Word: yushukan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...museum keeping such sentiments under wraps: Yushukan is one of the few museums in Japan that translates its impressive Japanese-language exhibits into English. Sample one of the opening epigrams, by the 8th century poet Otomo no Yakamochi: "We shall die in the sea / we shall die in the mountains / In whatever way / We shall die beside the Emperor." Visiting Americans also get a novel take on history in the museum's explanation that because the U.S. imposed heavy sanctions on Japan in 1941 and called on it to withdraw from China, Tokyo had no choice but to start...
...that is actually an improvement - until January, Yushukan had maintained that Washington tricked Tokyo into war in order to lift the U.S. out of the Great Depression. That was deleted in a recent revision of the some of the museum's historical explanations, although Yasukuni officials deny that the changes were made to placate any foreigners. They certainly don't go out of their way to soothe the feelings of Asian nations that suffered far more than the U.S. did at the hands of the Japanese army. Yushukan's exhibits on Japan's colonization of Korea in the first half...
...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...
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