Chinese man arrested, two others wanted for vandalism at Japanese war shrine

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A Chinese man has been arrested and two others put on the wanted list for allegedly damaging a Japanese war shrine that has long angered other Asian countries, Tokyo police said on Wednesday.

The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo is dedicated to the 2.5 million people who have been killed in wars since the late 19th century, mostly Japanese, including convicted war criminals.

Jiang Zhuojun, 29, who lives north of Tokyo, was arrested “on suspicion of vandalism and disrespect towards a place of worship,” a Tokyo Metropolitan Police spokesman told AFP.

Police also issued arrest warrants for two other Chinese nationals, 36-year-old Dong Guangming and 25-year-old Xu Laiyu, and put them on the wanted list, but the spokesman said the two had apparently left the country.

Jiang and Dong are said to have spray-painted the word “toilet” in red on a pillar of the shrine on May 31 while Xu filmed them, the spokesman said.

Local media reported that a video posted on Chinese social media showed a man apparently urinating on the stone pillar before spraying it with spray paint.

The police spokesman confirmed that officers had seen the video.

Dong had previously told Japanese broadcaster TBS that he admitted to the vandalism but would not report it to the police because the act was a protest against Japan’s release of treated wastewater from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The United Nations nuclear watchdog said the leak, which began last August, was harmless. But China, later joined by Russia, banned all imports of Japanese seafood, saying Tokyo was treating the Pacific “like a sewer.”

Yasukuni Park also houses a museum that portrays Japan during World War II primarily as a victim of US aggression, with little mention of the extreme brutality of the invading imperial troops as they stormed through Asia.

Government ministers still regularly pay homage to Yasukuni, infuriating China, South Korea and other countries, even though no prime minister has visited Yasukuni Palace since Shinzo Abe in 2013.