Japan sends senior official to China over boy’s fatal stabbing

TOKYO: Japan’s vice foreign minister will discuss the fatal stabbing of a schoolboy with Beijing on Monday (Sep 23), according to Tokyo’s foreign ministry.
From Sunday to Tuesday, Japan’s state minister for foreign affairs Yoshifumi Tsuge will visit Beijing “to deal with the death of a child at Shenzhen Japanese School”, the ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
After the attack last week in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida demanded an explanation and urged China to ensure the safety of Japanese citizens.
Beijing expressed “regret and sadness” for what it called an isolated incident that “could happen in any country”.
Japan’s foreign minister Yoko Kamikawa is also arranging to meet her Chinese counterpart in New York while they are both visiting the United States, according to public broadcaster NHK.
Japanese media reported that the boy was a 10-year-old Japanese national living in Shenzhen, while Beijing’s foreign ministry said his parents were Japanese and Chinese citizens, respectively.
Police detained a 44-year-old man suspected of stabbing the child.
While it remains unclear if the attack was politically motivated, it happened on Sep 18, the anniversary of the 1931 “Mukden incident” or “Manchurian incident”, which is known in China as a day of national humiliation.
In June, a Japanese mother and child were injured in another knife attack in Suzhou near Shanghai, which China’s foreign ministry described at the time as an “isolated incident”.
A 55-year-old Chinese woman died attempting to stop the assailant and was honoured by the local government after her death.
Relations between the countries have worsened as China grows more assertive in territorial disputes in the region, and as Japan boosts security ties with the US and its allies.
But Beijing announced last week it would “gradually resume” importing seafood from Japan after a ban in August last year over the release of water from the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Last week, Japan said a Chinese aircraft carrier sailed between two Japanese islands near Taiwan for the first time.
Tokyo slammed the incident as “totally unacceptable”, while China said it had complied with international law.