South Korea denounced Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's anniversary visit to a Tokyo war shrine today, and some 2,000 angry demonstrators scuffled with riot police outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul.
A group of former South Korean commandos decapitated an effigy of Mr Koizumi and some of the protesters burnt a picture of the Yasukuni shrine, which honours Japanese World War Two leaders convicted as war criminals along with 2.5 million war dead.
South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon
President Roh Moo-hyun, in a speech to mark the end of World War Two and Japanese rule 61 years ago, said Japan had far to go before it could change its pacifist constitution and that South Korea would press ahead with strengthening its own military.
"The Japanese prime minister's visit to the Yasukuni shrine is a total disrespect for the Korean government and people, particularly on our independence day and the day of the end (of) World War II," South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon told reporters in the Australian capital Canberra.
"All Korean people and government are frustrated and angry about this visit," he said, adding that the pilgrimage also disregarded appeals from other Asian countries, including China.
South Korea and China consider the visits to the Yasukuni shrine as symbolic of Japan's refusal to come to terms with its history of colonisation of the region which ended with the end of World War Two.
Ties between South Korea and Japan have turned increasingly chilly and Roh declared "diplomatic war" against Tokyo last year in a dispute over desolate islands claimed by the two neighbours and over Japanese leaders' visits to the Tokyo shrine.
"Japan has work to do before it amends its constitution," Roh said in his Liberation Day speech. "It must prove clearly that it has no intention of repeating the past by backing up its repeated apologies with actions," he said.
Japan's ruling and opposition parties are seeking to revise the pacifist constitution, whose Article Nine prohibits maintaining a military and has been interpreted as allowing armed forces solely for self-defence.