Ship comes riding high tide in China-Japan ties

A Japanese navy warship is set to visit China tomorrow.

The visit by the Sazanami destroyer is a return call to port by the Japanese side after the Chinese missile destroyer Shenzhen visited Japan in November.

The decision for an exchange of visits by the two countries' warships was clinched as early as in October 2000 by then Premier Zhu Rongji and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. But due to former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine that honors Class-A World War II criminals together with the ordinary war dead, the efforts to push forward the accord came to a standstill.