Banned from the shrine

The Providence Journal: Japan has long been eager to move past the dark deeds of World War II as it has stepped into its role as a peaceable democracy. Yet emotions can still flare over its role in that war.
In recent years, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has stirred controversy by making visits to Japan's Yasukuni Shrine, where the country's war dead -- including war criminals -- are honored. Koizumi has made a tradition of the visits, but has carefully avoided saying whether they are official or personal. In truth, they appear to be highly political, and doubtless to his advantage in winning elections.
But last month, a Japanese court ruled that the visits are official and religious acts, and thus in violation of Japan's constitutional separation of religion and state. (A lower-court ruling had deemed the visits personal, and thus acceptable.)
The prime minister's visits have caused no end of recriminations from China, and elsewhere in Asia, where memories remain raw of Japan's conduct during World War II. (China, of course, has yet to apologize for the crimes of the regime's founder, Mao Zedong, one of history's worst mass murderers.) Koizumi's visits to the Japanese shrine have also been denounced in the United States and Britain.
Insincere apologies
Japan's attitudes toward its not-too-remote past are complex. The apologies -- and there have been plenty over the years -- have sometimes seemed less than forthright or sincere. And at memorials to the Japanese as victims, such as the burned-out dome at Hiroshima, there are discordant paeans to the "brave" Japanese who served at Nanking, supposedly working to help the Chinese people. Most historians have a different view of the Rape of Nanking.
In truth, honoring those who died in wars can be a morally ambiguous business. President Ronald Reagan's 1985 visit to a German military cemetery containing the graves of S.S. officers aroused international controversy, and anguish among those who had survived Nazi horrors, even though the ceremony had been designed to demonstrate reconciliation between the United States and Germany. In this country, emotions remain mixed over honoring of Confederate heroes, who fought to destroy the Union and preserve slavery.