TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Kyodo News said Thursday that it has decided to penalize two senior editors to take responsibility for an erroneous Japanese report claiming lawmaker Akiko Ikuina had visited the war-linked Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo on Aug. 15, 2022.

Japan's leading news agency announced that Naoto Takahashi, managing editor of the News Department, and Shiro Yamane, chief supervisory editor of the Integrated News Center, will be relieved of their duties in January.

In late November, Kyodo News admitted to releasing a story saying that House of Councillors lawmaker Ikuina visited the shrine on the 77th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II. The article was written based on information from a reporter at another company, without directly confirming the claim with Ikuina.

Kyodo News President Toru Mizutani apologized to Ikuina for the false report, as the lawmaker, now serving as a parliamentary vice foreign minister, had not actually visited the shrine, which is viewed as a symbol of Japan's wartime militarism.

Mizutani acknowledged the report had affected Japan's diplomatic relations with South Korea and that it had had a negative impact on an event last month on Sado Island commemorating Japanese and Korean victims who worked at a gold and silver mine complex.

Ikuina attended the event, but South Korean officials were absent, citing a failure to reach a consensus on the ceremony. Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Yasukuni honors the souls of Japan's wartime leaders convicted as war criminals.

"We apologize once again to the people concerned and to our readers," said an executive director of Kyodo News, pledging to implement thorough measures to prevent similar issues by double-checking doubtful information before releasing stories.

According to the news agency, Mizutani will return 10 percent of his monthly executive remuneration for three months. The two editors who checked the story and the two reporters who wrote the article were reprimanded.