Japan PM Voices Serious Concerns to Xi Over South China Sea and Xinjiang

GYEONGJU, South Korea — Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said on Friday she raised “serious concerns” about the South China Sea, Hong Kong and Xinjiang in her first meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Takaichi, Japan’s first woman prime minister, has long been seen as a China hawk and has been a regular visitor to the Yasukuni shrine that honours Japan’s war dead, a site that angers China and South Korea.

She said she told Xi at the APEC summit in South Korea that she wanted a “strategic and mutually beneficial relationship between Japan and China”.

But she told reporters that she also raised a number of thorny issues with the Chinese leader, saying that it was “important for us to engage in direct, candid dialogue”.

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