Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has vowed to step up his country’s effort to defend a rules-based international order in a peace pledge made on Thursday on the 79th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War.
Mr Kishida said the country “will never again repeat the tragedy of war” at a solemn ceremony at the Budokan hall in Tokyo.
He added: “In the world where tragic battles have persisted, Japan will continue its effort to maintain and strengthen the rules-based, free and open international order.”
Mr Kishida noted the more than three million Japanese killed, the destruction and the lives lost from ground battles on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa, fire-bombings across Japan and the atomic attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
He did not mention or apologise for Japanese aggression across Asia or millions of lives lost there.
The omission follows a precedent set by then prime minister Shinzo Abe in his speech in 2013, a move critics call a whitewashing of Japan’s wartime atrocities.
Earlier on Thursday, three of Mr Kishida’s ministers, including defence minister Minoru Kihara, prayed at the Yasukuni Shrine — seen by Asian neighbours as a symbol of militarism.
The controversial shrine honours convicted war criminals among about 2.5 million war dead.
Victims of Japanese aggression, especially China and the Koreas, see visits to the shrine as a lack of remorse, and visits by defence officials are considered especially controversial.
Mr Kihara is the first serving defence chief to pray at the shrine on the anniversary since then-defence minister Nobuo Kishi’s 2021 visit.
Mr Kishida abstained from praying at the Yasukuni Shrine just a street away and sent a religious ornament instead.
Emperor Naruhito, who also attended the ceremony, repeated his “deep remorse” over Japan’s actions during the war that was fought in the name of the wartime emperor Hirohito, his grandfather.
Mr Kishida accelerated Japan’s military build-up and spending as the country further deepens military co-operation with the United States and their Indo-Pacific partners in the face of growing threats from China and North Korea.
