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© 2015 AFPChina slams Japan after Abe's wife visits Yasukuni shrine
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Yubaru
And to those that say what she does in private doesn't count? Yeah right, Abe's speech loses all meaning when his wife and cabinet go directly to the main source of friction with China and thumb their noses at them.
darnname
I didn't see any photos of her "thumbing her nose" at anyone. I also think that people should be able to do whatever they want. A lot of war dead are remembered there, not just the ones from the Pacific war. They all should be ignored?
What would be the reaction if Japan said that China should reflect deeply about killing 40 million or so Chinese in the purge by Mao. A political party founded by a mass murderer is whining about this middle-aged woman praying for the dead?
Speed
Where's the volume knob for China. I'd like to turn it off.
OssanAmerica
70 Years ago Japan was a militant fascist nation. Today it is China a militant dictatorship that needs to... "make more efforts that will help enhance mutual trust and achieve reconciliation with neighboring countries in Asia,”
BertieWooster
Coming straight after the "apology that was not quite an apology" speech that had been put together at tax payer expense over several weeks by a committee of academics, Abe's proxy visit to Yasukuni doesn't exactly exude sincerity.
Franz Fischer
The right heading should be "Abe sends his wife to YASUKUNI
Christopher Glen
Exactly
plasticmonkey
Chiran is the new Yasukuni-Lite. A place that masquerades as a place to honor the war dead, but actually functions as a shrine to glorify acts of violence and self-sacrifice in service to the state.
Just read The Eternal Zero, among most successful pop culture propaganda pieces for historical revisionism. Beneath the thin veneer of victimhood lies the real message: that negating one's own rationality and dying for the kokutai (for whatever purpose) is a noble virtue that modern Japanese must regain.
Above all, Akie Abe's visit to Yasukuni was a message to the Japanese people.
Irrelevant.
It doesn't matter what you think of the Chinese or South Korean governments. Historical revisionism in Japan is shameful in its own right. It is an irresponsible way to mislead the Japanese public about the past, which has never been thoroughly dealt with domestically. And not for reasons of international relations.
The most disturbing aspect of Abe's nationalistic agenda is how he intends to use this against the Japanese people themselves. Abe is happy to let the public think that this issue is simply about the grudges of China and Korea. What most Japanese do not realize is that the issue of history is ultimately about the nature of democracy in Japan and where it is headed.
Kenny Iyekawa
"What would be the reaction if Japan said that China should reflect deeply about killing 40 million or so Chinese in the purge by Mao."
Not even remotely the same argument...Chinese killing millions of Chinese as opposed to us killing millions of Chinese. Wake-up man...
Kabukilover
Whether Ms Abe decided spontaneously to visit Yaskuni (as opposed to, say, shopping) or was sent by her husband the result is the same. After Abe's non-apology this pored salt in the wounds of Japan's former victims. Abe knew this would cause anger against japan and I am sure so did his wife. So why did she do this at this time? I am not asking a rhetorical question. I really and truly don't get it. Whatever the answer is, it was a stupid move.
nigelboy
Classic example of shifting goal posts by China.
Before Emperor Xi, China was smart enough not to pi$$ off the Japanese public in general but to earmark the criticism towards the government. Now they managed to pi$$ everybody which shows is reflected in the opinion poll.
sfjp330
nigelboy AUG. 22, 2015 - 09:53AM JSTChina was smart enough not to pi$$ off the Japanese public in general but to earmark the criticism towards the government. Now they managed to pi$$ everybody which shows is reflected in the opinion poll.
How time has changed, but Japan has not. How can you compare? Thirty years ago, very few japanese companies had direct investment in China. Now they have 20K Japanese companies making billions. Ask these Japanese executives working in China if Mrs. Abe is doing the right thing of visiting Yasukuni. Take a opinion poll. You might be wrong. Who is pissing off who?
nigelboy
FDI to China has been going down since the uncivilized riots by the brainwashed masses. There are seminars in Japan where it advises how to divest in China. Your repeated "20k" was before the riots. Or perhaps you missed the recent "accident" where more are serious about "China risk".
