TOKYO, Nov 30 — Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida hailed today the late Henry Kissinger’s "significant contributions” to peace and stability in Asia.

Kissinger ”made significant contributions to the regional peace and stability, including the normalisation of diplomatic ties between the US and China,” Kishida told reporters after the former US secretary of state died aged 100.

"I’d like to express my most sincere respect to the great achievements he made,” Kishida added. "I also would like to offer my condolences.”

Kissinger in the 1970s had referred to the Japanese as "treacherous sons of b****es” for wanting normal relations with China when he was national security advisor to president Richard Nixon, according to documents declassified in 2006.

Kissinger made the comments just before Nixon met Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka in Hawaii in August 1972, according to transcripts released by the National Security Archive.

Kissinger was angry apparently because Japan, a key US ally, had defied the foreign policy of the United States, which at that time had diplomatic ties only with Taiwan.

Tanaka established diplomatic relations with China on September 29, 1972, seven years before the United States restored formal links with Beijing and severed official diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

Nixon, however, had made a landmark visit to China months earlier — in February 1972 — to end 20 years of frosty relations between the two countries. — AFP