TOKYO — A 10-year-old student at a Japanese school in China died Thursday after being stabbed on the way to school the day before, Japanese officials said, as they demanded that Beijing do more to protect Japanese nationals in the country.
“I consider this to be an extremely despicable crime and a serious and grave matter,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters.
Kishida said he would “refrain from making any prejudgments” about how the stabbing might affect relations between China and Japan, a U.S. ally with which Washington has been strengthening ties.
“Instead, I would like to strongly urge the Chinese side to provide all the facts pertaining to this case,” he said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday that Beijing was “deeply saddened and distressed by this tragic event.”
“We extend our condolences for the boy’s death and express our sympathy to his family,” spokesperson Lin Jian said at a regular news briefing in Beijing, adding that the case was still under investigation.
Lin said the boy was a Japanese national whose parents are Japanese and Chinese citizens. He said the ministry did not believe that this individual case would affect China-Japan relations.
“Effective measures will continue to be taken to ensure the safety of foreigners in China, including people from Japan,” he said.
According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the student was stabbed on Wednesday about 220 yards away from the Shenzhen Japanese School in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
Lin said Wednesday that the wounded student was immediately sent to the hospital and a suspect was apprehended at the scene. The motive in the attack was unclear.
The stabbing occurred on the anniversary of the 1931 Mukden incident, when Japanese troops staged an attack on a railway line near the northern Chinese city, now known as Shenyang, as a pretext for invading and then occupying the region known as Manchuria.
Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister Yoko Kamikawa said Thursday that the ministry had been advising Japanese schools and other institutions to step up safety measures after a Japanese woman and her child were injured in a June stabbing attack at a bus stop for a Japanese school in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou. A Chinese national who tried to stop that attacker was killed.
Considering the sensitivity of the date, Kamikawa said Tokyo had also asked the Chinese Foreign Ministry to do everything it could to ensure the safety of Japanese schools on the Mukden anniversary.
“It is with great regret that this incident occurred on such a date,” she said.
Kamikawa said the Japanese Embassy in Beijing and the Japanese Consulate in Guangzhou, which is responsible for Shenzhen, had asked for an explanation from the Chinese side and requested that “all possible measures” be taken to ensure the safety of Japanese nationals.
Flags at Japanese diplomatic missions in mainland China and Hong Kong were lowered on Thursday.
China and Japan are major trade partners, but the Chinese public still has strong memories of Japanese military occupation before and during World War II, and anti-Japanese sentiment stoked by Chinese authorities sometimes flares into protests and boycotts.
Ties have also been strained amid heightened Chinese military activity in the Asia-Pacific region, including in Japan. Last month, Japan said a Chinese military plane had violated its airspace in an unprecedented incursion. Tokyo said a Chinese aircraft carrier had also entered Japan’s contiguous waters for the first time on Wednesday, the same day as the stabbing attack.
Though gun violence is rare in China, which has some of the world’s strictest gun control laws, the country has experienced a series of stabbing attacks. In June, a knife attack at a public park in the northeastern Chinese city of Jilin injured four U.S. university instructors, none of whose injuries were critical.
Though Chinese social media is often awash with nationalist and anti-Japanese comments, there has been an outpouring of sympathy for the student online.
“Heartbroken,” one user wrote on Weibo. “I hope for a world without extremists and for China-Japan friendship.”
Arata Yamamoto reported from Tokyo, Mithil Aggarwal from Hong Kong and Rae Wang from Beijing.
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