Bgood41
China is worshiping Mao Tse Tung, the mass murdered of millions during cultural revolution without trial, and the world turns the other cheeks to give billions Chinese a change in civilize world. For now, China turns to be an ugly bully monster taking advantages from the rest of the world. China's model is not wanted by the world, only for Chinese.
Alistair Carnell
Nigelboy, you like using this expression 'moving the goalposts' , but I think you fail to understand what it really means.
The speech that Muppet face gave, is rendered meaningless, once yasukuni comes into the equation.
sfjp330
nigelboy AUG. 22, 2015 - 10:15AM JSTFDI to China has been going down since the uncivilized riots by the brainwashed masses.
FDI has nothing to do with the riots. It has more to do with the trends in both the Chinese and Japanese economies. Japanese companies are finding China a less attractive manufacturing base due to rising wages and other costs. They instead have been shifting new spending into Southeast Asia. Since the Chinese mainland has ample capital of its own, it no longer needs as much new investment as before for its over-built manufacturing sector.
Based on imports of both countries, trade value remains at same level (around $344 billion) of previous year in both imports and exports. Japan's deficit continues for three consecutive years. Not much as changed.
Source: http://www.jetro.go.jp/en/news/releases/2015/20150225183-news.html
nigelboy
August 1985- PM should not visit Yasukuni on an "official" basis (despite 20 PLUS visits by PM's after to the enshrinnent of so called class A)
Koizumi era, no visits by PM.
Around 2007, no cabinet members should visit.
Around 2008, no lawmakers should visit.
And now, 2015. No wife of PM should visit.
Triring
Auuuh, amount in trade really doesn't have much relevance in amount in direct investment. As for trade deficit it has more to do with shutting down the nuclear power reactors then anything else. If you are talking about governmental budget deficit that really has nothing with trade with mainland china.
One thing for sure is Japanese corporations are now focusing on SEA countries and sees PRC as a risk.
CGB Spender
Of course they do. China takes every chance to make Japan look bad, no matter how much these are Japan's personal matters. The CCP needs to keep patriotism high among their populace so everything Japan does that is related to WWII history can be shifted and bent to make Japan look as the aggressive enemy, while obscuring the true nature of the CCP which is busy with claiming sea territory of weaker countries.
advill
Ungentlemanly to slam ladies. Next, China will slam the Japanese people who do not follow their edicts. BTW, China could be slammed too - it started with HK protestors, their own unhappy and detained citizens; and recently it appears that a good number of Taiwanese now realize it is now "1 Country, 1 controlled system" if and when unification comes. That's a fact (as recently shown in HK). This cannot be denied even with the constant propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party. Free the social media if China dares & stop making excuses & try to hoodwink others.
katsu78
Day 1: "On the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, I bow my head deeply before the souls of all those who perished both at home and abroad. I express my feelings of profound grief and my eternal, sincere condolences."
Day 2: "Dear, here's some cash. Can you please go to the place that says we never did anything wrong and give it to them for me? Also say a prayer to some class A war criminals for me if you would."
Day 3: Well, that job's done! Guess it's time to focus on the economy.
Day 4: Hey, wait, wut? Why are you visiting China, Mrs. Park? Who could have possibly foreseen you might not be satisfied with my position on our shared history?
kwatt
It make a lot of sense if his wife has been visiting Yasukuni every year since when she was married with her husband. But she seems as arrogant as he is if she visits it more positively since only when Abe became a prime mininster.
katsu78
I really wish we could all collectively retire this red herring argument. Japan has no reason to demand China reflect on deaths caused by Mao's party. Japan is not a stakeholder in that dispute. China is a stakeholder in Japan's killing of Chinese people.
