NEW YORK: Japanese Foreign Minister KAMIKAWA Yoko on Monday urged China to strictly punish the suspect in the fatal stabbing of a Japanese schoolboy in China last week.

In an hourlong meeting at the U.N. headquarters in New York, Kamikawa strongly called on Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to speed up investigations into the suspect’s motive, which is still unknown, and other details behind Wednesday’s attack on the 10-year-old, who was on his way to a Japanese school in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, southern China.

Wang asked his Japanese counterpart to respond calmly to the incident.

Kamikawa demanded that Beijing implement concrete measures to ensure the safety of Japanese nationals and that it crack down on anti-Japanese social media posts that are baseless and malicious.

China needs to tackle head-on issues that are standing in the way of bilateral exchanges and seriously work on improving the situation, Kamikawa said.

Wang said that the attack was accidental and an isolated event and that his government will handle the matter based on law.

He said that the incident should not become a political issue and that the problem should not be escalated, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Beijing is rushing to calm the situation out of concerns that the bilateral ties would be dealt a severe blow if the attack is linked to anti-Japanese sentiment in China and turns into a political issue.

“China knows that if it mishandles the situation, it will be irreversible,” an official of the Japanese prime minister’s office said.

The stabbing came on the heels of an attack against a Japanese woman and her child who were waiting for a school bus of a Japanese school in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, eastern China.

In claiming that the stabbing incident was accidental, Wang “may be arguing that it is not an issue concerning China as a whole,” a Japanese government source said.

The two foreign ministers also discussed China’s plan to ease its blanket import ban on Japanese fisheries products, which was announced last week.

Kamikawa called on the Chinese side to present some form of visible progress toward Beijing’s early removal of the ban.

The ban has been in place since August last year in response to Japan’s release of tritium-containing treated water into the sea from Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s nuclear disaster-crippled Fukushima No. 1 power station.

Wang did not mention any specific time frame for resuming imports, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said.

Kamikawa also expressed grave concern about a Chinese military plane violating Japan’s airspace off the Kyushu southwestern region in August and the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning sailing in the Japanese contiguous zone in the Nansei island chain in southern Japan last week.

She also asked Beijing to release immediately Japanese nationals held by Chinese authorities and remove a buoy installed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone in the East China Sea.

JIJI Press