Members of Japan’s conservative ruling cabinet visited a controversial war shrine over the weekend, leading South Korea to cancel a scheduled high-level contact.

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se will not visit Tokyo as planned to try to repair relations damaged by conflicting territorial claims over some uninhabited islands over valuable off-shore energy reserves.

The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo honors not only the nation’s war dead, but several executed war criminals as well; not least of whom is Hideki Tojo, the hated Prime Minister of Japan’s Imperial expansion across the Pacific that led to World War II.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is an outspoken nationalist who did not attend, apparently so as not to provoke South Korea and China.  But he sent a ritual Cypress Branch to the shrine, which is used in ceremonies of Japan’s native Shinto religion.  And Abe’s right-hand Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso did attend.  Members of Abe’s cabinet who did go have also been prime defenders of Japan’s abominable conduct in World War II.

China has not reacted yet, but it will.  China and Japan are arguing over another set of uninhabited islands near Okinawa.