Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiromu Nonaka on Friday proposed separately enshrining seven hanged class-A war criminals memorialized at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine and stripping it of its religious status to enable the prime minister and Cabinet ministers to pay official visits there to honor Japan's war dead.
Some 2.4 million Japanese personnel and officials who died in wars since 1853 are enshrined at Yasukuni.
The shrine is widely regarded as a bastion of wartime government-sponsored Shintoism and a symbol of Japanese militarism before and during World War II.