A JAPANESE Cabinet minister and about 150 lawmakers yesterday visited Yasukuni Shrine, seen by critics as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism, sparking anger among Asian neighbors a day before U.S. President Barack Obama arrives in the region.

    The visit followed an offering to the shrine by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday that further strained already fraught regional ties, with both China and South Korea questioning Japan’s commitment to dialogue.

    Japan’s relations with China and South Korea have long been strained by territorial rows and disputes stemming from Japan’s wartime occupation of large parts of China and its 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean Peninsula.

    Japan’s Internal Affairs Minister Yoshitaka Shindo, along with a close aide to Abe, paid their respects at Yasukuni, where 14 war criminals convicted by an Allied tribunal are honored along with the nation’s war dead, as part of the shrine’s annual spring festival that ends today, the day Obama arrives.

    Abe made a December visit to the shrine, which sparked widespread global anger, with main ally the United States saying it was “disappointed.” But this time Abe opted for an offering, and not a visit, aimed at pleasing his conservative supporters while trying to minimize international criticism.

    Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference that the government could not interfere with visits by lawmakers as private individuals, since that would infringe on their freedom of belief.

    Chinese officials have in the past compared Japanese politicians’ visits to the shrine to the idea of German politicians laying flowers on Hitler’s bunker.

    Obama in March brought together Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye for their first face-to-face talks to help the two major U.S. allies in Asia mend ties, and there had been tentative signs of a thaw.

    But a spokesman for South Korea’s Foreign Affairs Ministry told reporters yesterday that Japan was “romanticizing” its past military aggression.

    “We think it is meaningless for them to talk about the future to neighboring nations when they are paying tribute to such a place,” the ministry spokesman told reporters.

    (SD-Agencies)