Japan’s relations with neighbours hit record low… and it’s not even the 15th yet…
A survey by the Japanese Daily Yomiuri newspaper has found that 65% of respondents "don’t trust China", 10% more than in a similar survey in 2002. And when asked about their impression of China, "67 percent said they had a bad impression of China, while 27 percent said they had a good impression."
Comparable figures on the attitudes of Chinese people are, unsurprisingly, not available, but it’s safe to assume that the figures are not great and are probably about to get a whole lot worse.
The same Yomiuri survey found that 51% of respondents "don’t trust Korea", an increase of 17% on last year, while 87% of South Koreans feel that "relations [between Japan and ROK] were strained". And another interesting statistic: "While 60 percent of Japanese respondents said Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine were not a problem, only 10 percent of South Korean pollees agreed."
An opinion piece in the same edition by a former president of Tokyo University lays into Prime Mininster Koizumi and his government’s "inward-looking diplomacy."
The paper also covers the details of Prince Mikasa’s 1998 apology for Japanese wartime atrocities, as revealed in the newly published collection The Selected Works of Jiang Zemin (a tome for which, we are told, there are queues around the block.)
