Staff writer Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi says he simply wants to pay his respects for those who died for Japan.
But unlike in other nations, where leaders pay their official respects to their war dead as a matter of course, the mere mention of an official visit to Yasukuni Shrine draws fire from inside the country and out. Koizumi's highly controversial planned visit on the 56th anniversary of Japan's World War II surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, would be the first of its kind since 1985.
Yasukuni, in the Kudan district of Chiyoda Ward, is dedicated to the spirits of the approximately 2.4 million Japanese who have died since 1853 in the nation's wars -- more than 80 percent of them in the last war, plus several convicted of war crimes by a postwar international tribunal.