If I break into your house one night and punch you in the face, I don't get to make you magically stop holding a grudge against me because that one time you punched your brother in the face. That just plain wouldn't make any sense. Mao's deaths are the concern of the Chinese people. It is their job to advocate for those dead. And incidentally, since people are generally more likely to focus on slights against them from people in the out-group than people in the in-group, maybe if you want China to start addressing those deaths, you might encourage Japan to stop distracting them from it by celebrating their past militarism through Yasukuni.
WA4TKG
WHO CARES ?! Find some REAL NEWS to report please.
Yubaru
About a billion people!
Wc626
During the initial occupation of Japan by the Americans, led by MacArthur, Yasukuni should've been bulldozed to the ground. In it's place, some kind of peace memorial (nothing religious).
Didn't PM Abe express deep regret for the pain & suffering japan caused? Obviously he didn't mean it, knowing where his wife would visit.
I hope China has a spectacularly wonderful parade next month.
FButukakala
Tell China to clean up their back yard
Triring
How do you know that she hasn't?
It's not like it will be taken up by the news even if she did.
Shumatsu_Samurai
I suppose Abe should slap her around a bit and tell her what she can and can't do. Because Japanese women should just do what they're told.
/sarcasm
Christopher Glen
She could've gone to Chidorigafuchi and no-one would have batted an eyelid. But she certainly didn't go to Yasukuni on a whim.
badman
Not having an indisputable mea culpa is good for the diplomatic dance on both sides. Domestically Abe can claim he didn't truly apologize as his statements were relatively ambiguous and from a foreign relations standpoint Japan can continue to needle their nemeses and maintain this as a bargaining chip.
On the other hand China and S Korea retain benefit of the ultimate strawman which helps them to delfect domestic criticism any time that flares up.
My college roommate works for the US Dept of State and we have spoken several times on the subject. He said it is quite common for governments to have back channel discussions in order to maintain status quo to manipulate public opinion. He did not say that is definitely happening here, but he was clear that it wouldn't surprise him a bit if theiy have a mutual agreement to play ticky tack in the middle without ever committing to anything final which would negate any mutual advantages.
Richard Froiland
How much groveling is necessary? None of the people in power, let alone still living, had anything to do with the aggression of the previous century.
Félix Lorenzo Martín Moro
China wants people feels guilty to be japanesse
OssanAmerica
The United States does not consider Yasukuni to be an issue, and does not consider visiting it to constitute "glorifying war" or "honoring war criminals". Actually, no country does besides China and their satellite South Korea. It's ridiculous enough that a foreign country believes that it has a right to dictate what politicians in another country do or go within their own country, but to extend that same stupid concept to a civilian who holds no official office displays utter disregard of individual human rights and freedoms under a democratic system. China frequently treats issues outside their country with the same authoritarian point of view that they treat domestic issues, but there really is no excuse for people not living in China to parrot the same view, after all, the same freedom that allows the wife of a PM to visit a shrine in a private capacity is the one that allows a poster to hang around a website forum and dish out anti-Japan comments day in and day out. Maybe they would be happier if civilians were not permitted freedom to visit wherever they want and poster were not free to post whatever they want?
Kenny Iyekawa
"Actually, no country does besides China and their satellite South Korea."
Ummm...I'm Japanese and I have issues with Abe-san's wifey showing up at Yasukuni...and they do honour war criminals there, if you believe all that souls bullsh*t ... it's called symbolism and optics
Yubaru
BS....When Abe visited Yasukuni himself in 2013 the US was ticked off at him because of the visit. His visiting hurts relations with China, and Korea. It puts the US in a difficult position.
The US government has, in the not too distant past, also told troops stationed in Japan to avoid visiting Yasukuni as well.
Yasukuni is a thorn in the side of the US in it's relations with Japan, China, and Korea. Japan keeps thumbing their noses at all of them.
toshiko
Akie's biggest problem is she can speak up, She gets criticized by Abe haters no matter what she does or says. They even created phony First Lady position for her to criticize her every action.
Kenny Iyekawa
@toshiko You know what the solution to all this is? Get those Yasukuni groundskeepers to remove all vestiges of those 14 Class-A warcriminals from the shrine. Put there souls in some cave in 琉球諸島. Problem solved. Shinzo-san and Aki-san can thank me later.
