The policy chief of Japan's ruling party vowed Sunday to keep paying homage at a controversial war shrine despite anger and diplomatic protests by China and South Korea.

Nearly 170 Japanese lawmakers made a pilgrimage last month to the Yasukuni Shrine, a flash point in a bitter dispute between Japan and Asian neighbors which were victims of its 20th century militarism.

For foreign critics, the shrine is a stark reminder of Tokyo's brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula and imperialist expansion leading up to World War II. Among the 2.5 million honored there are 14 men convicted of war crimes by a US-led tribunal after Japan's 1945 surrender.

Sanae Takaichi, who heads the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's policy affairs council, was one of the senior lawmakers who joined the April visit and on Sunday defended the practice.

"It's an internal affair (of a nation) how to commemorate the people who sacrificed their lives for the national policy," Takaichi said on a program on public broadcaster NHK.

China agreed to the principle of non-interference in each other's internal affairs when Tokyo and Beijing established diplomatic ties in 1972, she argued.

Takaichi also voiced doubt about a 1995 landmark statement Japan issued under then-prime minister Tomiichi Murayama, which acknowledged it followed "a mistaken national policy" and advanced along the road to war.

Takaichi also said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may have different views on history from past Japanese governments which accepted the judgment of the post-war Tokyo tribunal.