Kyodo News, via Associated Press

Japanese vessels sailed near a Chinese surveillance ship near disputed islands called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China on Tuesday.

TOKYO Tensions between Japan and its Asian neighbors rose on Tuesday when a large group of Japanese lawmakers paid a symbolically charged visit to a Tokyo war shrine, while Chinese paramilitary ships and a flotilla of boats carrying Japanese nationalists appeared to converge on disputed islands.

The group of 168 mostly low-ranking conservative lawmakers visited the Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo in what local news media described as the largest mass visit by Parliament members in recent memory. The shrine of the indigenous Shinto religion honors Japans war dead, including several who were executed as war criminals after World War II. This has made Yasukuni, and the political leaders who visit it, a target of criticism by China and South Korea, which suffered under Japans early 20th-century empire building.

Last year, a group of 81 lawmakers visited the shrine during the same season, when Yasukuni celebrates a three-day spring festival.

This years mass visit comes at a time when Japans relations with both those neighboring countries have frayed because of disputes over territory and history.

The shrine is viewed by many in China and South Korea as a symbol of how Japan remains unrepentant for its brutal wartime expansion across Asia. For many Japanese nationalists, visits to the shrine appear have become a way of standing up to what they see as the increasingly insistent demands of China, which has usurped their country as the dominant power in Asia.

Analysts said the size of the visit was partly a byproduct of Decembers landslide election victory by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which installed a hawkish prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and an increased number of rightists in Parliament. But they also called it the latest example of how Japanese ultraconservatives have become more vocal in recent years, amid growing unease in Japan over Chinas rising power and its increasingly forceful stance on their long-simmering dispute over the contested islands.

On Tuesday, that dispute appeared to heat up even further when the Japanese Coast Guard reported that eight Chinese patrol ships had entered waters near the islands, the largest number to appear at one time since the dispute flared up last summer. The Coast Guard said the Chinese ships converged from several different directions into waters near the uninhabited islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in Chinese.

The Chinese ships appeared at the same time as 10 boats carrying members of a Japanese fringe ultranationalist group also arrived off the islands. The boats were followed by Japanese Coast Guard ships apparently seeking to ensure that they did not attempt a landing, as some nationalists did last summer.

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Tensions Flare Between China and Japan Over Islands and Shrine