TOKYO (AFP) -- Outspoken Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso said it was thanks to Tokyo's colonization of Taiwan that the island today enjoyed such high education standards, a report said Sunday.

His remarks are likely to stir criticism from Taiwan and other Asian nations which suffered from Japanese wartime aggression and also follow comments by the hawkish minister that the Japanese emperor should visit a controversial Tokyo war shrine.

Aso said he believed Japan "did a good thing" to the island during its occupation, such as implementing a compulsory education system, the Kyodo News agency said.

"Thanks to the significant improvement in educational standards and literacy (during colonization), Taiwan is now a country with a very high education level and keeps up with the current era," Aso was quoted as saying to an audience in western city of Fukuoka.

"This is something I was told by an important figure in Taiwan and all the elderly people knew about it," Aso said.

"That was a time when I felt that, as expected, our predecessors did a good thing," he said.

Japan ruled Taiwan for 50 years from 1895 until the end of World War II.

Aso last week said Emperor Akihito should visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead including 14 World War II war criminals, triggering outrage from China and South Korea which see the shrine as the symbol of Japan's militarist past.

Japan's diplomatic relation with China have already been at low ebb as Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has repeatedly visited the shrine despite calls from home and abroad for him to stop.

Late wartime emperor Hirohito stopped visiting Yasukuni shrine after it enshrined top war criminals in 1978. Since becoming emperor in 1989, Akihito has refrained from going to the Shinto sanctuary which has become a thorn in relations with neighboring nations.

Aso had said it would be "best" if the emperor visited the shrine instead of only Koizumi, who has angered China and South Korea with an annual pilgrimage there.

Aso said soldiers had gone to war saying "Long live the emperor" and not hailing the prime minister.

The Japanese government later signaled that Emperor Akihito was unlikely to visit the war shrine.