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| Japan PM Shinzo Abe visits Yasukuni WW2 shrine | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is visiting a controversial shrine to World War Two dead, local media report. | |
| The visit to Tokyo's Yasukuni memorial comes exactly one year after Mr Abe took office. | |
| The move is likely to further inflame already tense relations with neighbouring China and South Korea. | |
| The shrine honours several convicted Japanese war criminals. Beijing and Seoul see it as a symbol of Tokyo's war-time aggression. | |
| This is the first visit to Yasukuni by a serving prime minister since 2006. | |
| Mr Abe entered the shrine on Thursday morning, wearing a morning suit and grey tie. His arrival was televised live. | |
| In August, Mr Abe sent a ritual offering to the shrine but was not among a group of dozens of Japanese lawmakers who visited Yasukuni. | |
| In protest, China summoned the Japanese ambassador, saying the move "seriously harms the feelings of the people of China". | |
| Yasukuni commemorates some 2.5 million Japanese men, women and children who died for their country in wars. | |
| But the souls of 14 Class A convicted war criminals from World War Two are also enshrined there, including Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo, who was executed for war crimes in 1948. | |
| Visits to the shrine by lawmakers anger and offend Japan's neighbours, to whom the shrine represents Japan's past militarism, including the colonisation of the Korean peninsula and the invasion of China. | |
| Mr Abe's planned visit comes as Japan and China remain locked in a bitter dispute over East China Sea islands that both claim. | |
| South Korea and Japan, meanwhile, are involved in a row over an island midway between the two over which both say they have sovereignty. |