Japan Press Weekly

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2014 February 12 - 18 [HISTORY]

PM’s visit to Yasukuni challenges post-war international order: JCP Kasai

Japanese Communist Party member of the House of Representatives Kasai Akira on February 12 criticized Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, which glorifies Japan’s past war of aggression, as an affront to the post-war international order.

Kasai at a House Budget Committee meeting grilled PM Abe about his visit to the controversial shrine at the end of last year which has provoked global criticism.

The JCP lawmaker cited the fact that the literature of Yasukuni’s war memorial museum Yushukan and remarks by Yasukuni’s chief priest describe Japan’s aggressive war as an “inevitable war for its self-existence and self-defense as well as for achieving a free, equal world.” It is obvious that the Yasukuni Shrine justifies the past war of aggression, he pointed out.

Showing the shrine’s leaflets for foreign visitors printed in English, Chinese, and Korean, Kasai reported that in their accounts of the Tokyo Tribunal of War Criminals the leaflets state that more than 1,000 people were “labeled war criminals and executed after having been tried by the Allies (the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands and China, etc.),” calling them “martyrs.”

Prime Minister Abe just replied, “It is inappropriate for me to make comments.”

The JCP representative referred to the fact that the common ground of the post-war international order is to acknowledge the war of aggression waged by Japan, Germany, and Italy as a war without rational cause and that Japan returned to the world community by accepting the Potsdam Declaration and the Tokyo Tribunal judgment.

He said, “Japanese leader’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine is regarded as a challenge to the existing international order. Abe should stop his visits as they seriously undermine the national interest of maintaining the trust of the global community and friendship with neighboring countries.”