Simon Foston comments

OssanAmericaToday  01:54 pm JST

China started with Communism as the adhesive to hold the people together. But that has been replaced with Nationalism. Just read the posts here on JT.

Oh? Which ones, specifically?

Great BirdToday  04:34 am JST

She's also been labeled a "right-wing" nationalist by a lot more than Chinese state-run media. Why single that one source out? Trying to imply it's a baseless claim from big bad China?

Possibly the insinuation is that it's only the Chinese who get bothered that she's a neo-nazi, so Japanese people shouldn't make too much of a fuss about it.

albaleoToday  03:44 am JST

"Their country.."

And also my mother-in-law's country, and she holds quite different views.

Some would have you believe that's impossible because apparently all Japanese people feel the same way and only foreigners, i.e. the Chinese and Koreans, have an issue with this. Perhaps clueless westerners such as ourselves simply don't understand Japanese attitudes so what we might see as criticism is in fact total approval. War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom and all that.

Aoi AzuuriToday  10:34 am JST

They 70 are far-right politicians who want to justify wartime totalitarian regime and war crime and want to Japan back to prewar state.

They needn't bother with the pretence they're just going as private citizens either, because they're all wearing their Diet member pins. I bet the newspapers got plenty of advance notice from their offices that they would be going.

Agent_NeoApr. 22  09:58 pm JST

Mr. Simon, your reaction is exactly what would be impossible in Japan.

We don't use "Mr." or "Mrs" or "Ms" with first names. The rest of this comment looks like a largely irrelevant non sequitur with lots of generalisations that aren't worth responding to.

Japan is completely different from the idea that Chinese and Korean bad people remain bad even after they are dead, and are people to be spat upon.

Do you mean that Japanese murderers, rapists, serial killers, gangsters and hardened criminals aren't seen as bad after they're dead? No one seems to think of enshrining them anywhere.

TokyoLivingToday  02:52 am JST

Their country..

There you go again. You parrot this tedious mantra every single time. You don't get it, do you. These visits are unconstitutional. Their rules are that politicians can visit the shrine as private citizens but not in any sort of official capacity. This is nothing but a shameless PR stunt for political purposes.

TaiwanIsNotChinaToday  02:53 am JST

Japan has several advantages France did not in 1940, chief among them being an unsinkable aircraft carrier and missile platform.

It doesn't matter how unsinkable it is if it's not deployed effectively. The German navy in WW1 was pretty impressive and the French navy in WW2 was nothing to sniff at either. It didn't make any difference in either case.

Agent_NeoToday  09:47 pm JST

No one can judge that the war dead died in vain.

Yes, they can. If you commit your troops to a banzai charge and they all get slaughtered but you lose the battle anyway, then they all died in vain.

In war, each side's justice clashes, and if you lose, you are the loser. The reason Japan is said to be in the wrong is simply because it lost the war.

Japan got into a war it never had any chance of winning. There were smart generals and admirals who knew that but unfortunately psychotic imbeciles were in charge. They also allied themselves with genocidal monsters in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Don't you think that's wrong?

Japan is surrounded by countries such as China, Russia, and North Korea, and unfortunately they are not people with whom it can be resolved through discussion.

Not by the kinds of politicians that you probably like. They're living proof that the Americans should have hanged a few more war criminals instead of letting them out of prison to run the country again and leaving it in the hands of the worthless offspring they spawned.

Therefore, if we renounce war, we cannot protect our country, as we can see from Ukraine.

France couldn't protect itself in 1940 despite its advantages in terms of manpower, tanks, planes and fortifications. What makes you think clueless amateurs and armchair generals in Japan can do any better?

"We should never forget the history of how the spirits of many fallen heroes laid the foundation for a peaceful and prosperous Japan after the war."

I'm not really sure how their pointless deaths could lay the foundation for anything. I doubt if the politicians who keep coming out with this know either, but say it because they think it sounds good and they've heard American politicians saying the same kind of thing. The difference is that America won. It doesn't make quite so much sense when these men all die and the country still gets flattened and colonised.

itsonlyrocknrollApr. 21  10:38 pm JST

It is the time to confront one's enemies.

