Many Japanese officials visit Shinto Shrine recently. Perhaps Japan is waking up and showing China and Korea who is the boss of all bosses.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060428/ap_on_...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
"TOKYO - Nearly two dozen Japanese ruling party lawmakers worshipped at a Tokyo war shrine on Friday, defying protests by China and South Korea against such visits.

The 21 lawmakers from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party are all first-year members elected in the party's landslide election victory last September, a parliamentary official said.

The lawmakers, part of a group that supports Koizumi's shrine visits, went to Yasukuni Shrine to mark the 54th anniversary of the 1952 restoration of Japan's sovereignty ending the Allied occupation that followed World War II.

"Today the members visited to commemorate this honorable day for Japan," said Kozo Imoto, an aide to lawmaker Tomomi Inada.

Koizumi has visited Yasukuni five times since taking office in 2001. The shrine honors 2.5 million war dead, including several executed World War II war criminals.

China and South Korea have strongly protested the visits, and have boycotted summits with Koizumi until he pledges to stop going to Yasukuni.

Koizumi has refused, defending his shrine visits as aimed at praying for the country's war dead and for peace. He last worshipped there in October, and speculation is high he will go again this year before he is scheduled to step down in September.

While Koizumi says he goes to Yasukuni to pray for peace, the shrine promoted imperialist expansion during the war, and honors fallen soldiers as deities.

The shrine also hosts a history museum that depicts Japan's conquests in Asia and the Pacific in the 1930s and '40s as a crusade of liberation from Western colonialism"

^ This is getting too good. Let's just hope China and Korea will react soon. I just love a good drama.

I'm starting to think Japan really doesn't care what China and Korea think about the shrine.

^ um, d'uh?

China and Korea better keep their noses out of Japan's business.

Doesn't matter. Only drives South Korea closer to China.

I mean at first I thought they did it to offend China and Korea, but now I'm saying I really don't think they could care less about how China and Korea feel regarding it. I think at this point it's pretty obvious these shrine visits aren't going to stop. Singling them out everytime they happen seems pretty pointless.

that line is ironic

who cares.........

I don't know how accurate your statement is. However I feel that it is just that attitude that japan should take toward the outside world at this point. Especially china and korea.

seriously, if japan really wants to point out that the shrine visit is for peace only then koizumi would have taken a different way to interpret their message. the reality is they're much more interested in spreading extreme nationalism in their country rather than focusing on its realtionships with china and korea.

Koizumi is spreading fear, not extreme nationalism. Just as Bush needed fear to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

I deeply believe that for a country to expand and survive, they need to buy more land or take over it with no exceptions, no feeling, and of course with full prejudice, I think that doing so is very natural in order to evolve and grow bigger, the Japanese were very ambitious people, I guess the government were crazily ambitious about concurring new land for the future generation Japanese to live in, and again its natural to do so isn’t it? So why blame the Japanese for slaughtering thousands if not millions of people who got in their way, the weak die the strong survive isn’t that true? its too bad china and Korea could not stand up against the Japanese, its too bad they lost millions of people to the Japanese, the Japanese were consider the strong, its part of human nature to be the top dog, be on top of the food chain and I believe that’s what Japan wanted, they wanted to test the weak, if the weak is not strong enough or not worthy enough to uphold their land in which they live on then it will get taken over and ruled by those who are stronger, if Japan politicians want to visit their war shrines they should have to right to do so with out silly protests, they just want to honor the soldiers who bravely sacrifice for Japan, we all should understand that in war, war crimes happens but war crimes is part of war any shots goes, and that’s what war is about, anything goes, again, its just part of human nature to kill people and take over their land for the sake of surviving ones own race. Very natural indeed.

If extreme nationalism is what it takes to save our country than I am all for it.

Bush didn't need to spread fear for Afghanistan, Klaws. If you don't remember, the US was attacked by terrorists whose leader was ruling over Afghanistan. That invasion, probably was the only invasion by Bush where you almost had a consensus with the American people for invasion. For Iraq, fear was used along with shady info and assumptions, most of which proved wrong. The country was divided over that invasion.

Yeah I guess. But, inspite of hatred for Japan, I don't think that South Koreans can ignore the fact that there's always a chance that the Chinese might annex them. Even if you say its unlikely, it's true that China would be the one to annex Korea before Japan could. If I were to pay statisticians to calculate who would annex Korea first, they'd probably come to the conclusion that China could, based on location, size, and military strength. China has the strongest ability to do that.

