Japan is embarrassed by the visit of one of its MPs to Russia
The Russian Foreign Ministry reported on Monday a face-to-face meeting between Russia’s deputy chief of diplomacy, Andrei Rudenko, and Muneo Suzuki, a deputy from Japan’s Innovation Party, a populist opposition party.
This visit surprised the Japanese government, which criticized this personal initiative on Tuesday. “The government was not informed by Mr. Suzuki about his visit to Russia,” Japanese government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno said at a regular news conference on Tuesday.
Tokyo has strongly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the start and, like its Western allies, has imposed sanctions on Moscow. Japan is therefore advising all its citizens not to travel to Russia “for whatever reason,” reminded Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa, indicating that this instruction also applies to parliamentarians.
“We are unable to comment on the reason for MP Muneo Suzuki’s visit to Russia and the details of his agenda,” Ms. Kamikawa added.
The lawmaker traveled to Moscow on Sunday “on an inspection trip,” his secretary Shinji Akamatsu told Agence France-Presse on Tuesday, specifying that he was making this trip “in the name of his own vision of the national interest.” But the move also embarrasses his own party, which has said it will summon Mr Suzuki upon his return to explain himself.
In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry noted Mr. Suzuki’s “important contribution” to the development of Russian-Japanese relations, while regretting that this old bilateral cooperation is “being deliberately destroyed today” by the sanctions imposed by Japan against Russia please the United states” and by “the anti-Russian orientation of the “collective West””.
Muneo Suzuki, 75, has long been known for his support for strengthening Russian-Japanese relations. He was also accused and convicted of corruption in the early 2000s, forcing him to leave the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD, right-wing conservative), Japan’s main political party, in power. However, this murky past did not stop him from becoming an informal diplomatic adviser to then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the 2010s as he sought to re-establish relations with Moscow.