1 week Ago By The Korea Herald
North Korea has criticized Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for making a ritual offering to a controversial war shrine in Tokyo, saying that it again demonstrated Japan's pursuit of militarization. The North's Korean Central News Agency issued the criticism in a commentary dated Saturday, after Ishiba sent an offering last week to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war dead, including 14 Class A criminals convicted by the Allied forces after World War II. A bipartisan group of Japanese lawmakers also visited the shrine in person to pay their respects at that time.
The KCNA denounced those actions by Japanese politicians as "the road t militarization," saying they would only precipitate the ruin of the whole Japan. The KCNA accused Japanese politicians of regularizing their annual offerings and visits to Yasukuni, denouncing the moves as an attempt to "invariably and deeply implant the poison of militarism in the whole area of the archipelago with the shrine as the origin." It also claimed that Japan is in the final stage of legal, institutional and military preparations for a continental invasion, referring to the country's recent launch of the Self-Defense Forces Joint Operation Command and constitutional revisions.
"The revision of Japan, which has systematically and extensively pushed forward with its political and military rearmament for decades since its defeat, is approaching as the reality, not expectation," the KCNA said. Sending an offering or visiting the shrine has been a point of criticism from neighboring countries like South Korea and China, which view such actions as an attempt to glorify the country's militaristic past. Japan invaded China during World War II and Korea was under Japan's colonial rule from 1910-45.
(Yonhap).
