Advertisement
Advertisement
Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida at a July 4 press conference, when the government slammed China's effort to highlight the past of Tokyo's wartime aggression amid a territorial dispute between the two countries. Photo: AFP

Fury as Chinese paper publishes Japan map with mushroom clouds over Hiroshima, Nagasaki

Advert depicting mushroom clouds over cities bombed in second world war dismissed as 'ignorant' by Japanese foreign minister

AFP

A Chinese newspaper published a map of Japan with mushroom clouds rising above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, provoking outrage today from Tokyo’s foreign minister, who is from the first of the cities to be obliterated.

Tensions between Beijing and Tokyo are high due to a series of issues ranging from a territorial dispute over islands in the East China Sea to recent moves by Tokyo to reinterpret its pacifist constitution.

The , a newspaper linked to the Communist Youth League in the southwestern megacity, last week carried the map in a full-page advertisement under the title “Japan wants a war again”, according to a posting on its official account on Weibo.

Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937 left 20 million Chinese dead, according to Beijing’s estimates. It ended with Tokyo’s second world war defeat in 1945 following the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It was not clear who placed the advertisement, which can no longer be found on the newspaper’s official website.

But the stunt infuriated Tokyo, with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida calling it “very, very ignorant”.

“As the foreign minister of the only country that has suffered an atomic bomb attack, and being a politician from Hiroshima, I cannot tolerate this,” Kishida was quoted as saying.

Kishida said he has instructed the Japanese consulate-general in Chongqing to lodge a formal protest if the publication was confirmed, Jiji Press news agency said.

“Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe has clearly said it would be absolutely impossible for Japan to wage war again. There is no shift in the path of Japan as a pacifist country,” Kishida said.

China’s ruling Communist Party uses nationalism as part of its claim to a right to rule. President Xi Jinping joined hundreds of soldiers, veterans and schoolchildren Monday in an unusually high-profile ceremony marking the 77th anniversary of the start of war with Japan.

In an indirect jab at Abe he condemned those who “ignore the iron facts of history”.

Tokyo has said the Chinese commemoration did “nothing to contribute to peace and cooperation in the region”.

In a recent commentary the lashed out at Japan’s re-interpretation of its constitution last week to proclaim the right to send soldiers into battle even when the country is not under direct attack.

“Unfettering the right to collective self-defence is equivalent to handing over a sword back to the hands of murderer,” it said, adding China had been “too tolerant” of Japan for more than 40 years.

Post