BEIJING, March 31 (Reuters) - President Hu Jintao offered to ease tensions
with Japan when he met a retired Japanese leader on Friday, but said Japan's
current prime minister must stop visiting a shrine honouring war criminals.
Hu told former Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto that "developing
friendly and cooperative neighbourly relations between China and Japan is in the
two countries' fundamental interests", according to a news broadcast on Chinese
state television.
But Hu said the current Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated
visits to a shrine that honours war dead, including war criminals from the
Second World War, now stood in the way of improved ties.
"If Japan's leader makes the clear-cut decision to cease visiting the
Yasukuni Shrine that includes Class-A war criminals, I'm willing to improve and
develop Chinese-Japanese relations and hold meetings and dialogue with the
Japanese leader," Hu said.
His comments came at a time of renewed anger across the region at Tokyo's
wartime past and a year after passionate anti-Japan protests rocked China.
Bilateral ties are at their worst in decades, weighed down by disputes mostly
springing from Japan's invasion and occupation of parts of China from 1931 to
1945. Japan also colonised the Korean peninsula from 1910 until its World War
Two defeat.
Hashimoto is part of a delegation of China-Japan friendship groups hoping to
improve relations frayed by disagreements over how to develop energy resources
in disputed waters, and Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which Hu said
were to blame for the tense state of relations.
TEXTBOOK CASE
But as Hashimoto arrived, the Japanese government was under fire in Beijing
and Seoul over the education ministry's call for school textbooks to be revised
to underline Tokyo's claim to islands claimed by both its neighbours.
In China, the vice-director of the Foreign Ministry's Asian Affairs
department lodged a strong protest against Japan over the issue and reiterated
China's claim to the Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea.