Word: shrine
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...change began with Abe's own surprise trip to Beijing last October, which established lines of communication that had been all but ruined by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated trips to the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto memorial to Japan's war dead viewed by many nations as an irredeemable symbol of Japanese imperialism. For Abe, who had a nationalist reputation as a legislator, the move assuaged worries that ties with China would further degrade under his administration. For the leaders in Beijing, Abe's visit was an opportunity to show that China could be forward thinking...
Were Wen Jiabao to visit Yasukuni in the course of his visit to Japan this week, he would find the Shinto shrine's cherry trees in late bloom, raining white petals with every breeze. But such serenity would quickly be disrupted by the contents of a shrine that honors Japanese war criminals, and of its adjacent Yushukan museum, which rewrites 20th century history to place much of the blame on China for its devastation by the Japanese military in the 1930s, describing the Nanking massacre simply as an "incident...
...course, Wen would never go to Yasukuni, because China sees the shrine as a symbol of unrepentant Japanese imperialism. Beijing has made Yasukuni a litmus test - it was only when new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe became purposefully vague on visiting the shrine that icy Sino-Japanese relations began to thaw. Yushukan perpetuates the lie that the war was unavoidable, and that the 5,843 mostly young men who lost their lives as kamikazes died for a transcendent cause, died to save Japan. The museum is a celebration of wasted lives...
...Yushukan's only flaw were its distortion of 20th century history, it might not have become such a lightning rod for criticism. After all, the shrine is not government-controlled, and the museum's version doesn't represent Tokyo's official view of the war - let alone what most Japanese believe. What is truly disturbing about the museum is the implicit approval of the imperialist ideology that led to the deaths of millions throughout Asia - and a blatant celebration of the most extreme expression of that ideology, the kamikaze...
...emperor. But the past still matters. It would be right - to Japan's wartime victims and to Japan itself - to have a memorial that honors the war dead without honoring the ideology that cost them their lives. As peaceful a square as any you might find in Tokyo, Yasukuni shrine could be that place, but only with a radically different museum. And if that ever happens, perhaps even Premier Wen could spare a visit...