The Democratic People's Republic of Korea DPRK) strongly denounced on Tuesday Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's trip to a notorious war shrine in Tokyo, and stressed any attempted act to justify Japan's historical crimes was unendurable.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that Koizumi's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine on Sunday was a dangerous act which attempted to justify crimes Japanese invaders committed on the Asian people during World War II.
The Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese Class A war criminals, is a symbol of Japan's wartime militarism. Japanese aggressors inflicted formidable disasters on other Asian countries during the war, killing millions of civilians, more than 35 million in China alone. Visits by Japanese leaders, in whatever form and at whatever time, to the Yasukuni Shrine are regarded as attempts to justify Japan's historical crimes and are utterly unendurable, the DPRK spokesman said.
Koizumi's visit was an overt provocation to the world's peace-loving people who had been opposed to Japan's militarization, he noted. He said the Japanese leader's visit to the infamous shrine in August last year ignited fierce protests and condemnation from Asian countries.
Koizumi's trip on Sunday to the shrine, which came after the Japanese government last week submitted new defense legislation to increase military authority in Japan, had stirred up great concernin the international community, the spokesman said.
He warned that if Japan forgot the lessons of failure incurred by aggression and expansion, and embarked on a dangerous road to militarization, it would end up with the same fate.
South Korea, China and other Asian countries have reacted strongly to Koizumi's visit to the shrine.
(Xinhua News Agency April 24, 2002)
