North Korea has now responded to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo:

North Korea has become the latest country to criticize Tokyo over Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to a controversial war shrine. Koizumi visited the Yasukuni monument on Monday.

The secretive Stalinist state added that the shrine is “a symbol of militarism, in spite of the unvarying opposition from the international community,” AP said.

“A symbol of militarism”? Give me a break, the North Koreans are complaining about a shrine promoting militarism when their entire country promotes militarism.

In fact if you believe this Chosun Ilbo report the North Koreans should get along well with Koizumi because his dad allegedly recruited Koreans in Japan to return to North Korea:

The father of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was a key figure in efforts to lure Koreans living in Japan to North Korea. Junya Koizumi died in 1969.

With promises that North Korea was a “Paradise on Earth,” repatriation organizations between 1959 and 1984 sent 93,340 Koreans to the Stalinist country. Despite opposition from the South Korean government, leading Japanese politicians and intellectuals on Nov. 17, 1958 formed a repatriation association which was to support efforts to send Koreans to the North. Once repatriated, these people would find themselves slandered as “a disruption to society,” Japanese spies or collaborators, and a significant number were carted off into forced labor and never heard from again.

Nobody forced them to go to North Korea. Also how come the South Koreans didn’t try to take them in? Yes, Koizumi is stupid for doing his shrine visits, but the reaction by everyone else in the neighborhood is even stupider and hippocritical. Just more mindless Japan bashing if you ask me.