A delegation of nearly 100 Japanese legislators visited Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine on Tuesday, which honors Japanese military casualties, including those from World War II and “convicted war criminals,” Kyodo News reported.
Tuesday was the 80th anniversary of the Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The Imperial Japanese Naval Air Service launched a surprise airstrike on a U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The operation killed 2,403 U.S. citizens including 2,008 U.S. sailors, 218 U.S. soldiers, 109 U.S. Marines, and 68 civilians. The strike on Pearl Harbor led to the U.S. officially entering World War II (1941-1945).
Kenichi Hosoda, Japan’s Senior Vice Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and Shunsuke Mutai, Japan’s Senior Vice Minister of the Environment, joined 99 legislators from Japan’s ruling and opposition parties to visit Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on December 7.
“The majority of the around 2.5 million people enshrined at Yasukuni were military servicemen and civilian employees of the Japanese military,” according to Kyodo News.
“Yasukuni added wartime [Japanese] Prime Minister Gen. Hideki Tojo and 13 other Class-A war criminals to the enshrined deities in 1978, which stirred controversy also in Japan,” the news agency noted.
“Visits to the shrine by Japanese leaders and lawmakers have been a source of diplomatic friction with China and South Korea, where bitter memories of Japan’s militarism before and during World War II run deep,” Kyodo News acknowledged.
Yasukuni is a shrine based on Shinto, a native and ancient Japanese religion. Nearly 2.5 million “divinities,” or souls of people who died in military service to Japan, have been enshrined at Yasukuni since its establishment in 1869.
The site commemorates Japanese military casualties “since 1853, during national crises such as the Boshin War, the Seinan War, the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, World War I, the Manchurian Incident, the China Incident, and the Greater East Asian War (World War II),” according to Yasukuni’s official website.
South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed “deep concern and regret” over the Japanese delegation’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine on December 7. South Korean Foreign Ministry Spokesman Choi Young-sam said the visit served to “glorify Japan’s colonial past and invasions.”
Former Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide “stayed away from the controversial Yasukuni shrine” on August 15, 2021, when marking the 76th anniversary of Imperial Japan’s surrender to the Allied Forces of World War II, which effectively signaled the conflict’s end.
Though Suga avoided Yasukuni on the somber occasion, “he did send a religious offering to the shrine,” Japanese media observed.
While commemorating Japan’s World War II defeat at a formal ceremony in Tokyo, “Suga pledged for the tragedy of war to never be repeated but avoided apologizing for his country’s aggression,” the Associated Press (AP) noted at the time.
“Beginning in 2013, Abe stopped acknowledging Japan’s wartime hostilities or apologizing in his Aug. 15 speeches, scrapping a nearly 20-year tradition that began with the 1995 apology of Socialist leader Tomiichi Murayama,” the news agency recalled.
The AP referred to former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, who served as Japanese prime minister from 2006-2007 and from 2012-2020. Abe was Suga’s predecessor in office.
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