The Foreign Ministry has recommended that Japan's media organizations not reprint contentious caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, after angry demonstrators torched the Danish embassies in Lebanon and Syria over the weekend and other violence has erupted.
The ministry informally urged all media outlets that belong to its press club Monday not to carry any of the 12 cartoons first printed in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten daily in September out of consideration for Muslims' feelings and concerns of triggering attacks on Japanese.
The ministry also sent requests to the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association and the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association, urging their members to refrain from publishing the cartoons.