A Shinto priest leads Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Tsutomu Takebe (R) and other lawmakers at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo honouring Japan's war dead, October 19, 2004. (Reuters)

In a tranquil wooded area in the heart of Tokyo, tucked away between a park and the outer moat of the shogun's castle, World War II wages on.

There are no casualties, artillery fire or atomic holocausts, but a quiet campaign justifying Japan's World War II crimes nearly 60 years after it capitulated to Allied forces.

The Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial to the nation's 2.5 million war dead and executed war criminals, is frozen in time.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who has repeatedly said the Yasukuni visits are intended to pray for peace, defended his annual homage at the shrine yet again on Monday.

"I am aware that the visit is an unpleasant event for China," Koizumi said during a parliamentary committee session. "But I don't think it is right to conform so easily to what another country says is wrong just because our ideas about honouring the souls of the dead differ."

Similar tunes are heard from members of his cabinet.

Nobutaka Machimura, the new foreign minister, who has also visited the shrine, did nothing to ease tensions with China on his first full day on the job. He said he "understands" Koizumi's actions and the problem lies in cultural differences concerning death.

The problem is, no doubt, more than cultural differences concerning death.

No one, no country, objects to Japan paying its respects to its war dead. But doing so at Yasukuni sets off all sorts of angry emotions with good historical reasons.

The Shinto shrine was founded in 1869 by nationalists who espoused aggressive Japanese nationalism, racial and cultural superiority, as well as then State-sponsored Shintoism.

In 1978, the priests conducted a secret ceremony enshrining a new list of war dead, among them 14 Japanese wartime leaders convicted as Class-A war criminals by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Seven of these, including Japan's wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, were hanged by the occupation authorities.

The news leaked out some six months later, provoking widespread outrage, but the priests refused to back down. Signs inside the shrine refer to Tojo and the others as "martyrs" who were "wrongly accused by the Allied forces."

Obviously, the visits do not simply serve to honour those who gave their lives in the service of the Japanese nation.

To pay homage at Yasukuni is anything but an innocuous political act.

The fact that the prime minister visits Yasukuni as the representative of the nation displays a keen lack of awareness of, and disregard for, others who have felt the pain of Japan's aggression.

Efforts to create a national cemetery that could serve as a secular alternative to Yasukuni have been thwarted by Japanese conservatives.

Koizumi, who has repeatedly pledged he will continue his annual visits to Yasukuni despite protests from Asian nations, said there is no alternative to Yasukuni.

This is a very weak excuse that only reflects his unwillingness to find an alternative.

His Yasukuni visit, one which was declared unconstitutional by a Fukuoka court in April this year for violating the constitutional spirit of the separation of state and religion, may please the association and the patrons of its Liberal Democratic Party, but harm regional relationships and jeopardize Japan's diplomacy.

"Instead of laying a traumatic past to rest, Koizumi has unnecessarily resurrected it," said Sean Curtin, a fellow at the Tokyo-based Japanese Institute of Global Communications.

"His ill-considered Yasukuni visits have caused immense damage to Sino-Japanese ties, complicating one of the most important relationships in Asia."

Source: China Daily