Anti-Japan sentiment soaring in China, S. Korea: Survey
Anti-Japan sentiment soaring in China, S. Korea: Survey
Nearly two thirds of Chinese and South Koreans dislike Japan with
more than 80 percent opposing Tokyo's longstanding dream of a
permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a survey showed on
Wednesday.
Sixty-four percent of Chinese and 63 percent of South Koreans
dislike Japan, Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper said in a joint
survey with the South Korean daily Donga Ilbo and the Chinese
Academy of Social Science.
The figure was sharply up from the 34 percent in a similar
survey in China taken in 1997 and from 53 percent in 2002. South
Koreans' dislike of Japan was also high up from 57 percent in a
2001 survey, the Asahi said.
Only 8 percent of Chinese and South Koreans said they liked
Japan, which bloodily occupied the two nations until its 1945
defeat in World War II but has since become a leading trade
partner.
The poll was carried out by personal interviews with a total
of 5,441 people in Japan, South Korea and China in late March,
when there was an uproar in South Korea over a local Japanese
assembly's renewed claim to disputed islands.
But the survey was taken before massive anti-Japanese protests
in China triggered by Tokyo's approval of a nationalist textbook.
China said this month that relations with Japan are at a 30-year
low.
Eighty-seven percent South Koreans and 84 percent Chinese are
against Japan's goal of winning a prestigious permanent seat on
the UN Security Council, whose current power structure dates from
World War II.
Sixty-eight percent of Japanese supported the Security Council
bid.
Japanese sentiment was much less passionate toward its
neighbors.
Twenty-eight percent of Japanese respondents said they
disliked China against 10 percent who like the nation, with most
indifferent. Japanese antagonism towards South Korea was 22
percent against 15 percent who like the neighbor.
Japan and China have both bitterly opposed Japanese Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to the Yasukuni war
shrine which honors Japan's 2.5 million war dead including 14 top
war criminals.
Ninety-two percent of South Koreans and 91 percent of Chinese
opposed the visits. Japanese opposition was 28 percent, with 54
percent supporting the pilgrimage. -- AFP