Oh? And achieve what, exactly? Get real. Ishiba is going to do no such thing. He's not very keen on the whole Yasukuni circus, in case you hadn't noticed.

Agent_NeoToday  07:19 pm JST

Japanese media outlets such as Kyodo News, which are trying to please China, write articles about this nonsense, but the only ones criticizing it are China and South Korea, so Japan can just ignore it.

Japan can ignore the views of the likes of you too. Probably for the best.

To begin with, it is not a facility that glorifies war criminals.

No, it just absolves them of their sins and enshrines them as part of the kami of the shrine, along with the souls of all those that they caused to be pointlessly killed.

No Japanese citizen would go out of their way to think about such a thing.

Oh? There are 120 million Japanese citizens. Are they all brainwashed sheep like you?

The only people who criticize visits are a few foreigners who have no idea what Yasukuni Shrine is. It's ridiculous.

You don't seem to have much of a clue about the place yourself.

itsonlyrocknrollToday  09:42 pm JST

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, publicly, head held high take the offering to the shrine.

That idea couldn't be more stupid if he went there without any trousers on.

Fighto!Today  10:08 am JST

Kyodo news should not be reporting on this irrelevant "news".

Quite right. Publishing news articles about the religious observances of private citizens is not in the public interest. I suspect some politicians would get a bit upset if they didn't, though.

Negative NancyToday  09:02 am JST

Time to let this embarrasing debarcle fade away for good. If the press stopped giving this column inches, the problem would resolve itself.

I think though, that LDP politicians actually want their activities related to Yasukuni Shrine to get media coverage.

voiceofokinawaToday  04:47 pm JST

Is it in response to the South Korean government's protest against his offering of a sakaki branch to the shrine last time, or is it out of his own philosophy not to visit the shrine?

He seems to have some longstanding views on the subject:

"The government concluded that Japan was doomed to lose a war, yet entered it anyway. They should be held accountable for that... I cannot understand why their actions that led to the defeat of the country, without giving accurate answers to Emperor Shōwa's questions and without informing the public of the truth, are being left unquestioned as 'we are all heroes once we die."

albaleoToday  02:43 am JST

And we probably agree it is right to remember those who died carrying out the orders of others. But should we honour those who didn't die during wartime but promoted the war?

The chief priest at Yasukuni in 1978 apparently thought so. He was a retired military officer who rejected the Tokyo War Crimes Trials verdicts, so he had the convicted war criminals enshrined and didn't make it public. This was done on the belief that the act of enshrinement would also completely absolve them of all their sins, which the chief priest didn't believe they'd committed anyway. I think that's what the controversy stems from.

OssanAmericaApr. 18  10:57 pm JST

Simon FostonToday  01:16 pm JST

The Americans did also let off a lot of war criminals pretty lightly, e.g. Shinzo Abe's grandfather, and many perpetrators of the most heinous class B and C war crimes never faced any sort of justice at all.

Fact Check:

Nobusuke Abe,

Fact check: it's Nobusuke Kishi.

Shinzo Abe's grandfather was never charged, tried or convicted of any war crime of any class...

So? Does everyone who actually commits a crime get charged, tried and convicted?

GuruMickToday  09:41 pm JST

Simon...so

1/ No, Japan should not commemorate war dead and here are reasons why ...

Who said that? I didn't. I pointed out that Japan has an official remembrance ceremony held every August and I never said it shouldn't.

2/ Yes, Japan can...ditto above

Except for the "ditto above" bit, I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

3/ A little bit of each.

Getting a bit facetious there, aren't you?

What is your position except to argue against others ?

Clearly you're just going to take issue with whatever response I have, but here you are:

Japanese politicians can and arguably should attend the official remembrance ceremony, and anyone can go to Yasukuni Shrine and commemorate the war dead as much as they want because freedom of religion is a constitutionally guaranteed right in Japan, but politicians should go in a strictly private capacity and keep it to themselves, otherwise it looks as if they're using the media circus their visits generate for political purposes.

