Following a Japanese ambassador’s sally into the world of Harry Potter, a Chinese ambassador has now likened Japanese militarism to the evil Lord Voldemort. The deep-rooted feud between Tokyo and Beijing has now gone to an entirely new dimension.
“If militarism is like the haunting Voldemort of Japan, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo is a kind of horcrux, representing the darkest parts of that nation’s soul,” Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, said in a story in The Telegraph last week.
A horcrux is a fictional object used by the evil wizard to hide a fragment of his soul for the purpose of attaining immortality. In J.K. Rowlings beloved series, Lord Voldemort created seven horcruxes that must be destroyed in order to kill him.
Japanese ambassador Keiichi Hayashi wrote in the same newspaper that fears of rising militarism in Japan are unfounded given the nation’s postwar record of commitment to peace.
In response, he said that China risks playing “the role of Voldemort in the region by letting loose the evil of an arms race and escalation of tensions.”
China and South Korea say the shrine, which Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited recently, glorifies Japan’s past militarism.
Clearly, this is not be the eighth book that fans of the bestselling series were hoping for.
By Maesie Bertumen
