By Stuart Biggs
Bloomberg
June 18, 2010

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.

To contact the reporters on this story: Stuart
Biggs in Tokyo at sbiggs3@bloomberg.net