The Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Junichiro Koizumi, is expected to visit a controversial Tokyo war shrine despite fierce protests from neighbouring Asian countries, an aide said yesterday.
"I think he will certainly make a pilgrimage to Yasukuni and I think he should," the secretary general of Mr Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Mr Taku Yamasaki, said on the private Fuji television network.
Mr Koizumi has promised to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to Japan's war dead, on August 15th - the 56th anniversary of Japan's surrender to the US at the end of the second World War. Gen Hideki Tojo and other Japanese World War leaders, who were convicted as war criminals, are also honoured at the Shinto shrine.
In Beijing, Mr Hiromu Nonaka, a former LDP secretary general, was critical of Mr Koizumi after meeting the Chinese Vice-President, Mr Hu Jintao.
"As a man who has lived through an old time, I think [the visit] might lack consideration to neighbouring countries," Mr Nonaka told a televised news conference there at the end of a six-day tour of China on Sunday.
Mr Yamasaki admitted the visit would sour relations with China, South Korea and other Asian countries invaded by Japan.
China as well as North and South Korea have strongly denounced the proposed visit, which they argue would justify Japan's military past.
In 1985 Mr Yasuhiro Nakasone became the first and only post-war Japanese prime minister to visit the shrine in an official capacity.
Mr Nakasone gave up on plans for an official visit the following year. The then chief cabinet secretary Masaharu Gotoda released a statement on August 14th, 1986, that such a visit could trigger "misunderstanding and distrust" at Japan's regret over the war and its determination for peace.
Mr Yamasaki yesterday did not deny speculation that Mr Koizumi could seek to visit the shrine on a date other than August 15th as a compromise solution.
A former prime minister, Mr Ryutaro Hashimoto, made what he called a private visit on his birthday in July 1996 but still infuriated China and other neighbours.
The Yasukuni issue has become all the more controversial after Tokyo rejected demands from Beijing and Seoul to revise history textbooks used in Japanese schools.
The textbooks have caused widespread anger among Japan's neighbours for playing down events such as the 1937 Nanjing massacre in China and the use of hundreds of thousands of Asian women as sex slaves for Japanese troops.