Koizumi set to anger neighbors one last time with shrine visit

TOKYO (AFP) - With stubborn defiance, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is expected to visit a war shrine Tuesday on a sensitive anniversary, angering Asian neighbors one last time before stepping down.

Koizumi, Japan's longest-serving premier in three decades, has gone once a year to pray at the Shinto shrine -- but never on August 15, the date of Japan's World War II surrender, as he had pledged when he took office in 2001.

"I think he will visit the shrine tomorrow to fulfill the promise he made," Taku Yamasaki, a former top aide to Koizumi, told TBS television.

China and

South Korea, which see the shrine as a symbol of Japan's militarist past, have urged Koizumi not to go but are likely focusing on repairing ties with whoever succeeds him in late September, analysts said.

"He probably does not have any ideological or political reason for going now. It is only his stubbornness that would drive him to go," said Toshiaki Iwai, a political science professor at Nihon University.

Koizumi has been increasingly vocal in his defense of the shrine -- which honors top war criminals along with 2.5 million war dead -- apparently laying the groundwork to go on August 15, when veterans and nationalists congregate at the site.

"Even if I were to avoid August 15, I am criticized whenever I visit," Koizumi said recently. "I visit the shrine to console the souls of the war dead. This is a natural thing."

Some 2,500 police including riot squads will be deployed Tuesday around the shrine, Jiji Press said. It said police may send even more officers if Koizumi goes ahead with his visit.

Koizumi, 64, came to power as a lone-wolf reformer with promises to liberalize the economy and to "destroy" his conservative Liberal Democratic Party, of which he became president.

A charismatic campaigner who led the party to a landslide victory last year, Koizumi's base within the long-ruling party has always been weak.

His 2001 pledge to visit the shrine annually won him needed support from conservatives including the Association of War Bereaved, a traditional backer of the Liberal Democrats, although recent polls show most Japanese want his successor to stay away from the site.

"Mr. Koizumi had to make the promise because he has been a loner in the party and needed to entice the association to support him when he was running to become the prime minister," Iwai said.

"Mr. Koizumi probably did not think much of the issue and certainly did not expect this was going to become as big as it came to be. But he is the type of person who wants to keep a promise and does not listen to others," he said.

China has likened Koizumi to a German leader honoring Adolf Hitler for going to Yasukuni and has refused summits with him. South Korean President

Roh Moo-Hyun has also stopped meeting Koizumi and repeatedly demanded Japan face up to history.

Koizumi assumes the foreign criticism is choreographed, "made only to score diplomatic points," rather than coming from true emotion, said Phil Deans, a professor at Temple University in Japan.

"If it was not Yasukuni ... there are lots of issues there that the Chinese are upset about," Deans said.

Koizumi leaves a different legacy in other areas. He has been one of the closest allies of US

President George W. Bush and sent troops to

Iraq -- a historic step for officially pacifist Japan. He leaves amid signs Japan has emerged definitively from its recession in the 1990s.

Koizumi used Yasukuni to prove his patriotic credentials while carrying out controversial US-style economic reforms, said Koichi Nakano, an associate professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Koizumi's most likely successor, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, is also a defender of the shrine and visited last year on August 15.

But he has refused to promise to go to the Shinto shrine as prime minister.

Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki, who is challenging Abe, said he would shun Yasukuni shrine in hopes of repairing ties with South Korea and China, which is Japan's top trading partner.