world

The Japanese cabinet ministers and right-wing conservative politicians have recently thronged and made offerings to the Yasukuni Shrine on the occasion of the autumn ancestral rite.

The visits and offerings to the shrine have got more undisguised since the emergence of the present ruling forces. 

After declaring in February this year that they were making efforts to create an environment for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi made offerings to the shrine in April. And on August 15, the day of Japan’s defeat, she bowed to the direction of the shrine at a car park on her way to the venue for a national memorial service for the war dead.

As is known, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo is the one housing the name tablets and list of those who died in the wars of aggression, including the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the War against Japan and the Pacific War, which the Japanese imperialists started in the past century. The dead only did invade Korea and many other countries in Asia and inflict innumerable misfortune and sufferings upon innocent people while resorting to murder, arson and plunder. Moreover, visiting the shrine enshrining together the name tablets of class-A war criminals, who were prosecuted and punished for their war crimes, is an insult to lots of victims and sufferers in Asia and a violation of international justice.

But the Japanese authorities visit the shrine like an annual event, claiming that it is pursuant to history, traditions and custom, despite the denunciations from the international community.

The Japanese reactionaries are making it a rule and “tradition” to visit the shrine and make offerings to it every year on the occasion of spring and autumn ancestral rites, the day of defeat and so on. This is a manifestation of the militarist frenzy designed to totally deny their bloodstained past and incite revanchism in Japanese society so as to realize at any cost the old dream of the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere” they failed to do in the past.

It is the intention of the Japanese authorities to make all the Japanese steeped in their militarist ideology through visits to the Yasukuni Shrine so as to instigate them to overseas invasion at any time.

The wild ambition for reinvasion of the Japanese reactionaries, who are hell-bent on realizing rearmament and reinvasion while spreading the idea of neo-militarism throughout the archipelago with the Yasukuni Shrine as the source, is evidenced by the fact that the right-wing conservative politicians let loose reckless remarks that “Many of the war dead became the cornerstone of Japan’s stability and peace” and “We will properly call for not dimming the memory and records of war at all”.

The Japanese reactionaries’ persistence in visiting the shrine will make them suffer defeat once again.