Every year on Aug 15, Tokyo performs a carefully choreographed act of forgetting history. This year the choreography was more brazen than usual. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who once made the pilgrimage in person, dispatched a ritual monetary offering to Yasukuni Shrine instead — a gesture calibrated to satisfy her right-wing base while allowing her to claim “restraint”. Her defense minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, felt no such need for subtlety and prayed at the shrine in person, joined by three other cabinet ministers. Three senior executives of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) then made a rare joint visit, bearing offerings, explicitly on the prime minister’s behalf. Dozens of lawmakers followed. The message could hardly have been clearer: The head of government stayed away in body but was present by proxy.
What makes this more than a diplomatic irritant to the countries victimized by Japanese aggression during World War II is what Yasukuni actually is. It is not an ordinary cemetery. It enshrines, alongside Japan’s war dead, 14 Class-A war criminals convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. These criminals were the men whose decisions engendered the Nanjing Massacre, the biological warfare units, the comfort women system, and the three years and eight months of vicious occupation that Hong Kong has never forgotten. Attached to the shrine is the Yushukan museum, where Japan’s destructive rampage across Asia is whitewashed as a “war of liberation from Western colonialism”. To offer prayers there in an official capacity is not private mourning; it is a political statement that the verdict of history remains open. Beijing was therefore right to lodge serious protests and to describe the shrine as a spiritual instrument and symbol of Japanese militarism. Seoul, whose relations with Tokyo have lately been warming, nevertheless condemned the visits as “anachronistic acts” — a reminder that this is a shared grievance of the countries that suffered from Japanese aggression.
That the timing is particularly graceless deserves emphasis. This year marks the 81st anniversary of Japan’s unconditional surrender and the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Tokyo war-crimes trials. Correctly understanding history was the precondition for Japan’s readmission to the international community after 1945. It is also the explicit political foundation of Sino-Japanese relations: The 1972 joint communique records that Japan was “keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious damage” it inflicted on the Chinese people and “deeply reproaches itself” — language reaffirmed in every subsequent bilateral document. A government that honors the architects of that damage while invoking those documents is asking its neighbors to accept a contradiction no serious state should accept.
Yet the shrine visits would matter less if they stood alone. They do not, and that is the heart of the problem. Historical revisionism in Japan has never been merely antiquarian; it is the ideological scaffolding for dismantling the postwar constraints on Japanese military power, and under the Takaichi government that dismantling has accelerated at a pace few predicted. In December, the Japanese cabinet approved a record defense budget exceeding 9 trillion yen ($58 billion), a 9.4 percent increase — and Tokyo reached the 2 percent of GDP threshold by March, two full years ahead of schedule. That trajectory will make Japan the world’s third-largest military spender, behind only the United States and China. More than $6 billion of the new budget goes to “standoff” strike capability, including upgraded Type-12 missiles with a range of about 1,000 kilometers. Those missiles have been deployed to Kyushu, which places parts of China within reach. Japan has also established a permanent Joint Operations Command, created a National Intelligence Bureau, and is rewriting all three of its core security documents.
Peace in East Asia does not require Japan to be weak. It requires Japan to be honest
Then there is the arms trade. In April, the Takaichi Cabinet revised the Three Principles on Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology to permit, in principle, the export of lethal weapons — fighter jets, destroyers, combat systems — to the 17 countries with which Japan holds transfer agreements, while removing controls on nonlethal equipment almost entirely. Japan’s own opposition parties, from the Constitutional Democrats to the Communists, marched in the streets against the plan and warned that their country was becoming a “merchant of death”. Meanwhile the prime minister continues to press for amending Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan, the clause in which Japan forever “renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes”. Taken together, these are not the adjustments of a defensive posture. They are the systematic reconstruction of an offensive one.
Placed against that backdrop, the shrine visits acquire their true significance. Trust is what allows neighbors to interpret military capability charitably, and trust is precisely what Tokyo keeps spending. It was Takaichi who declared in the Diet last November that a “Taiwan contingency” could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan — language with concrete legal consequences, since it is the statutory trigger for “collective self-defense”. She has refused to retract it.
The most compelling criticism of the Yasukuni ritual came from inside Japan. Protesters marched through Tokyo demanding the prime minister’s resignation and the shrine’s dismantling. A University of Tokyo professor who leads a civic association defending the pacifist constitution called the collective LDP visit constitutionally suspect and politically unacceptable. A Hosei University political scientist observed that Takaichi’s Aug 15 remarks expressed neither remorse toward the countries Japan invaded nor any firm resolve to uphold peace. Japan’s conscience, in other words, is alive; it is simply not in government.
The remedy is not complicated, only uncomfortable. Germany rebuilt its standing in Europe not through rhetoric but through institutionalized remembrance — honest textbooks, legal prohibitions on glorification, and reparative acts sustained across generations. Japan could choose that road: separate the war criminals from Yasukuni’s enshrinement, end official patronage of the shrine, teach the war as it happened, and refrain from inflating “external threats” to justify each of its new military capability. Until it does, no amount of reassurance about a “purely defensive” buildup will persuade anyone in this region, least of all a city that lived under Japanese occupation and buried its own dead. Peace in East Asia does not require Japan to be weak. It requires Japan to be honest.
The author is the convenor at China Retold, a member of the Legislative Council, and a member of the Central Committee of the New People’s Party.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
