Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, sent an offering to a controversial war shrine but refrained from visiting himself, in a calibrated attempt to keep tense relations with China on an even keel.
In a ceremony to mark the 68th anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of the second world war on Thursday, he said Japan would “engrave deeply in our hearts the lessons that we should learn” from conflict. However, he did not explicitly mention Japan’s wartime aggression as has become customary on such occasions, and he skipped a formulaic pledge that Japan would never again go to war.
The prime minister has been critical of what Japanese conservatives contemptuously describe as Japan’s “apology diplomacy”. He has argued that Tokyo should take more responsibility for its own defence, particularly in light of Beijing’s increasingly muscular regional diplomacy.