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A South Korean man was sentenced to four years in prison Tuesday for detonating a homemade pipe bomb at a controversial Tokyo war shrine.
During the trial Chon Chang-han, 28, reportedly admitted to illegally entering the shrine and detonating the bomb in a case that highlighted lingering tensions over Japan’s former colonial rule of the Korean peninsula.
Judge Kazunori Karei said in the ruling that a lot of planning had gone into the crime as Chon made gunpowder based on information he gathered on the Internet and repeatedly tested igniting the powder after filling metal pipes with it.
"It was highly premeditated and atrocious in that, for instance, the device was put in a place where people could come and go freely,” the judge said.
However, Karei avoided characterising Chon’s act as “terrorism”, a term prosecutors had used in describing it in their closing arguments. The prosecutors said that Chon had carried out a “terrorist act based on a dangerous idea.”
During one hearing, Chon had told the court: “I thought South Korean media would praise (my acts). I had no intention of harming people.”
Chon returned to South Korea on the afternoon of November 23, but re-entered Japan on December 9 and brought gunpowder with him. He was arrested upon his arrival in Tokyo that day.
The Yasukuni shrine, which honours millions of Japan’s war dead, including several senior military and political figures convicted of war crimes after the second world war, has been targeted in the past by activists who see it as a symbol of Japan’s militaristic past.
Visits by senior Japanese politicians to the shrine routinely draw an angry reaction from China and South Korea, which view them as an insult and painful reminder of now-pacifist Japan’s history, including its former occupation of the peninsula.
(Agence France-Presse, Kyodo)