Now - as this topic seems to make you a bit irritable, oversensitive and self-righteous I don't see any point in discussing it further with you.

GuruMickToday  07:50 pm JST

Simon...enough with the oppositional defiance

Within the rules of the forum I will write as much as I want about whatever I want.

Daniel NeagariToday  06:20 pm JST

mmmm... Yasukuni does not "idolize" anyone burried in there.

No one's buried there. The souls interred there are believed to become part of the kami of the shrine, to be venerated and prayed to, which I'd say is a bit like being idolized.

I give it that there are some far right loonies that go there, but generally speaking Yasukuni is a shrine were all those who fought to make Japan a better country are resting.

There are lots of others with less noble enshrined there too.

Making no distinction if what they did was good or bad, only from the point of view that they did what they did for the country.

Some of them were the wartime leaders who made the decisions that doomed all the others.

The shrine as a whole is an entinty, as any being, it has good thing and bad things. But the spirit of it is in making Japan a better place.

By leading the country to devastation, defeat and foreign occupation?

UncleAToday  02:54 pm JST

"Japanese politicians can fulfil this obligation by attending the official remembrance ceremony in August. The visits to Yasukuni are more about getting votes and money from elderly right-wingers than they are about honouring the war dead."

With respect, that’s a misreading of both political and cultural reality.

First, the idea that Yasukuni visits are some cheap electoral stunt to “get votes” from elderly right-wingers shows a misunderstanding of Japan's political structure. The LDP has maintained power almost continuously since 1955 — not because of emotional populism, but because of a deep structural alliance between bureaucratic elites, rural interests, and big business. When they briefly lost power, it was to a breakaway faction from within. They're not scrambling for votes — they are the system.

Yes, I know all that. However, the LDP still need to win elections which they can lose as they did last year, although the odds are generally a bit stacked against it. Otherwise they wouldn't need to engage in the sorts of disreputable fundraising activities that got them into so much trouble last year.

If honoring the war dead were really just about the government-organized August ceremony, there wouldn’t be such fury when a leader privately bows at Yasukuni. The truth is: Yasukuni represents memory Japan was told to erase, and that’s why it’s targeted.

Yet no one bothered much about it until the high priest had the convicted war criminals enshrined there in the 1970s. I believe the Emperor even went there before that happened and no one made a fuss. Yasukuni is targeted because the priests politicised it themselves.

So no — this is not about votes. It’s about whether Japan has the right to remember its dead as a sovereign nation. And some people seem very invested in making sure it doesn’t.

Who? I've never heard of anyone expressing such a wish or arguing that Japan shouldn't have such a right.

JeffLeeToday  01:24 pm JST

The people with the loudest opinions on this topic are the ones who understand it the least.

They also seem to continually fail to understand or accept that as the Japanese Constitution separates religion and government, and as Yasukuni Shrine is a private religious establishment, Japanese politicians cannot go there in any sort of official capacity, only as private citizens.

UncleAToday  12:25 pm JST

Refusing to honor the 2.4 million fallen for the sake of trade relations is not diplomacy — it’s betrayal.

This isn't about glorifying war criminals; it's about respecting the sacrifice of those who gave everything for their homeland. When a nation's leaders, installed under the postwar order, neglect their dead to appease foreign powers, it reveals a political class that no longer serves the soul of the nation — but its overseers.

Japanese politicians can fulfil this obligation by attending the official remembrance ceremony in August. The visits to Yasukuni are more about getting votes and money from elderly right-wingers than they are about honouring the war dead.

GuruMickToday  09:30 am JST

The "enshrined war criminals " complaint is laughable when you consider how the allies quickly shelved war crime proceedings against top Nazis in the years just after ww2.

The Americans did also let off a lot of war criminals pretty lightly, e.g. Shinzo Abe's grandfather, and many perpetrators of the most heinous class B and C war crimes never faced any sort of justice at all.

