Word: diets
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...first glance, the timing looked impeccably bad. With emotions between China and Japan still raw after weeks of anti-Japanese protests in major Chinese cities, 80 Japanese Diet members and the personal representatives of 86 others assembled at 8:00 a.m. last Friday to pay their respects at the Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo. No ordinary center of Shinto worship, Yasukuni is where the souls of 2.5 million Japanese war dead are enshrined. Since 1978, when 14 of Japan's most notorious World War II war criminals were added to the books of veneration there, Japan's neighbors have considered...
...this brisk and sunny spring morning, Diet member Yasukazu Hamada was undeterred. A young and conservative member of Koizumi's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Hamada saw his pilgrimage to Yasukuni as a proper personal tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country. No offense to China was intended, he says, but no special concessions were made to soothe China's sensibilities, either. Three such parliamentary prayer services had been held every year for decades, Hamada notes, and this one had been scheduled long before the anti-Japanese riots in China. He looks surprised when asked whether...
...acted to ease the tension. Beijing banned further protests and closed several anti-Japanese websites, while Koizumi offered his apology. But goodwill may be fleeting. Although Koizumi is credited as the architect of Japan's more confrontational foreign policy, he is backed by a growing neoconservative movement in the Diet?a bloc of Young Turk legislators who are both driving and riding the country's rekindled national pride. These are not Japan's traditional patriots, far-right citizens who wear headbands exhorting fealty to the Emperor and who for years have driven their ominous black trucks blaring military marches through...
...Japan. Shintaro Ishihara, who was once considered a fringe ultra-nationalist, is now the wildly popular governor of Tokyo. And with the socialist and communist parties effectively defunct, there are far more conservatives in parliament than ever before. The boiler room of the neocon network is the "Young Diet Members' Group for Establishing Security Framework for the New Century." This multiparty coalition of about 270 Diet members was co-founded in 2001 by young, influential lawmakers, including former defense chief Shigeru Ishiba and Seiji Maehara, a member of the primary opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). A passel of hotly...
...some of these observers fear that Chinese leaders will continue to play the history card whenever they consider it expedient. "In the post-cold-war era, the [Chinese] Communist Party is using nationalism as an ideology to maintain legitimacy," says Keizo Takemi, an LDP member who heads the Young Diet Members' group. "Anti-Japanism is an important part of Chinese nationalism, and has become an outlet for pent-up discontent among the young...