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Japan envoy says new PM wants to improve China ties
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks to reporters after hearing a briefing by Finance Minister Taro Aso, Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa and Economics Minister Akira Amari (not pictured) in Tokyo January 22, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon
BEIJING |
BEIJING (Reuters) - A Japanese envoy carrying a letter from new prime minister Shinzo Abe told his Chinese hosts on Wednesday that Japan wants to improve bilateral ties, strained by a dispute over a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
A spokesman for Natsuo Yamaguchi, head of New Komeito, the junior partner in Japan's ruling coalition, would not disclose the letter's contents nor say explicitly who it was for.
But he told Tang Jiaxuan, a former Chinese foreign minister and head of the China-Japan Friendship Association, Yamaguchi had high hopes for the visit.
"He said that Prime Minister Abe hopes strongly to improve Japan-China relations, and hopes for peace between the countries and in the region. Japan and China have a strategic relationship and he is looking at the big picture," New Komeito lawmaker, Makoto Nishida, told reporters in Beijing after the meeting.
Tensions over the islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, have flared in recent months, one of several maritime territorial disputes involving China that have worsened as Washington seeks to shift its security focus to Asia.
"If we move in the same direction together, the challenges will become opportunities. We are looking for a win-win relationship. This is important to China," Nishida paraphrased Tang as saying.
The islands issue was not discussed specifically, he said.
While Yamaguchi does not have a formal position in the government, he is leader of relatively dovish New Komeito, which joined the Liberal Democratic Party in its return to power last month. LDP leader Shinzo Abe became prime minister.
Violent anti-Japanese protests broke out across China last September after the Japanese government purchased three of the islands from their private Japanese owners.
Some Japanese businesses were looted, Japanese citizens were attacked and Japanese auto and other manufacturers reported considerably lower sales in China in the following months.
In recent weeks Japanese military planes have scrambled numerous times against Chinese planes approaching airspace over the islands. Chinese planes have also been launched to shadow Japanese planes elsewhere over the East China Sea.
China insists the islands are its territory and that it will brook no dispute over this.
"The Diaoyu Islands issue concerns China's territorial sovereignty and the feelings of the Chinese people," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular briefing earlier in the day.
(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Louise Ireland)
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Abe has done the opposite: Abe has been telling the Japanese people to be PROUD of its Nazi war crimes past.
Abe has been fanning dangerous Japanese nationalism that has time and time again, until Japan was demilitarized, led to cruel and sadistic invasions of its neighboring countries.
Unless Abe berates the official tactics of NHK, of misrepresenting, defaming Asian Americans, distorting history to the American public to carve a distorted image about what Japan really is— ABE IS WOLF IN SHEEP’S SKIN under careful scrutiny of EVERY SHRED OF EVIDENCE.
Unfortunately, many news reporters are blind to the evidence; others are steep into indefensible Japanese propaganda which can ONLY sound credible under the presumption that Japanese people are the more advanced, superior rac, the Aryan race deserving of special treatment in every way.
Yet NHK presents a hawkish stance to the Japanese people and to the Ameican people.
This kind of duplicity, is consistent with ALL Abe’s other moves —that he is a “wolf under sheep’s skin”.
If he were sincere, he would say the SAME EXACT THING to he Japanese people, to the American people, and his envoy would say the exact same thing to the Chinese reporters on the microphone.
Instead, what’s propagated to CHina is one thing.
What’s broadcast on NHK is the opposite.
Could the next major one happen again in Asia? Not likely this time.
China will shun from claiming the disputed islands by force, unless the Western nations have nothing better to do than purposely dumping their mighty navy in the West Pacific to prepare for a final showdown.
Leave East-Asia issues to East Asians, do not interfere. (mtd1943, ttm1943, vzc1943)
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