Jay Que
Correction: "Communists in China should reflect deeply about killing 60 million or so Chinese in the purge by Mao."
Yubaru
Wrong....The first lady position has always been there, the wives of the PM's in Japan have always been around and played their part. It's just recently that the wives are getting more press, which makes them even more public figures than before.
Dont forget about the aliens and Hatoyama.
Abe's wife is a public figure and she knows it!
newyorknewyork
@Speed
It's not so much a "volume" issue, it's a 'quantity' issue.
I do hope China gives up all this anti-Japan propaganda nonsense. It's going to get very old and backfire on them.
Unfortunately, the CCP propaganda wing just does not cut it when it comes to Western PR and advertising standards.
What they need to do is hire a Western agency and do it properly. Focus on the positive of China (if there is any left) and not the negative of Japan.
They'll lose the PR war against polite Japan.
Come on, folks, killing off your own citizens - be they innocent and impoverish peasants or the skilled intelligentsia of your nation - is far worse than killing off foreign enemies.
25 million died in laogai concentration camps alone.
I mean, you may be a pacifist and anti-war but at least you can see the rationale behind killing the enemy.
Killing off your own people in vast genocidal sweep, and imprisoning millions for thought crimes, is much, much worse.
toshiko
@YubaruAUG. 22, 2015 - 10:19PM JST They even created phony First Lady position for her to criticize her every action.
Wrong....The first lady position has always been there, the wives of the PM's in Japan have always been around and played their part. It's just recently that the wives are getting more press, which makes them even more public figures than before.
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
Is this why old time PM's wives used to get blamed it is their fault when their PM husbands' sex lives are revealed? This means definitions of First lady is omitted for generations: To raise their husbands' illegitimate children. For change, Akie does not have such problrm, So suddenly Japan has First Lady.
OssanAmerica
When did you become a country? But seriously if you're a 日本人 then I'm an エチオピア人。So let's cut the BS ok? Don't know who you think you're fooling.
"You know what the solution to all this is? Get those Yasukuni groundskeepers to remove all vestiges of those 14 Class-A warcriminals from the shrine"
As if that will have any effect on China's anti-Japan policy.
toshiko
Japan usually use Japanese language daily, but not English. First Lady translation is Dai-Ichi Fujin. If you live in Japan, ask any adult Japanese what this means in Japanese society. You will find Akie can not be called first lady. Her husband does not have even Dai-Ni Fujin.
dcog9065
I've said this from the beginning but Abe's wife has always been, and always will be, Abe's soft voice echoing the exact same positions he is presenting. Her innocent political naivety to reinforce Abe's learned politics, her superficial support for liberal causes, as well as her comically silly rhetoric that matches up perfectly with Abe's policies show that she is just a political tactic from the beginning.
In some ways, his wife is even more disgraceful than Abe himself as she herself knows she is being used for nothing more than for political puppetry. If she isn't aware, she's a bigger fool than we thought.
wtfjapan
ive posted this before and will again so those that dont know the reason why the shrine has become a more political than religious symbol.
the main reason its so controversial is because of the Head priest in 1978 decided to include the class A war criminals, it was purely a political and Ideological and nothing to do with the religion itself.
