China's refusal to hold a summit with Japan because of Prime Minister 
Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a Tokyo war shrine is "incomprehensible," he said 
Tuesday. 
 
 
   Japanese Prime 
 Minister Junichiro Koizumi arrives at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo Monday, 
 Oct. 17, 2005. [AP] | 
China has refused to 
meet with Koizumi in recent years, in part to protest his annual visits to 
Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead, including several executed war 
criminals. 
"I think China will someday regret that it did something as incomprehensible 
as not holding a summit because of one problem," Koizumi told reporters, without 
elaborating. 
Koizumi has long defended his shrine visits as aimed at praying for the 
country's war dead and for peace, and last worshipped there in October. 
He has gone every year since taking office in 2001, and speculation is rising 
about whether he plans to go again this year, before the end of his term in 
September. 
Koizumi has continued the visits despite a rapid deterioration in ties 
between Tokyo and Beijing. 
He has refused to reveal whether he will go to the shrine again this year, 
but reiterated his argument that China's objection to the visits is an 
interference in Japan's internal affairs. 
"The people who criticize my visits tell me that in order to maintain 
friendly ties with China, I must not visit the shrine," he said. "In extreme 
terms, it means it is wrong if I do not listen to China." 
While Koizumi says he goes to Yasukuni to pray for peace, the shrine was a 
center of propaganda backing imperialist expansion during the war, and honors 
fallen soldiers as deities. 
The shrine also hosts a history museum that depicts Japan's conquests in Asia 
and the Pacific in the 1930s and '40s as a crusade of liberation from Western 
colonialism. 
The visits have triggered a stream of domestic lawsuits claiming they violate 
the constitutional division between religion and the state. The shrine is part 
of Shinto, the emperor-led creed that was Japan's state religion before the war. 
Koizumi also took aim at domestic critics. 
"I can't understand why an outside country would tell me not to visit 
Yasukuni Shrine when I am only expressing these regrets for those who died at 
war," he said. "More so, I cannot understand why Japanese people would empathize 
with this opposition from China."