Founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has been given one of Japan’s top honours for foreign leaders.

He will be posthumously conferred the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Paulownia Flowers, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said at a press conference on Tuesday.

“Mr Lee strived to strengthen relations with Japan and was successful in building a friendship between the two nations,” Mr Suga told reporters after a Cabinet meeting.

The Japanese Embassy in Singapore announced on its website that the conferment of the award was backdated to March 23, 2015, the day Mr Lee died.

… Dr Naoko Kumada, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said: “The Japanese learnt from his memoirs the tragedy that Mr Lee and the people in Singapore experienced during the Japanese Occupation and Mr Lee’s determination never to forget that experience.

“Despite this, he took a practical and open approach towards Japan after he became prime minister. He built a positive relationship between Japan and Singapore by learning from Japan’s success in industrialisation from the 1970s and built a strong economic partnership between the two countries that has become today’s friendship.”