Japan's security chief canceled a visit to Seoul, a day before he paid tribute to a controversial war shrine that glorifies Tokyo's wartime atrocities, a diplomatic source in Seoul said Tuesday.

Keiji Furuya, the chairman of the National Public Safety Commission and chief secretary of the Parliamentarian League on the North Korean abduction issue, had planned to make a two-day visit to South Korea from next Sunday and meet with Seoul's intelligence chief and home affairs minister.

Furuya is one of the senior Japanese officials who visited the Yasukuni shrine in recent days, prompting South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se to cancel his planned visit to Japan this week in a diplomatic reprisal.

"Chairman Furuya had been scheduled to visit Korea and meet with his counterparts but canceled his planned visit last week," the source said on condition of anonymity.

Furuya visited the shrine that honors Japan's war dead, including 14 designated as Class A criminals by the Allies in the trials that followed World War II, on Sunday.

In moves that angered South Korea, Japan's deputy prime minister, Taro Aso, and Katsunobu Kato, the deputy chief cabinet secretary, paid their tribute to the shrine.

Worsening the mood in South Korea was an offering by Japan's nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of a "masakaki" tree that is traditionally used in rituals to the shrine, with his name written under his title of "prime minister."

Seoul's foreign ministry expressed "deep concern and regret" over the visits by Japanese ministers to the shrine that "glorifies Japan's wars of aggression that caused huge loss and pain to the peoples of neighboring countries and enshrines its war criminals."

South Korea "strongly urges the Japanese government to immediately stop its retrograde behavior, which ignores history, and to behave responsibly based on a correct understanding of history," the ministry said in a statement. (Yonhap News)