Dalai Lama Says Talks Would ‘Inconvenience’ Japan’s Government

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Bloomberg
By Stuart Biggs
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama prays with Japanese Buddhist monks during the Buddhist ceremonial service at Zenkoji temple in Nagano on June 19, 2010. The Dalai Lama criticised wildlife activists for staging what he said were violent protests over Japan's hunting of whales. The rebuke came as the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader visited Japan for an 11-day lecture tour.(Photo:Getty Images)

The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, said he has no plan to request official talks that would “inconvenience” Japan’s government and that his lecture tour in the country is “non-political.”

The Dalai Lama, 74, arrived in Japan yesterday to lecture on Buddhism at a temple in central Japan’s Nagano prefecture, and in Yokohama. He spoke to reporters today at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo.

Overseas receptions of the Tibetan religious leader have angered China’s government, which regards him as a separatist since he fled to India in 1959. China objected to the Dalai Lama’s meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in February and canceled a China-European Union summit after French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with him in 2008.

“This is a non-political visit, so I have nothing to ask or discuss with the government,” the Dalai Lama said today. “I don’t want to create any inconvenience to anybody.”

China opposes outside pressure on how the country runs Tibet, which was brought under its rule in 1950.

--Editors: Mike Millard, Jim McDonald.