Word: shrine
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Junichiro Koizumi was dressed to the nines for his last visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, because if you're going to be the center of international controversy, you might as well look good. Wearing a formal tuxedo jacket with coattails, the Japanese Prime Minister arrived at Yasukuni, where WWII-era war criminals are enshrined along with 2.5 million Japanese war dead, at 7:40 on Tuesday morning - 61 years after Japan surrendered to end World War II. He followed a white-robed Shinto priest into the shrine's inner hall, worshipped briefly and departed, the entire 10-minute visit carried...
...Yasukuni is a losing diplomatic issue for Japan, but there's always been support at home, especially among older Japanese who feel they deserve a place where they can pay respect to their millions of war dead without guilt. Although he had never visitied the shrine before he ran for Prime Minister in 2001, Koizumi made an election promise to pay his respects at Yasukuni if he won. That pledge won him key support from conservatives, and in the following years Koizumi deftly used Yasukuni to score political points at home. The louder China and South Korea would complain...
...main opponents, Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki, has come out against the Yasukuni visits, while another, Foreign Minister Taro Aso, wants to sidestep the issue by transforming the shrine into a state-sponsored memorial, instead of a religious one. But Tanigaki and Aso are only polling in the single digits, and the LDP stalwarts who will be voting in the party election tend to be conservative. Abe will have to decide eventually. Many observers assume that his past record means he will make the trip as Prime Minister at some point. But with Abe's proven conservative bona-fides, he might...
Japanese Gesture A shrine visit could mean trouble PM Junichiro Koizumi's likely visit this week to the Yasukuni shrine honoring Japan's war dead may create more strain with South Korea and China, who see it as an homage to Japanese atrocities...
...militias, many of his partners in the government are blatantly sectarian. Political leaders express outrage over the atrocities committed against their own sect but won't acknowledge that the other side, too, is bleeding. They often dismiss those wounds as self-inflicted. After the bombing of the Samarra shrine, many Sunni leaders told me the blast was the work of Shi'ite agents provocateurs working in concert with Iranian intelligence operatives. Likewise, Mahdi Army commanders routinely accuse Sunni insurgents of committing atrocities against their own kind and then blaming the Shi'ites...