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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 called on Beijing to do more to protect Japanese nationals in the country.
“I think this is an extremely despicable crime and a serious and grave matter,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters.
Kishida said he would “refrain from making any assumptions” about how the stabbing could affect relations between China and Japan, a US ally with which Washington has strengthened ties.
“Instead, I want to strongly encourage the Chinese side to provide all the facts relevant to this case,” he said.
China’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday that Beijing was “deeply saddened and distressed by this tragic event.”
“We express our condolences for the child’s death and express our sympathy to his family,” spokesman Lin Jian said at a regular press conference 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 meters away from the Shenzhen Japanese School in the southern city of Shenzhen.
Lin said on Wednesday that the injured student was immediately sent to the hospital and a suspect was arrested at the scene. The reason for the attack was not clear.
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 and a pretext to invade and then occupy the region known as Manchuria.
Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa said Thursday that the ministry had advised Japanese schools and other institutions to strengthen security measures after a Japanese woman and her child were injured in a June attack at a bus stop for a Japanese school in eastern China. Suzhou city. A Chinese national who tried to stop that attack was killed.
Considering the sensitivity of the date, Kamikawa said Tokyo had also asked the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to do everything it could to ensure the safety of Japanese schools on the anniversary of Mukden.
“It is with great regret that this incident happened on such a date,” he said.
Kamikawa said that the Japanese Embassy in Beijing and the Japanese Consulate in Guangzhou, which is responsible for Shenzhen, had requested an explanation from the Chinese side and requested that “all possible measures” were taken to ensure the safety of the Japanese nationals.
Flags at Japanese diplomatic missions in mainland China and Hong Kong were lowered at half-mast on Thursday.
China and Japan are major trading partners, but the Chinese public still has strong memories of the Japanese military occupation before and during World War II, and anti-Japanese sentiment fueled by the Chinese authorities sometimes manifests itself in protests and boycotts.
Ties have also been strained amid increased Chinese military activity in the Asia-Pacific region, including in Japan. Last month, Japan said a Chinese military aircraft had violated its airspace in an unprecedented incursion. Tokyo said a Chinese carrier had also entered Japan’s contiguous waters for the first time on Wednesday, the same day as the stabbing attack.
Although gun violence is rare in China, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world, the country has experienced a series of stabbing attacks. In June, a knife attack in a public park in the northeastern Chinese city of Jilin injured four US university instructors, none of whom were critically injured.
Although Chinese social media is often flooded 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.