Japan's emperor urges understanding of wartime past

TOKYO, (Reuters) - Japan's Emperor Akihito expressed hope that mourning the country's war dead would lead to a better understanding of the past, but avoided touching on how people should show their respects.

"Now that the number of those who were born after the war increases as years pass by, the practice of mourning the war dead will help them to understand what kind of world and society those in the previous generations lived in," Akihito told a news conference.

A transcript of his statements, made on Wednesday, was only released on Saturday to mark his 73rd birthday. Former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi has made annual visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which honours the war dead, but the pilgrimages strained Japan's ties with China and South Korea as some convicted war criminals are also enshrined there.

"I sincerely hope that the facts about the war and the war dead will continue to be correctly conveyed to those of the generations that do not have direct knowledge of the war so the kind of ravage of war that we experienced in the past will never be repeated," the emperor said.

While Koizumi insisted that his Yasukuni visits were also to vow never to wage war, Japan's neighbours saw them as a symbol of Tokyo's past militarism. In July, Japanese media reported that Emperor Hirohito, the current emperor's father, had been upset over Yasukuni's enshrinement of the war criminals in 1978, citing a memo kept by a former chamberlain to the imperial family.

Akihito said he had never discussed with his father their views on mourning the war dead or what form it should take.

No emperor has visited Yasukuni since Hirohito last did in 1975.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has supported his predecessor's pilgrimages, has succeeded in repairing ties with Beijing and Seoul by taking a policy of "strategic ambiguity", not commenting at all on whether he would go to Yasukuni in the future.