiting - prompting her to
cancel the meeting with Koizumi and return home.

Despite the deterioration in relations, trade between
China and Japan has been growing strongly and was valued
at nearly $170 billion in 2004.

The Japanese trade minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, said the
two countries also should hold talks on other issues to
improve their relations.

"We should realize that the rest of the world is
watching how we deal with the problems between Japan and
China, the two economic powers and Asian neighbors,"
Nakagawa said in Tokyo.

"Our confrontations are unfortunate," he added. "We
should just sit down and talk, just like we are doing
right now over the gas exploration in the East China
Sea."

end of quotes agencies.

Monday, May 30, 2005

Hong Kong journalist arrested in China for reporting on 1989 Tian an Men massacre ?!?

The Washington Post has a report on the Chinese
government's detention of Ching Cheong, a renowned
journalist from Hong Kong working for Singapore.

Ching was working on a story in involving secret
interviews with a former Communist party chief who
opposed the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres, and who
died recently after 16 years of house arrest.

After receiving a call from someone on the mainland
claiming to have access to the interviews, Ching
traveled to Beijing to get them. When he arrived, he
was swiftly detained. Though China often takes its own
journalists into custody, this is the first instance in
which a foreign reporter has been arrested.

Security agents apprehended Ching Cheong, chief China
correspondent for Singapore's Straits Times newspaper,
on April 22 in the southern city of Guangzhou, where he
was scheduled to meet a source who had promised to give
him a copy of the politically sensitive manuscript,
according to the journalist's wife, Mary Lau.

Lau said Chinese authorities warned her and the Straits
Times not to disclose her husband's detention, and she
stayed silent for weeks in the hope he would be
released. She said she decided to go public last week
after a mainland official told her privately that the
government was preparing to charge him with "stealing
core state secrets."

If charged, Ching would be the second journalist for a
foreign newspaper arrested by the government of
President Hu Jintao in the past year. Zhao Yan, a
researcher in the Beijing bureau of the New York Times,
was arrested by the State Security Ministry in September
on similar charges and has been held incommunicado
without trial since.

The arrests could have a chilling effect on foreign news
operations in China. The Chinese government often jails
Chinese journalists and writers -- the advocacy group
Reporters Without Borders says there are more
journalists in prison in China than anywhere else in the
world -- but in the past it has generally refrained from
arresting individuals employed by foreign news agencies.

The Straits Times, which has not reported the detention
of its correspondent, said in a written statement Sunday
that it had been told by the Chinese Embassy in
Singapore that Ching "is assisting security authorities
in Beijing with an investigation into a matter not
related to the Straits Times."

Junichiro Koizumi visits tomb for unkown soldiers

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose visits
to a Shinto shrine for war dead have sparked a bitter
row with China, joined in a tribute at Japan's tomb of
the unknown soldiers on Monday.

As heavy rain fell, Koizumi stood in silence with
Japanese politicians and foreign diplomats as the ashes
of 300 soldiers were added to those symbolising some
350,000 Japanese soldiers who died in World War II.

Chidorigafuchi, an austere, non-denominational memorial
near the Imperial Palace, honor's Japan's unidentified
war dead whose remains are symbolically placed in a
gold-plated urn inside a wooden coffin housed in a
hexagonal pavilion.

It stands in sharp contrast to the nearby Yasukuni
Shinto shrine, once a symbol of wartime nationalism and
now a site where war criminals convicted by a 1948
Allied tribunal are honored with Japan's 2.5 million war
dead.

Koizumi has visited Yasukuni each year since taking
office in 2001 and last went there in January 2004.

Some Japanese have suggested prime ministers could honor
war dead without angering China and other Asian
neighbors that suffered under Japan's wartime occupation
by paying their respects at Chidorigafuchi rather than
at Yasukuni.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sat with
Princess Takamado during a memorial service at
Chidorigafuchi National Tomb for Dead Soldiers in Tokyo

"On the occasion of this ceremony, I think deeply of the
war dead who became the foundation for peace and
prosperity of our country of today, and express my
condolences," Health Minister Hidehisa Otsuji said in an
address at Monday's ceremony.

"In the meantime, I pledge to make efforts to pass on to
the next generation many lessons learned from the war in
order to ensure eternal peace."

Koizumi, a member of the royal family and foreign
diplomats each placed a chrysanthemum on a table set
before the memorial's coffin to music from a band of
Imperial Palace guards.

The latest remains came mainly from Southeast Asia and
Pacific islands including Iwo Jima, where U.S. forces
defeated the Japanese in 1945 in a fierce battle that
helped turn the tide of World War II.

Ceremonies are performed at Chidorigafuchi each May and
the prime minister sometimes attends with other cabinet
ministers -- without prompting complaints from other
Asian countries.

Yasukuni has long been the focus of controversy, in part
because Shinto priests in 1978 added 14 "Class A" war
criminals -- leaders including wartime prime minister
Hideki Tojo -- to the lists of those worshipped as
deities at the shrine.

No remains are interred at the shrine.

Sixty years after Japan's defeat in World War II,
ordinary Japanese as well as politicians remain divided
about official visits to Yasukuni as well as how to view
the nation's past.

"The ... prime minister should be able to pay his
respects to the war dead (at Yasukuni)," said Toshiko
Yasuda, a 54-year-old housewife whose uncle is believed
to have died on Iwo Jima.

