Around this time of year, speculation in Asia always runs high as to whether Japan's prime minister or other prominent politicians will visit Yasukuni Shrine.
The shrine, which honors more than a thousand indicted war criminals who took part in Japan's disastrous war in Asia, remains a place of fascination for Japanese rightists, who persist in claiming that Japan's war in Asia was a war of liberation against Western imperialism.
This claim sounds particularly hollow in China and South Korea, which suffered horrifically from Imperial Japan's invasion and occupation of much of Asia.