One thing I hate about opponents of the Yasukuni shrine visits, is that you guys keep talking about worshipping warcriminals. What they do for the people of that shrine is the same as they would do for anyone else. Both the decent soldiers who fought for their country (which isn't an act of evil in of itself), and the warcriminals are not given special status over anyone else.
And, though I'm not saying that Japanese imperialism was right, but it did help both Korea and China out. Before Japan started to expand, both of your countries were ruled or heavily influenced by Europeans. Just look at other great civilizations that fell to the might of European imperialism. The Muslim empire was the most advanced civilization in the world, but during their collapse, the Europeans came in and conquered them. And, now their countries are backward nations, with no hopes of ever joining first or second world status anytime soon. The same goes for African countries and the Latin Americas. However, China and South Korea both have hopes of reaching the status that Japan has already reached in our lifetimes, thanks to the catalyst that was Japanese imperialism.
Also, Koizumi and any and all politicians in Japan have a right to honor the dead who fought for their country. Even if the shrine happens to have the bad ones in it too, it's only right that they be allowed.
Even the Germans can go visit their war dead. The laws of Germany may prevent them from idolizing Nazism, but it doesn't prevent people in respecting those who fought for their country and gave up their lives for their own homeland.

Thing is the war criminals are still worshipped. Maybe the war criminals should be moved out of the shrine.

Don't you even dare say China and Korea was helped by Japan's WWII actions. That is just pathetic and inflaming! Killing all those people are helping the Chinese and Koreans you have got to be kidding. It might have taught CHina something such as keep themselves strong so no one takes advantage of them again. It's like saying a rape victim is helped by a rapist because now they know to not go thru a secluded wood anymore.

And who is going to do that?
Its all well and good saying that, I used to but its unlikely to happen.

well then the saga will just continue then. Especially if the politicans are doing it.

Precisely.

Regardless of whether the war was just, it is fear against terrorism that drove the U.S. to invade Afghanistan. Personally, I believe there was all the justification behind the invasion of Afghanistan, which was harboring Al Qaeda and supporting it on a government level. It was an act of war. Still, terrorism really struck fear into the hearts of Americans, which gave Bush the unanimous support for the war on Afghanistan. The same can be said about the War on Iraq, except that those who feared Iraq, say, dumb$hit like "Saddam controls the Al Qaeda", were really dumbasses.

Not that I deny Japanese occupation had some positive influence, most notably modernization, but saying that Japan somehow "saved" Asia from "western imperialism" is absurd. It was just a propaganda they used to expand their own empire, and modernization was an effort to make Korea into a warmachine anyways, much of which industrial facilities were destroyed by the Americans during the WWII, including the nuclear processing facility(yes, Japanese were trying to make nukes). And while I would say Korea was heavily influenced by Japan, I wouldn't say the same about China, which was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union.

And the honoring of Yasukuni without any discretion of war criminals is clearly wrong. You see, Germans don't honor Hitler except some mindfu-ked skinheads. In a sense, I guess Koizumi could be defined as a Japanese version of a skinhead.. imagine a neo-Nazi skinhead becoming the German Chancellor. And it's clearly illegal in Germany to deny the Holocaust, yet you see Japanese making an organized effort to deny the Nanjing massacre. While I'm the least of concerned over these zealous nationalistic crap some of the Japanese are doing, I mean after all there are skinheads in Russia and Germany, and the KKK in America, but the mindset of its intellectual elite - most notably its politicians - are substandard, although in a perspective. Either they are extremely irresponsible and just plain stupid with a substandard of moral values, or they are intentionally provoking its neighbors to spread fear among the Japanese which could ultimately lead to the full rearmament of the Japanese military. Under the assumption that those Japanese politicians aren't just plain dumb, I support the latter scenario, and thus believe those warmongerers are best ignored.

No, the two comparisons are nothing like that. What some Japanese soldiers did was wrong, but also note that war tends to have casualties. But, inspite of what the horrors of Japanese expansionism may have included, there were benefits to it as well. It did allow for change in the region that would've never happened otherwise. Like I said, it was a catalyst for development.

Just because there are were drastic changes as I listed before, the action should never be justified.

what are these people thinking, what benefit can they gain from isolating themselves from the rest of East Asia?.. even my 4 yearold cousin knows making freinds then enemies are for the better

Well, I'm not saying you're wrong. I don't think what the Japanese was right, but some might argue that the ends justify the means. Since, I studied the subject of "morality" I could tell you of a moral theory called utilitarianism.
If I was somehow able to measure "happiness" (they use some other philosophical ideology of happiness based on what is a good life) of the Chinese and Korean people in our world and the happiness of those in an alternate universe where Japanese never expanded through imperialism. And, if the overall happiness in our world was higher than in their world, then what the Japanese did was moral.