NOW THAT JUNICHIRO Koizumi has committed the ultimate offense of visiting the Yasukuni Shrine on August 15th–the 61st anniversary of the end of World War II–what is “big” China going to do with an increasingly disobedient “little” Japan? Probably not much, except repeating the same old empty threats.
A grim-faced Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, immediately summoned an equally grim-faced Japanese ambassador, Yuji Miyamoto, to denounce Koizumi’s visit to the shrine, his sixth since taking office, as a move that “challenges the international justice” and “tramples the conscience of mankind.” “China strongly requests Japanese leaders to make efforts to remove political barriers and push the Sino-Japanese ties back to the normal development track at an early date,” Li said, demanding that Japan’s next leader not visit the Shinto shrine where fourteen Class-A war criminals are honored among 2.5 million other souls.
The likelihood that Shinzo Abe, Koizumi’s chief cabinet secretary, will fail to win the leadership contest of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on September 20th is so slim that many are calling the current government the “pre-Abe” administration–the elected president of the ruling LDP, which holds a majority in both houses of Japan’s parliament, automatically becomes the prime minister.
Would Abe listen to Li’s advice and revert to the knee-jerk practice of kowtowing to China like all the post-war Japanese leaders that preceded Koizumi? Unlikely. Over the years, Abe has made his stance on this issue very clear in both word and deed.
Speaking right after Koizumi’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine last Tuesday, Abe said that “[T]he prime minister explained [the reason for his visit] in a very easy-to-understand way.” Koizumi has always claimed that he visits the shrine to “express my condolences to all the war dead.” Abe added that the next administration’s handling of the issue won’t be affected.
In an interview published a few days before Koizumi’s visit, Abe explained “I cannot possibly think that prime ministers’ visits to the shrine would support or glorify the purposes of the war 60 years ago.” Abe told the monthly magazine Bungeishunju that twelve prime ministers have gone to the shrine since Japan adopted its pacifist constitution in 1947, and none of them were “belligerent or militaristic.”
China has demanded a halt to the shrine visits as a condition for holding a summit between the two nations. To this, Abe’s reaction couldn’t have been firmer. “We cannot and will not allow Japan’s freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and our feeling in memory of the war dead to be violated in such a manner,” he told reporters last month. Without naming China, Abe was critical of Beijing’s attitude. “Relations between mature countries should respect differences of opinion,” he said, adding that “is a shared view among the Japanese public and by countries that value democracy, basic human rights and the rule of law.”
Abe seems to understand well the real reason for the big fuss China has created over the issue. Earlier this year, he said “[I]t’s wrong for us to decide to stop our prime minister’s visits to a shrine which is located in our country just because a foreign country demands it. If you stop visiting Yasukuni because China demands it, then the next demand could be about the territorial disputes over the gas fields in the East China Sea.”
Abe spoke even more forcefully on the subject at the Brookings Institution in May 2005: “China is a communist country and there is no freedom of religion, and they do not have understanding of freedom of religion. I think what the Chinese government is doing is interference in domestic policies or domestic politics, and in the peace treaty between Japan and China, section one and section three prohibit policy interference. So they are clearly violating those two sections.” In case anyone might still be uncertain of his intentions, Abe declared that “[R]egardless, whether I become the next prime minister or not, I think the next prime minister after Koizumi should visit the Yasukuni Shrine.”
Abe believes prime ministers and cabinet members can freely pay visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in their capacity as private citizens, and he has done just that many times over the past few years: in October of last year and on August 15th in both 2004 and 2005. In response, Abe has received death threats. Two letters, containing a box-cutter blade and a razor blade respectively, were sent from Hong Kong to Abe in early July warning him to stay away from the shrine. A 24-year-old man was arrested and charged for the threats by the Hong Kong police.
Early this month, it was reported that Abe paid a secret visit to the Yasukuni Shrine on April 15th of this year, which would be his first visit since becoming the chief cabinet secretary last October. He neither confirmed nor denied the report, but officials at the shrine acknowledged the April visit. Abe would only say he had visited the shrine before to pray that the souls of those who fought and perished for the country may rest in peace and to show his deep respect for them. “There is no change to that belief and it is not going to change in the future,” he said bluntly.
Abe is a very savvy politician, and his defiance on this issue will serve him well politically. By making his visit before August 15th, not only could Abe pander to his base of conservative supporters, but he could also avoid any potential fallout before the LDP presidential election, in which he’s facing a challenge from finance minister Sadakazu Tanigaki and foreign minister Taro Aso. Tanigaki has stated that he would not visit the shrine if elected, and Aso is also staying away from the shrine for the moment. Right now, neither is a serious threat to Abe, who has taken this page from Koizumi’s war book. Koizumi himself didn’t visit the shrine on August 15th last year, a month before the general elections, in order to avoid controversy. He only went a month later, after winning an overwhelming victory.
Abe, born in 1954, is set to become Japan’s youngest post-war leader, continuing the family tradition of political service. His father, Shintaro Abe, served as foreign minister in the 1980s. His grandfather was Nobusuke Kishi, a suspected Class-A war criminal who was not indicted for his role as trade and industry minister in the Tojo cabinet and went on to serve as prime minister in the late 1950s. And Eisuke Sato, Abe’s great uncle, whose tenure as Japan’s longest-serving prime minister lasted from 1964 to 1972 and earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.
In his recently published book titled Toward a Beautiful Country, Abe outlined four universal values as a blueprint for his administration–liberty, democracy, human rights, and rule of law. He also advocates strong alliance with the United States, Australia, and India, based on shared democratic values and with the aim of spreading those values throughout Asia. This the Chinese may rightly fear.
Kin-ming Liu, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association and general manager of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily, is a Washington-based columnist.
