I don’t want to make big deal about this, but I thought it was interesting that PM Junichiro Koizumi decided not to visit Yasukuni Shrine this new year season (Oshogatsu).
The Christian Science Monitor’s article Political pitfalls of a Japanese war shrine, written by Bennett Richardson, was perhaps the best one to explain the complication of this issue.
…the debate over Yasukuni highlights one of the noteworthy features of Japan’s Shinto religion, which doesn’t distinguish between good and evil when it comes to questions of the eternal. … The (Shinto) belief that a person’s conduct during life is irrelevant to the bestowal of divinity after death has thus been used to explain the enshrinement of (World War II) war criminals at Yasukuni…
csmonitor.com’s Matt Clerk did a nice Daily Update on this subject
I can see both sides… part of me says “what’s the big deal”, and part of me says “don’t anger other countries (especially China) unnecessary”. Either way it was interesting to me since my father’s side “Fujiwara Family” is Shinto-ists, even though my mom’s side was Buddhists and there fore my family really never had a religion. I became a catholic two years ago. But still those things interest me.
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