USA Todayに載った靖国神社の記事
Posted 6/22/2005 10:03 PMﾊﾊﾊﾊ Updated 6/24/2005 7:01 AM
Tokyo shrine a focus of fury around Asia
By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY TOKYO
One of Asia's biggest trouble spots is a peaceful place hidden away in the heart of Tokyo, a refuge from skyscrapers and traffic.
At the Yasukuni Shrine, couples take romantic walks beneath cherry trees, schoolchildren feed fish in a pond and aging war veterans remember fallen friends.
It's those old memories that are causing problems.
To many Japanese, the Yasukuni Shrine is no different from Arlington National Cemetery in the USA: a place to honor their war dead. They don't understand why people in other Asian countries are so furious about Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to the shrine. "It must be a lack of communication," says Kimura Takashi, 29, an acupuncturist visiting Yasukuni recently with his girlfriend.
China, South Korea and other Asian countries occupied and brutalized by imperial Japanese military forces decades ago see Koizumi's defiant visits as a symbol of Japan's refusal to show remorse for its bloody past. The sore point: In 1978, Yasukuni, operated by a private Shinto religious foundation, secretly enshrined 14 "Class A" war criminals convicted by an international tribunal after World War II.
The controversy over the shrine (and over textbooks that whitewash Japan's wartime atrocities) is having diplomatic consequences for Japan and rattling nerves across Asia. Ill will over the past spoiled Koizumi's summit Monday with South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun in Seoul.
South Korea's JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported Tuesday that Roh scolded Koizumi: "No matter how you explain your visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, it is understood as justifying Japan's past for me and for the people of Korea."
Anti-Japanese riots broke out across China this spring, threatening Japanese business interests there. In May, Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi canceled plans to meet Koizumi and abruptly ended a fence-mending trip to Japan. The snub came a week after Koizumi said other countries shouldn't interfere in the way Japan chooses to honor its dead.
Criticism of Koizumi's visits is coming from inside Japan, too. A poll by the MainichiDaily News last weekend found that 50% of Japanese oppose Koizumi's shrine visits, up from 45% in an April survey. A front-page commentary in the Asahi newspaper this month warned that the visits jeopardize Japan's bid to get a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Top Japanese politicians, including former prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and the speaker of Japan's lower house of parliament, have urged Koizumi to rethink the visits.
22-acre memorial
The shrine's caretakers try to keep a distance from the controversy. "The problems of history I leave to the historians," Yasukuni spokesman Shingo Oyama says.
The shrine was built in 1869 to commemorate soldiers killed in a Japanese civil war. It covers 22 acres and honors nearly 2.5 million killed in conflicts from the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) to World War II.
No one is buried at Yasukuni. Instead the spirits, or kami, of the dead are honored there. Ordinary visitors pass through a large torii, or entrance gate, and stop before the worship hall to pray for the dead.
Official visits such as Koizumi's occur in the main hall. Visitors purify their hands and mouths in a water fountain. They follow a Shinto priest who wears long robes and a shiny black hat with a thin chin strap. He stops in a quiet hallway to ask the gods to purify visitors' souls. Visitors then ascend some steps to the main altar. They lay down sprigs from the sacred sakaki tree, kneel in prayer, bow twice, clap twice and bow again. As they leave, visitors drink from a shallow cup containing holy sake called omiki.
Yasukuni, which means "peaceful nation," is supposed to be a place to reflect on the sorrow of war. But the keepers of the shrine clearly are more sensitive to Japan's suffering than the suffering Japan inflicted on others.
The Yasukuni Web site explains the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the invasions of China and Southeast Asia this way: "To maintain the independence and peace of the nation and for the prosperity of all Asia, Japan was forced into conflict." The shrine unapologetically describes the 14 war criminals as martyrs who were "unjustly tried as war criminals by a sham-like tribunal of allied forces."
Richard Minear, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of a 1971 book on the Tokyo Tribunal, notes that the Class A war criminals, including wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, did not commit atrocities themselves.
"The Tokyo defendants were selected mainly for their role in the prosecution of the war," Minear says. "The charge was that 'aggressive war' itself whatever that is was a crime."
Outside Japan, the furor over Yasukuni reflects a resurgence of nationalism across Asia. Chinese leaders stoke anti-Japanese sentiment to promote patriotism and justify their own monopoly on power, says historian Akinori Takamori of Takushoku University.
The South Korean government likewise has "brought a fierce ethnocentric consciousness into power," says political analyst Michael Cucek of the consultancy Okamoto Associates.
Looking for motives
So why does Koizumi visit Yasukuni despite the furor?
Cucek suggests that Koizumi is currying favor with right-wing Japanese politicians whose support he needs to implement his policies, particularly the privatization of Japan's postal system.
According to JoongAng Ilbo, the South Korean daily, Koizumi promised Roh, the president, that Japan would consider building a war memorial unburdened by the presence of the souls of war criminals. But Koizumi watchers doubt that he'll back down.
"He revels in behaving outrageously," Cucek says. After Chinese official Wu's snub in May, he says, "Koizumi could hardly suppress a smile. ... He was clearly savoring her chutzpah."
At the shrine, retired car dealer Masaru Inagaki, 70, says: "He won't stop coming because he has a strong character.
"He's really stubborn."
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