Japan's defence minister has visited a controversial shrine to Japan's war dead, just after accompanying Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on a historic visit to Pearl Harbour.
Television footage showed a smiling Tomomi Inada in a black jacket and skirt arriving at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine on Thursday, which honours Japanese who lost their lives in the country's wars, including several leaders executed for war crimes.
Visits to the shrine by prominent Japanese officials anger neighbours China and South Korea, which consider Yasukuni a reminder of Japan's wartime atrocities.
South Korea's defence ministry called the visit "deplorable".
"We express deep concern and regret over Japan's defence minister visiting Yasukuni Shrine, even as our government has been emphasising the need to create a new, forward-looking South Korea-Japan relationship," it said in a statement.
Inada joined Abe and Barack Obama on Tuesday for the first visit by a Japanese leader and a US president to Pearl Harbour to commemorate the victims of the Japanese attack there 75 years ago.
The visit followed Obama's May visit to Hiroshima, the first by a serving president to the spot where the United States dropped the first atomic bomb in the final days of the war.
"This year the president of the country that dropped the atomic bomb visited Hiroshima, and yesterday the prime minister made remarks of consolation at Pearl Harbour," Inada told reporters at Yasukuni.
"I visited the shrine wishing to firmly create peace for Japan and the world from a future-oriented perspective," she said.