"The prime minister has apologized for the past
mistakes. That is necessary. Japan has done bad things
in the past, but what we have to do is think about what
to do in the future," added Yasuda, who attended
Monday's ceremony.

An official of a veterans group, said he was strongly
opposed to Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni.

"I want the government to build a national cemetery. I
want a facility where people of various religions and
beliefs can pay their respects freely," said the
68-year-old man, who declined to give his name.

Nearly three out of every five Japanese who responded to
a poll published by Kyodo news agency on Saturday said
they believed Koizumi should not visit Yasukuni this
year.

Koizumi has repeatedly said he goes there to pay his
respects to the dead and to vow that Japan would never
again wage war. He has not yet said when he will visit
the shrine again.

end of quotes (agencies)

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Koizumi to visit WW II war dead cemetery on May 30th

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is to attend a ceremony
for Japanese World War II victims at the cemetery of
Chidorigafuchi in the Nippon Budokan of Tokyo on Monday
May 30th. This time, not (yet) at Yasukuni Shrine... In
the same time, rivalry on the gas rich territories in
the East China sea continues.

Quote:

"Japan's trade minister accused China of hypocrisy
yesterday for starting construction of a gas project in
disputed waters of the East China Sea, the latest in a
series of remarks threatening to worsen a diplomatic
feud.

China, whose ties with Japan are at their worst in
decades, said on Thursday it was committed to talks
scheduled for May 30-31 on resolving the row but
criticized Japan for starting the process of awarding
exploration rights in the disputed area.

Japan, in turn, expressed outrage over evidence that
Beijing was going ahead with the construction of
facilities in the same area ahead of the talks. "It's
outrageous," Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry
Shoichi Nakagawa was quoted by a ministry official as
telling a news conference.

"While shaking hands with the right hand, they are
dealing a blow with the left. It's unacceptable,"
Nakagawa said, adding it was only natural that this
would affect next week's talks in Beijing, Nakagawa said
that government inspections of the area had shown that
rather than halting its project, China was going ahead
with building facilities.

"Work is proceeding. That is a big problem from the
viewpoint of Japan-China friendship," Nakagawa-who last
month called China a "scary country" ? said.

Sino-Japan relations, already chilly, worsened sharply
this week when Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi abruptly
cancelled a meeting with Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi over his refusal to stop visits to Tokyo's
Yasukuni shrine, where convicted war criminals are
honored along with Japan's 2.5 million war dead.

Ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) senior official
Shinzo Abe told reporters after meeting Koizumi that he
thought China would continue to raise the issue of how
Japan handles its wartime past whenever Beijing thought
it would benefit.

"I told him my views ... that they (China) would
continue to use this as a diplomatic card as long as
they can and they would not let go of it," said Abe,
often cited as a possible successor to Koizumi and known
for his outspoken criticism of China.

Koizumi is set to visit the Chidorigafuchi tomb for the
unknown soldier on Monday to take part in a ceremony in
which more war dead will be honored, a spokesman for
the prime minister's office said late Friday.

Visits to secular Chidorigafuchi have not sparked Asian
outrage before, because the site it lacks associations
with convicted war criminals or Japan's pre-war Shinto
religion, in which the emperor was viewed as a god.

Koizumi usually visits Chidorigafuchi, on August 15, the
anniversary of the war's end.

China and Japan, the world's second and third biggest
oil consumers, are also at odds over the disputed area
of the East China Sea, with Tokyo demanding China halt
energy exploration and provide data on its gas
development projects there. Trade between the two Asian
giants have been growing, valued at nearly $170 bn in
2004.

But diplomatic ties deteriorated sharply in April, when
thousands demonstrated across China to protest the
Japan's approval of school textbooks that critics say
gloss over its wartime atrocities and to oppose its bid
for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

On Thursday, former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro
Mori, Koizumi's predecessor, accused China and South
Korea of "niggling" in their attacks on the textbooks.

China on Friday lashed out at the comments of a junior
Japanese cabinet minister on Thursday that war criminals
honored at the Yasukuni Shrine-who include wartime
prime minister Hideki Tojo-were no longer regarded as
criminals in Japan, Kyodo news agency reported.

Japanese officials have repeatedly said this is not the
stance of the Japanese government. The remarks were
absurd and a "blatant provocation to international
justice and human conscience", China's Foreign Ministry
said on Friday in a statement on its Web site,
www.fmprc.gov.cn.

"The Chinese government and people express their intense
indignation and severe condemnation," spokesman Kong
Quan said in the statement. The comments were not
isolated or accidental, he said.

"This cannot but make people ask, does Japan play a
responsible role in the international community?" he sai

Shoichi Nakagawa, Japan?s trade and industry minister,
accused China of hypocrisy on Friday for starting
construction of a gas project in disputed waters of the
East China Sea, the latest in a series of remarks
threatening to worsen a diplomatic feud.

China, whose ties with Japan are at their worst in
decades, said on Thursday it was committed to talks
scheduled for May 30-31 on resolving the row but
criticized Japan for starting the process of awarding
exploration rights in the disputed area.

Japan, in turn, expressed outrage over evidence that
Beijing was going ahead with the construction of
facilities in the same area ahead of the talks. ?It?s
outrageous,? Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry
Shoichi Nakagawa was quoted by a ministry official as
telling a news conference.

?While shaking hands with the right hand, they are
dealing a blow with the left. It?s unacceptable,?
Nakagawa said, adding it was only natural that this
would affect next week?s talks in Beijing."

end of quotes