Head of Japan business group sides with China
By David Ibison in Tokyo
Published: November 25 2004 10:48 | Last updated: November 25 2004 10:48
The head of one of Japan’s most influential pro-business organisations has taken the unusual step of siding with China in the highly charged debate over Japan’s prime minister Junichiro Koizumi’s controversial visits to a shrine honouring the country’s war dead.
Kakutaro Kitashiro, head of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, whose membership includes some of the country’s largest corporations, said Mr Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni shrine, which houses the spirits of convicted war criminals, could undermine the ability of Japanese companies to do business in China.
Visits by successive Japanese prime ministers to the Yasukuni shrine are one of the most inflammatory aspects of the complex bilateral relationship between Japan and China, Asia’s two most powerful economies.
The debate returned to the top of the political agenda last weekend when after Hu Jintao, China’s president, urged Mr Koizumi to stop the visits when the two leaders met during the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) forum summit in Santiago, Chile.
Mr Koizumi responded by saying that he would consider Mr Hu’s remarks “sincerely”, while reminding the Chinese leader of an illegal incursion by a Chinese nuclear submarine into Japanese territory the week before the Apec summit began.
The frosty dialogue was a reminder of the sensitivity of relations between the two countries.
The balance of power has swung in China’s favour recently as Japan has come to rely iance on China to fuel drive its economic recovery.
China is Japan’s second largest destination for exports by volume and its fastest growing export market, fuelling the country’s export-led recovery at a time when growth in exports to the US have been flattening.
Mr Kitashiro, whose organisation is renowned for taking a more reformist stance than the Keidanren, the more conservative business lobby group, said: “I think the premier should refrain from visiting the shrine. Many in business circles have the same opinion.”
The spat highlights the difficulties inherent in a relationship contaminated by a history that includes Japan’s invasion of China and atrocities committed by Japanese troops, such as the Nanking massacre in 1937.
In addition to a lengthy dispute over a group of disputed islands known to the Chinese as Diaoyu but called the Senkaki islands by the Japanese, there is also disagreement over a gas field in another disputed part of the East China Sea. Tokyo argues that China may be drilling for gas in Japan’s exclusive economic zone.
news.ft.com |
