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.

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.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki denied the report claiming that China and S.Korea reached an accord with PM Shinzo Abe on the thorny Yasukuni issue.

It is not true that there has been a promise that the prime minister will not visit Yasukuni Shrine,” Shiozaki told reporters Friday. “There are various political difficulties between Japan and China, but we share a mutual resolve to firmly re-establish future-oriented relations by overcoming these difficulties.

Whether the Japanese government is trying to keep it as a secret matter, or it is a move by South Korean officials to pressure Shinzo Abe to make an end to Yasukuni visits is still unknown. Only time will tell!

Via Mainichi Daily News

It has only been a month since Shinzo Abe won the LDP vote and became Japan’s 90th Prime Minister. And already, Tokyo’s business and political elite are talking about new opportunities with their economically booming neighbour to the West. 

Japan and China have reached an understanding over the famed Yasukuni Shrine. Although the precise details are not clear, insiders are saying that Abe has made a “significant concession” to China on the topic of the shrine. 

Yasukuni Shrine, located in Tokyo is a shrine that honours Japan’s War Dead and includes the names of a number of individuals who were convicted of war crimes during World War II. 

Geoffrey York of the Globe and Mail reported on Thursday, October 5^th that inside analysts are speculating that Abe must have offered a private assurance to Beijing that he will not personally make visits to the shrine. 

Mr. Abe was quoted after the deal was announced, “All of us- Japan, China and South Korea – concluded that we should begin new steps towards the future”. He continued by saying “ We intend to move forward in a future-looking relationship.” 

There are many political and economical reasons for Japan to be doing its best to impress Big Red. China’s economy is soaring at a staggering 9% growth rate a year. Japanese businesses are clearly putting pressure on the new Prime Minister to resolve uncomfortable issues that may jeopardize growing business ties between the two countries adding to the fact that trade and investment links have been crucial to Japan’s recent economic recovery. 

Prime Minister Abe confirmed that he will travel to Beijing on Sunday and then to Seoul on Monday to meet the leaders of China and Korea for talks.

Two minor events involving Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine seem to have escaped widespread notice. That’s unfortunate, because both may be more important than people realize.

First James Hoagland, now George Will–more of the pundits overseas are starting to get it.

Will’s latest column deals with Yasukuni specifically and Japan’s relationships with its neighbors in general. And like Hoagland, he provides us with another dollop of common sense:

Such as:

But both of Japan’s most important East Asian neighbors, China and South Korea, now have national identities partly derived from their experience as victims of Japan’s 1910-45 militarism. To a significant extent, such national identities are political choices. Leftist ideology causes South Korea’s regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA.

And:

Shinzo Abe, a nationalist who is almost certain to replace Koizumi, who is retiring next month, seems inclined to continue something like Koizumi’s policy, and for at least one of Koizumi’s reasons: China should not dictate the actions of Japan’s prime ministers.

Will also includes a fascinating comment from an unidentified “senior Japanese official”:

…(S)peaking about the incessant incursions by Chinese submarines and military aircraft into Japanese sea and air spaces, a senior Japanese official casually made the startling suggestion that China’s regime, like Japan’s regime before the war, does not fully control its military.

The columnist also makes an observation about the real state of relations between Japan and China that is similar to ones I have made here about Japan and South Korea:

But relations other than diplomatic ones are flourishing. China is, after America, the second-most popular destination for Japanese tourists….and in 2004, for the first time since 1945, Japan’s trade with China was larger than with the United States.

Here’s the entire column.

OK, it’s like this. A politician makes some remarks about Yasukuni that are not to your liking or sense of patriotism, so you resolve to set fire to his house. You then plan to ritually disembowel yourself on his doorstep, thus ’showing him’ and ensuring yourself martyr-like status for eternity as a grateful nation looks on in adoration.

Or not, as the case may be.

Perhaps it’s just emblematic of Japan’s decline that rightists can’t even commit seppuku properly these days.

According to documents left by Tomohiko Tomita, the late head of the Imperial Household Agency and aid to Emperor Showa (Hirohito), the Emperor decided to stop visiting Yasukuni Shrine after Class-A war criminals were enshrined there.

The notebook suggests that Emperor Showa made the remarks in April 1988. “Class-A war criminals have been enshrined. Even Matsuoka and Shiratori (have been enshrined). I’ve heard that Tsukuba dealt cautiously with the matter, but …” part of the note reads.

“I wonder what the current chief priest, who is the son of Matsudaira, thinks about it. I think Matsudaira (senior) had a strong belief in peace,” the note says. “That’s why I haven’t paid a visit to the shrine since then. That’s my belief.”

Word is that China has set up a special team specifically tasked with coming up with ways to improve relations with Japan.

Specifically, the team is in charge of handling policies that relate directly to Japan and advising Beijing’s leaders on ways to put bilateral relations on a better footing, the sources said.

Why the change of heart? Apparently it was because the Chicoms realized that Japan, and Prime Minister Koizumi in particular, would not be bowed by the emotional outbursts of its neighbors.

It was decided that unilateral criticism of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the Shinto shrine was not helping matters and that Koizumi would only harden his stance.

The team, therefore, sought to present a less confrontational stance toward Japan ahead of the Aug. 15 anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II when Koizumi may pay tribute at Yasukuni Shrine once again.

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso has declared himself in the run to succeed Junichiro Koizumi when the prime minister steps down as he says he will do this September. Aso says he is confident of securing the backing of the minimum of 20 lawmakers required to run.

Aso points out that of the four prospective candidates, only he has stated clearly that he will run.

Aso is known for making public statements that irritate Japan’s Asian neighbors.

In one instance, he called China a military threat. He has also accused Beijing of using beautiful women as spies to lure Japanese diplomats into revealing classified information.

He also credited Taiwan’s high educational standards to Japanese colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century. Tokyo’s imperial conquests are remembered bitterly in the region.

With Aso in the race for prime minister, this autumn’s contest promises to an interesting one, indeed.

Kyodo News is reporting that Yasukuni Shrine has started to distribute brochures in Korean and Chinese in an attempt to allow the people in those countries to better understand their positions.

The brochures explain the history and other details of the shrine. An English version is also available.

“There are an increasing number of visitors from China, Taiwan and South Korea, and the brochures are aimed at enhancing foreign visitors’ understanding of Yasukuni Shrine,” an official said.

The brochures say Yasukuni enshrines those who “were cruelly and unjustly tried as war criminals by a sham-like tribunal of the Allied Forces.”

They also refer to the Japan-China war, which started in 1937, as the China Incident and to World War II as the Great East Asian War.

“War is truly sorrowful. Yet to maintain the independence and peace of the nation and for the prosperity of all of Asia, Japan was forced into conflict,” the brochures say.

Thanks to Mr. Pink.

Japan Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe has indicated Yasukuni Shrine visits will continue to be an issue if he succeeds Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi who is stepping at the end of this year. Abe said that he would continue to visit Yasukuni if he becomes Prime Minister.

“My view on visits to Yasukuni Shrine is the same as I have explained many times,” Abe said at a regular press conference. “If there is any misunderstanding, it’s important to explain our views sincerely to China and South Korea and try to resolve such misunderstandings.”