TOKYO – Japan said Wednesday the detentions of its citizens in China are damaging public sentiment toward the neighboring country, after a Beijing court convicted a Japanese businessman of espionage.
The issue “has become one of the major obstructive factors for people-to-people exchanges…and improvement of public sentiment,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Toshihiro Kitamura told a regular press conference.
The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court on the same day sentenced an Astellas Pharma Inc. employee, who was detained in the Chinese capital in March 2023 and formally arrested the following October, to three and a half years in prison for spying. Kitamura called the ruling “extremely regrettable.”
The spokesman reiterated Tokyo’s demand for the early release of the man in his 60s, as well as other Japanese detained in China.
Kitamura said Tokyo also urged Beijing to “enhance transparency” in judicial procedures, given that Chinese court trials are closed to the media and, unlike Japan, explanations are “not offered externally.”
Earlier in the day, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Kazuhiko Aoki told a separate news conference that the government will provide the Astellas Pharma employee with “all possible support from the standpoint of protecting Japanese nationals.”
