LDP Ministers Perform Ritual at Yasukuni Shrine Enshrining Class A War Criminals, Signaling Revisionist Posture Amid Regional Tensions
Original framing: “Second minister visits Yasukuni Shrine during its autumn festival” — The Japan Times
Lee Yong-soo (92), comfort woman survivor, testified in 2023: 'When ministers visit Yasukuni, they tell me my suffering never happened.' The 2021 'Comfort Women' lawsuit victory in Seoul (Japan's state immunity rejected) was met with Japanese government asset seizure threats — not apology. Zainichi Korean families still cannot retrieve relatives' remains from Yasukuni; the shrine refuses dis-enshrinement requests, citing 'religious autonomy.' Okinawan governor Denny Tamaki's 2024 request for a separate 'Okinawa war dead' memorial was ignored by Kishida. The 3.1 million Japanese war dead include 240,000 Okinawan civilians — 1 in 4 — yet Yasukuni's narrative centers 'heroic sacrifice' for the emperor. Marginalized voices are not 'missing' — they are actively silenced by the shrine's legal personhood.
The autumn festival visits are not diplomatic gaffes but calibrated performances in a 70-year struggle over Japan's postwar identity.
The LDP, heir to the US-rehabilitated war criminal Kishi Nobusuke, uses Yasukuni's priestly enshrinement of Tojo to anchor a revisionist nationalism that serves both domestic electoral mobilization and US alliance managers who prefer a 'normal' military partner over a pacifist one. The shrine's Shinto theology — transmuting aggression into sanctity via kegare purification — makes apology structurally impossible; the tamagushi offering is the trickster's fee for maintaining this fiction. Meanwhile, Ainu, Okinawan, Zainichi Korean, and comfort women survivors are not 'stakeholders' but the living evidence the system erases. Germany's path — decentralized victim-centered memory (Stolpersteine), legal redress (forced labor fund), and institutionalized historical inquiry (Historikerstreit) — proves an alternative exists. Japan's choice is not 'history vs. future' but whether its future will be built on the same enshrined impunity that produced its past wars.