NYTimes Editorial
Pointless Provocation in Tokyo
Published: October 18, 2005
Fresh from an election that showcased him as a modernizing reformer,Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan has now made a point of publicly embracing
the worst traditions of Japanese militarism. Yesterday he made a nationally
televised visit to a memorial in central Tokyo called the Yasukuni Shrine.
But Yasukuni is not merely a memorial to Japan's 2.5 million war dead.
The shrine and its accompanying museumpromote an unapologetic view of Japan's
atrocity-scarred rampages through Korea, much of China and Southeast Asia
during the first few decades of the 20th century. Among those memorialized
and worshiped as deities in an annual festival beginning this week are
14 Class A war criminals who were tried, convicted and executed.
The shrine visit is a calculated affront to the descendants of those victimized
by Japanese war crimes, as the leaders of China, Taiwan, South Korea and
Singapore quickly made clear. Mr. Koizumi clearly knew what he was doing.
He has now visited the shrine in each of the last four years, brushing
aside repeated protests by Asian diplomats and, this time, an adverse judgment
from a Japanese court.
No one realistically worries about today's Japan re-embarking on the road
of imperial conquest. But Japan, Asia's richest, most economically powerful
and technologically advanced nation, is shedding some of the military and
foreign policy restraints it has observed for the past 60 years.
This is exactly the wrong time to be stirring up nightmare memories among
the neighbors. Such provocations seem particularly gratuitous in an era
that has seen an economically booming China become Japan's most critical
economic partner and its biggest geopolitical challenge.
Mr. Koizumi's shrine visits draw praise from the right-wing nationalists
who form a significant component of his Liberal Democratic Party. Instead
of appeasing this group, Mr. Koizumi needs to face them down, just as he
successfully faced down the party reactionaries who opposed his postal
privatization plan. It is time for Japan to face up to its history in the
20th century so that it can move honorably into the 21st. |