October 18, 2024

Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru on October 17 offered a sacred tree called “masakaki” to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo in the name of the prime minister at his own expense on the occasion of the shrine’s annual autumn festival.

To offer a sacred “masakaki” tree to Yasukuni Shrine on a festive occasion corresponds to paying a visit to the shrine. Ishiba’s act of making an offering to Yasukuni conflicts with his previous statements.

Ishiba has maintained that he is determined not to visit the place where Class-A war criminals, former military and government leaders who led Japan into the war while knowing they would lose, are enshrined as “gods”.

In the September Liberal Democratic Party presidential election campaign, Ishida appeared in a news video posted on rightwing newspaper Sankei Shimbun’s YouTube channel. In the video, he said that he does not want to go to Yasukuni Shrine where the Emperor refuses to visit, adding that if elected as the prime minister, he will not make a visit to this shrine.

Ishiba in a Mainichi Shimbun article (local edition) dated September 23, 2006, expressed his view of young LDP politicians and stated, “They appear to believe all wars involving Japan were ‘just wars’. I wonder if they are in their right minds.” He indicated his recognition that the Sino-Japanese War was obviously Japan’s war of aggression against China and that Japan’s annexation of Korea enabled Japan’s decades-long colonization of the Korean Peninsula.

Ishiba in the August 2006 issue of the monthly magazine “Ronza” criticized the then Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro for visiting Yasukuni Shrine on August 15, the anniversary of the end of the Pacific War in Japan. Referring to the shrine’s historical view glorifying Japan’s past war of aggression, Ishiba stated, “PM Koizumi went to worship at such a shrine. This is a problem.” He asserted that the prime minister should not visit Yasukuni as long as it enshrines Class-A war criminals.