China has brought its complaint with Japan over a controversial military shrine to the United Nations.  Beijing’s UN envoy used the New York-based world body as a platform to question Japan’s motives and tell its neighbor to correct its “erroneous outlook” on history.

The row stems from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 26 December visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo, a Shinto shrine to the nation’s war dead that also venerates several Imperial Japanese leaders responsible for ordering atrocities across Asia and the Pacific. 

“It all boils down to whether the leader of a country should stand on the side of maintaining the principles and purposes of the charter of the UN or to side with war criminals,” China's UN envoy Liu Jieyi said.

Abe is a rich kid, descended from past Japanese leaders, and a fervent nationalist who wants to put wartime atrocities in the past and loosen military restrictions in the post-war constitution.  Despite the blood-hued taint over Yasukuni, Tokyo’s UN envoy insists Abe was not paying homage to war criminals.

“Abe visited Yasukuni Shrine to pay his respects and pray for the souls of the war dead and renew the pledge that Japan shall never again wage war.  It was nothing more and nothing less,” said Japan's UN ambassador Motohide Yoshikawa.

Meanwhile, the spat also revealed its completely ridiculous side as the Chinese and Japanese envoys to London both wrote columns in Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper in the past week likening each other to Lord Voldemort, the villain in the Harry Potter stories.  That’s right – the two biggest powers in East Asia engaged in name-calling based on a Anglophiliac series of children’s’ books.