A Head Priest’s Ideological Agenda, Matsudaira Nagayoshi
The impasse continued until Tsukuba’s sudden death in March 1978. Matsudaira Nagayoshi (1915–2005) was installed as head priest in July that year. It is worth going over Matsudaira Nagayoshi’s background. His grandfather, Matsudaira Yoshinaga (1828–90), was the feudal lord of the Fukui domain. In the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, Yoshinaga called for a merger of the shogunate and the imperial court. After the shogunate fell, he was granted a position inside the new Meiji government. Matsudaira’s father, Yoshitami (1882–1948), was the last minister of the Imperial Household. Matsudaira himself was a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Navy during World War II and an officer in the Self-Defense Forces after World War II. His father-in-law, Daigo Tadashige, was a vice admiral in the Imperial Navy. He was tried by the Dutch after the war, convicted of Class B and C war crimes, and executed by rifle shot. He is listed among the war dead honored at Yasukuni Shrine.(6) Matsudaira unequivocally rejected the verdict of the tribunal and argued that the Tokyo Trials had produced a distorted view of history that cast Japan as the sole villain. He was determined from the outset to enshrine Japan’s Class A war criminals at Yasukuni. This was part of an ideological crusade to discredit the Tokyo Trials. Once appointed, he moved quickly. In a secret ceremony on October 17, 1978—just three months after becoming head priest—he enshrined all 14, including Matsuoka and Nagano.(7) When the story broke in April the following year, the public reaction was relatively muted. But controversy erupted with a vengeance six years later, when Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro became the first postwar prime minister to pay homage at the shrine in an official capacity. When Nakasone and his cabinet visited Yasukuni on August 15, 1985 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the visit unleashed a storm of criticism from Japan’s Asian neighbors. The next year Nakasone agreed not to visit the shrine in deference to the views of Chinese leader Hu Yaobang. From that time on, visits by cabinet officials to Yasukuni Shrine have been a hot-button issue, drawing intense criticism from abroad and stymying diplomatic progress between Japan and its neighbors. The ultimate source of this ongoing conflict was the enshrinement of Class A war criminals in 1978. And the enshrinement of this group cannot be attributed simply to religious or filial impulses. In fact, it was a blatantly ideological and political act driven by an urge to justify and legitimize a highly controversial chapter in Japanese history.
OssanAmerica
Because China made it so. And it's satellite South Korea joined them. No need for a long dissertation to answer that question.
Serrano
When are they going to get rid of the shrines to the war criminals in Yasukuni so this would stop being an issue with the countries that were brutalized because of their mis-leadership?
nath
There are no shrines to war criminals, only a register of names.
The souls have been purified now, so they are not criminals any more.
Serrano
"There are no shrines to war criminals, only a register of names."
If that be the case, why is it said that 14 war criminals are enshrined there?
"The souls have been purified now, so they are not criminals any more."
Somehow the Koreans and the Chinese don't take much comfort from that.
nigelboy
Just China. And they criticized Nakasone for making this visit a full "official' visit. Now you see how far China has moved her goal posts.
nath
Bad translation.
"enshrining" merely means writing their name in a register and saying some prayers for the dead.
It's not like there are little "spirit houses" for them to live in and be worshiped I get the impression is how the Chinese and others see it.
Somehow the Koreans and the Chinese don't take much comfort from that.
Had they not been whipped up by their government, press and compensation seekers, they would not even have known it exists.
Do the Communists believe in spirit?
That is a serious question because I think part of the Chinese response is based on their ancient spirit and burial tradition.
Presumably this is where they lose the plot and start talking about "worship".
But, logically, if you are offended because you believe there are 2.5 million souls floating around the grounds, then you have to accept the rest of the beliefs that they have now been purified.
The Koreans and the Chinese obviously need re-re-education.
nigelboy
How in the world do you "mute" a public reaction? How do you explain the six years of 20 plus visits by the PM's without a sound from China?
nath
Actually, originally enshrining just meant saying their names.
The fault lies with the uninformed and hyped reporting of it by Western and, presumably, the Chinese and Korean media who are not just making no effort to understand what it all means, but deliberately getting it wrong.
turbotsat
By the:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_Curtain
nigelboy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_Curtain
??? Chinese Embassy was already established after the Joint Communique of 1972. The first Ambasaddor was assigned in 1973. The said embassy had access to all the media within Japan and of course, had direct communication with Beijing.
toshiko
When Yasukuni was created after Boshin war, winners only enshrined winners dead souls, not Shogun side such as Fukui Ken soldiers of Matsudaira's home base people's ancestors.
@wtfjapan,
Instead cut and paste, learn history of Yasukuni first such as what kind of animals are enshrined for starter.