By Kenta Sugawara

After the Second World War, China, South Korea, and North Korea have sharply criticized Japan because Japanese Prime Ministers and politicians continue to pay homage at Yasukuni shrine. Again, the issue on Yasukuni shrine has caused much controversy in Japan.

On January 14 of this year, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi suddenly paid homage at Yasukuni. His thoughtless act has gravely affected Japanese relations with North Korea despite the fact that the two nations were in delicate talks on the abduction of Japanese by North Korea after the historic Japan-North Korea talks. Although Japan has to keep a close relationship with China and South Korea in order to promote Japanese economic activity and the firm peace of North-East Asia, his action threw a wet blanket on the relationship with those nations.

I can little understand the Japanese people who are in the habit of paying homage at Yasukuni for the war dead in terms of their own patriotism, but Japanese mustnﾕt forget their armyﾕs cruel acts during the war of aggression, which brought the Asian war victims deep sorrow and hatred.

Yasukuni Shrine was built in the Meiji era and enshrined the war dead who passed away in the Southwest War, the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Second World War. The most awkward problem is that this shrine enshrined twenty-five convicted Japanese war criminals, including former Prime Minister Hideki Toujyou; they were found guilty of the execution of the war of aggression in the Far-East Provost court after the Second World War and they were charged as ﾔWar criminals in the first degree.ﾕ

Although Yasukuni Shrine has this history, Japanese Prime Ministers and politicians continue to visit Yasukuni Shrine, so we can say that they donﾕt know what their position is. Furthermore, some people think that the reason why Japanese politicians visit Yasukuni is to get votes for election. If Japanese politicians have this purpose to visit the shrine, they are totally unqualified to be politicians.

Of all those problems in this discussion, Yasukuni is mostly responsible for the problems because the shrine didnﾕt respond to the call to give back the remains of the war criminals to their families. Although some families really would like to take them back, the shrine rejected their demands. So I wish that the war criminalﾕs families could take their remains from Yasukuni and then hold a memorial service with their own families.

In addition, the Japanese government needs to set up a new place in order to hold a memorial service for the unknown soldier. I hope that the key features of the site could hold a memorial service with all Japanese citizens without religious overtones, and could be also acceptable to foreign nationﾕs leaders in the future. The most important purpose to set up a site is to send a message to the generations who donﾕt know war; that war is miserable and horrible.