WA4TKGToday  01:14 pm JST

Next you’ll be asking why would North Koreans be infiltrating the country

It's not really relevant to the issue of defence spending though, is it. They certainly don't need to hike up the defence budget to handle a few spy boats.

Marc LoweApr. 15  10:22 pm JST

The threat of the CCP is real and a militarization is key.

Not with a lot of clueless career politicians and armchair generals in charge it isn't.

Conscription is also a good idea. Make Nippon Strong Again.

If you're so keen on conscription I expect you've already enlisted yourself or are planning to do something soon. Or is it only a good idea for other people to sign up?

OssanAmericaApr. 15  06:40 pm JST

Every comment about "how about spending the money on..." ignores the reality that if there was no country, the people's needs would never be met in any way whatsoever. Military expenditure, particularly with a country like Japan that is highly defense oriented, is to ensure that the country is protected and continues to exist.

France had an extremely powerful military in 1940, led by generals with actual combat experience. Didn't stop the Blitzkrieg though.

Of course most of such comments, while sounding like liberal ones, really aim to keep Japan defenseless because it is a significant obstruction to China's expansionist goals.

But of course. So everyone who expressed any criticism of this increase in defence spending is really an online shill in the payroll of the CCP?

HappySmilesToday  06:45 am JST

Shouldn't he be accompanied by Akie Abe, the widow of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe?

No. Why should he be? She's not a Diet member, a diplomat or a civil servant, so what role would she have in any negotiations?

GarthgoyleToday  11:22 am JST

His ego, narcissism and condescending attitude, talking and bragging live, "*these countries are calling us kissing my a**** to negotiate tariffs. Please, please, sir, make a deal...I will do anything, sir***."

Never mind the penguins and the people on those uninhabited islands Mr. Trump, what about the Chinese?

Trump's just making it all up as he blunders along, isn't he.

ThePunisherToday  07:29 am JST

His low IQ supporters are desperately readying the spin. "It was always part of the plan....he's just shaking the system up...."

They can't back out now. It would be far too embarassing after all the ego they've invested in the unconditional love and admiration, and making out that it's everyone else who has the low IQs.

Agent_NeoApr. 13  04:45 pm JST

What Japan should reflect on is why it lost the war.

The stupidity and short-sightedness of its leaders?

History is written by the victors, and I think it's just a scapegoat to hide how cruel the colonial rule of the Western countries was.

Compared to...

Whatever. You might not have noticed but this 'you westerners can't criticise Japan because of western colonialism blah blah' line of defence doesn't really work. You probably don't like to think that the rest of the world sees the Japanese of the WW2 era as a horde of vile inhuman friends but that's just how it is.

MarkXToday  07:40 am JST

But trying to paint all foreigners as cheating the system, is typical right wing scare mongering, and I am really disappointed in Tamaki for even mentioning this.

Scapegoating foreigners is an easy way to make it look as if they're doing something about this escalating crisis with healthcare costs, instead of tackling the real issues that are causing it. That would involve asking some uncomfortable questions about what certain Japanese people, like doctors and the elderly, have been doing. They're strategically important to politicians so no one really wants to go there.

jinjapanToday  07:50 am JST

The Japanese, which is 97% of the population in Japan ( only 3% foreigners) totally misuse the system constantly. Many of them go to the dentists every 3 months, per doctors suggestion. Many of the elderly go to the hospital to have a warm place to go in winter & can meet their friends & chat all morning in the waiting room. Doctors are only allowed to prescribe medicine for up to 60 days, meaning if you have a chronic disease, you have to visit the doctor at least 6 times a year. The whole system needs to be reviewed, not just the gaijin.

I imagine a lot of the doctors would prefer if everything stays just the way it is. They often own their clinics themselves or work at private hospitals, so they're also thinking about where the income and profits are coming from. People visiting the dentist's every three months, old people coming in for a chat and people with chronic illnesses having to renew their prescriptions constantly are all good for business. What's good for doctors' business is also good for the government because - guess what - the Japan Medical Association that most doctors join is a big supporter of the LDP. I wouldn't expect any changes any time soon.