A film company is feeling the heat from Japanese extremists over a documentary they are planning to release about Yasukuni Shrine.
“The threats began about two months ago, when we started press screenings of the movie in Japan,” [Chinese-born director Li Ying] told The Hollywood Reporter in Berlin, where “Yasukuni” screened at the Berlin International Film Festival’s Forum sidebar. “The threats have gotten worse and worse as we have gotten closer to the Japanese theatrical release of the film in April.”
From Mainichi:
Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine has found itself with an unexpected hit on its hands — a rap song dedicated to kamikaze pilots and using lyrics from their farewell letters written immediately before their suicide missions,
More the Roppongi Hills Gang than the Sugarhill Gang, it’s hardly ‘Fight For Your Right (To Party)’.
Still, those swords can be considered ‘bling’, can’t they?
Just don’t mention the Wu-Tang Clan to them.
Listen to an Arei Raise rap track here.
A man who is a member of right-wing group in Japan has been arrested for giving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the finger. . . Literally. . .
The man was upset that Abe failed to visit Yasukuni Shrine on the anniversay of Japan’s defeat in World War II, and so he cut off his little finger and sent it to Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party headquarters.
An envelope delivered to the Liberal Democratic Party headquarters in Tokyo also contained a letter of protest and a disk of photographs of the 54-year-old man cutting off his finger, a police official in Okayama Prefecture, western Japan, said.
“I thought they would ignore me if I just sent the letter, so I put my little finger in as well,” Kyodo news agency quoted the man as telling police.
Removing part of a finger is a traditional form of punishment or atonement among gangsters in Japan.
Japan’s former agriculture minister Yoshinobu Shimamura (Center) and other lawmakers visit Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo April 23, 2007. Interestingly, the Japanese Prime Minister has stuck to his word and has not visited the shrine, a place of contention for Korean and Chinese nationals.
Photograph by REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon (JAPAN)
Two guards walk by the front entrance of Yasukuni jinja in Tokyo. If you have an interest in Japanese history, there is a museum on the Yasukuni grounds that I believe is a must-see. You can read more about Yasukuni Jinja here.
The above photo is by REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon (JAPAN)
Bloomberg Media is reporting that it is possible that the Japanese government had a hand in quietly seeing convicted war criminals such as Tojo Hideki added to the register of names at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.
Japan’s government didn’t force the controversial Yasukuni Shrine to honor war criminals, the country’s top officials said.
The government decades ago proposed that the Tokyo shrine honor those convicted of crimes during World War II, documents released by the National Diet Library yesterday suggest. Minutes from a 1969 meeting of health ministry and Yasukuni officials show an agreement that 12 Class-A war criminals should be made eligible for enshrinement, “while avoiding any announcement.”
The Associated Press is also reporting on this story as well.
Japan’s premier Thursday denied any wrongdoing after documents suggested past governments quietly asked a Shinto shrine to honour war criminals, setting the stage for a major diplomatic row.
I am unclear who first broke this story but its curious that no Japanese media sourse has, as of the publishing of this article here on Japundit, covered the story. Interesting.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Saturday visited a Tokyo shrine honoring a former emperor. The move may be aimed at appeasing nationalist conservatives while defusing criticism of his support for visits to a controversial war monument.
Public broadcaster NHK carried footage of Abe attending Meiji Shrine in downtown Tokyo in heavy rain. Meiji is a popular shrine with few political connotations, and draws many worshippers during New Year’s holidays.
Visits by Abe’s predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, to another Tokyo shrine (Yasukuni) have sparked outrage among Japan’s neighbours who saw it as a glorification of Tokyo’s militarist past.
The Yasukuni shrine honors Japan’s war dead, including convicted WWII criminals, and Koizumi’s visits particularly angered China and South Korea where memories of Tokyo’s often brutal wartime occupation are deeply entrenched.
Abe has not attended Yasukuni since he took over from Koizumi in September last year, although he reportedly went there in April. He has expressed his support for such visits by Japanese leaders, but has so far kept quiet on whether he plans to go to Yasukuni as prime minister.
Former U.S. President George H. W. Bush in a recent trip to Beijing had harsh words for the Yasukuni Shrine, saying that it twists Japan’s World War II history.
Bush, a WWII veteran, criticized the repeated visit to the shrine by former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
The materials on the war displayed in the shrine are “deviated from history”, he said.
“Our country was attacked — openly, aggressively, surprisingly by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, so they ought not to try to deny history,” Bush said.
“I think a country, when it makes mistakes like that, should admit them and should work to calm the troubled waters and not exacerbate as Prime Minister Koizumi did when he went to the shrine,” Bush said.
Bush also said that Japan “did insufferably bad things to the Chinese people.”
A trio of real winners in today’s Japan Times by staff writer Eric Prideaux.
In Riding with the rightists Prideaux takes “his tape, his camera and his time to get to know some of those who bellow their rightwing beliefs from scary ‘sound trucks’ that disturb the peace throughout Japan.”
Steel grilles cover their windows and patriotic slogans plaster their sides. Thunderous rhetoric and martial music blast from huge speakers mounted on top, while people in paramilitary uniforms glower out grim-faced. These fortresses on wheels look like they could quell a riot in the Gaza Strip — but instead they’re to be found patrolling some of the world’s most expensive real estate along central Tokyo’s glitzy Ginza shopping street, around the Imperial Palace, revered national shrines and despised foreign embassies.
They are the (generally) black trucks that are the intimidating signature of Japan’s uyoku (rightwing) political activists — an element of society little understood by the average citizen, let alone foreign residents or visitors often moved to recoil in fear from the vehemence of the nationalistic passion they so stridently broadcast.
Then in NATIONALIST HATREDS BORN OF WAR: ‘God of death’ seethes with rage he interviews Shinichi Kamijo, founder of the nationalist group Gishin Gokoku-kai.
Home renovator Shinichi Kamijo has three tattoos of swastikas: one on each shoulder and another smack dab between his sizeable pectoral muscles — right above the words, “Heil Hitler.”
A black belt in karate, and built like a bull, Kamijo, 37, also has the word “Death” tattooed across the back of his neck — “as a courtesy to foreigners,” he said, mostly U.S. Navy servicemen he used to brawl with in Tokyo’s Roppongi party district.
As he explains: “It means, ‘I am the god of death and I will mete death upon you.’ ”
Yet it was with an affable smile and in polite and cultivated Japanese that Kamijo — who was a teenage motorcycle gang leader before founding the still-thriving 17-member nationalist group Gishin Gokoku-kai at age 26 — presented his logic for hating not only Chinese and Koreans but also his fellow Japanese who sympathize with them.
He finishes up with WHERE RIGHT MEETS LEFT: Yasukuni is a ‘duty’. which chronicles the relationship between the rightists and the Yasukuni Shrine.
“Take World War II. At that time, of course, there was foreign pressure on Japan, the only non-colony in Asia. Japan was also attacking other countries, and I disapprove of that. Japan created Manchuria for its own profit and invaded Southeast Asia and Korea — I acknowledge that. I do believe that Korea was a Japanese colony. At that time, though, Japan wasn’t the only colonizer; Britain, France and the rest of Europe were colonizing Asia — as well as the Philippines, China and Hong Kong. The United States was involved. They most likely wanted to make Japan a colony, too.
“Liberating Asia was one reason Japan had for invasion. OK, that may have been what the Japanese government told the population to get everybody on board. But Japanese at the time believed it.
Every one a must-read.
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84 Japanese lawmakers visited Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on October 18 to attend the shrine’s annual autumn festival and honor Japan’s war dead.
hi zakiah
FRCKN GAY