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