TOKYO, April 2: Japan’s foreign minister on Sunday called China a military threat, while a top government spokesman rebuffed conciliatory gestures by Beijing over a controversial war shrine, in comments likely to heighten tensions between the two nations.
Foreign Minister Taro Aso, who has already angered China in recent months with a series of critical comments, questioned China’s rapid military spending increases and its lack of transparency.
“It’s not clear what China is using the money for. This creates a sense of threat for surrounding countries,” he said on a Fuji TV Network talk show, in an unusually clear expression of Japanese government unease.
China has announced double-digit spending increases for its 2.5-million-member military nearly every year since the early 1990s. Japan’s Defence Agency lists China’s military expansion as a top security concern in the region, echoing US concerns about Chinese secrecy surrounding its military spending.
Chinese officials have insisted their country is open about spending and has increased military exchanges with other countries.
Chinese President Hu Jintao also made a rare conciliatory gesture to Japan earlier this week by offering to hold a summit with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi if he stops his visits to Yasukuni Shrine, which honours 2.5 million war dead — including convicted war criminals.
Beijing has refused top-level talks since Koizumi last visited the shrine in October 2005, calling his actions offensive for Chinese victims of Japan’s aggression before and during World War II.
But Chief Cabinet Spokesman Shinzo Abe rejected that offer on Sunday on the same talk show.
“It is wrong for China to refuse talks just over one problem ... It’s China that needs to take another step forward,” Abe said, adding how Japan commemorated its war dead was an internal affair.
Though linked by billions of dollars (euros) in trade, relations between the two neighbours have plunged to their lowest in decades over a spate of disputes, threatening to destabilize a region already tense over North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.
China protested earlier this week when Japan’s Education Ministry approved textbooks that say a disputed island chain in the East China Sea — called the Senkakus by Japan and the Diaoyu by China — is an integral part of Japan.
Meanwhile, Japan on Friday renewed accusations that China used spies to pry state secrets from a Japanese diplomat in Shanghai, ultimately driving him to suicide in 2004. China has angrily denied the claims.
