By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 23, 2005

TOKYO, April 22 -- Inside the hallowed cedar halls of this city's vast Yasukuni Shrine, 168 Japanese lawmakers and aides gathered on Friday, clapping their hands twice in traditional reverence to the deified souls of Japan's fallen warriors.

Joined by almost 50,000 other citizens who attended the shrine's annual Spring celebration this week, many of the nation's top lawmakers bowed and offered Shinto prayers to the divine spirits of the shrine -- including a list of more than 1,000 convicted World War II criminals topped by Japan's wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo.

The observance was central to the roiling dispute over history that has engulfed Japan and its primary wartime victims, China and South Korea.

Visitors to Yasukuni are confronted with the exhibit of a reconstructed Zero fighter, which stands in an honored spot inside the shrine's newly expanded museum. Also on exhibit is the gingerly encased military uniform of Hirohito, the wartime emperor. Miniature flags of the Rising Sun can be purchased at the museum gift shop, along with camouflage T-shirts and scale models of the battleship Yamato sunk by U.S. forces off Okinawa in 1945.

In a museum film, Pearl Harbor is described as a "battle for Japan's survival" while one exhibit blames the 1937 Nanjing Massacre -- where Chinese officials say Japanese soldiers slaughtered 300,000 people -- on the Chinese leaders who fled the city while ordering their men to fight to the death. After the fall of Nanjing to the Japanese, the museum notes, "the Chinese citizens were once again able to live their lives in peace."

"Individuals and people have their own respective views on history, culture and tradition," said Takao Fuji, an influential lawmaker from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party who attended the ceremony. "We are worshiping here with a pure heart, and we would like neighboring countries such China and South Korea to understand that."

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is among an estimated 5 million Japanese who visit Yasukuni Shrine each year.

Despite the reiteration of a broad apology for war crimes by Koizumi at a summit in Jakarta on Friday, critics argue that Japan is not repentant for its wartime deeds. Protests in China and South Korea focused on the Education Ministry's approval this month of revised schoolbooks that the Chinese and Koreans say whitewash Japan's wartime atrocities.

While many believe the Chinese government initially sanctioned the anti-Japanese protests that have festered there for weeks, analysts say they seem to have gone beyond official control.

For decades after World War II, Japan avoided provoking its wartime enemies, with only fringe groups armed with bullhorns and black vans exposing nationalist rhetoric. But as Japan has grown leery of China's increased military strength and North Korea's nuclear weapons, it has pursued a greater role on the world stage -- including a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and a redefinition of its constitution to once again legally possess a military. The Koizumi government has sought to assert its national sovereignty, underscoring that goal by restating old claims to islands and territorial waters under dispute with South Korea and China.

Leading analysts concede that the new thinking has opened the door for revisionist views of Japanese history. Newspapers editorials and best-selling books in Japan have heralded the nation's early military expansion, particularly the victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 that launched Japan as a global power. Tokyo's popular governor, Shintaro Ishihara, remarked two years ago that the Korean people "chose" to be annexed by Japan. "You may call it colonialism," he said, "but it was carried out in the most developed and humane manner."

There is no question, analysts say, that China and the two Koreas have periodically used anti-Japanese propaganda as a tool to stoke nationalist flames and deflect public wrath away from their leaders. Japan, many here note, has done far more to clear the air of history than China, whose textbooks still neglect the massive human rights abuses committed by the ruling Communist Party.

But many say Japan is also undergoing a surge of nationalism.

"Now is the season of nationalism in the world," said Makoto Iokibe, a professor at Kobe University, and an expert on the political and diplomatic history of modern Japan. "After 9/11, there was a burst of nationalism in the United States. There is also growing nationalism in China and Korea, and yes, there is growing nationalism now in Japan. . . ." he said. Japan "completely rejected nationalism" after World War II, he said, but "it is making a comeback here. The question is how far it will go."

That nationalistic view of Japanese history is evident at Yasukuni Shrine.

Constructed of wooden beams and decorated with embroidered purple tapestries marked with the Japanese imperial sign of the chrysanthemum, the shrine was built in 1869 only years before Meiji-era Japan embarked on military build-up that would lead to its rise as a major power.

The names of nearly 2.5 million of the fallen are inscribed here, all of whom are considered to be divine spirits worshiped under Japan's pantheistic Shinto religion. The controversy over the Yasukuni shrine largely erupted after 1978, when the names of convicted World War II criminals were included in its sacred book of names, sanctifying their souls as deities whose spirits are believed to dwell inside the shrine. Although more than 1,000 war criminals were enshrined, attention has centered on the 14 "Class A" war criminals -- mostly top Japanese military leaders, including Tojo, who were convicted by the Allies at the Tokyo trials after the war's end.

Although previous prime ministers have periodically come to the shrine, Koizumi outraged Japan's neighbors in 2001 when he began staging annual visits. Koizumi has said he visits the shrine "to console the spirits of the unwilling war dead and renew a pledge not to wage war again."

But critics describe the shrine and its adjacent museum as being anything but a symbol of peace. Here, World War II is instead called "the Greater East Asian War," while the invasion of China is described as "the China Incident." The adjacent museum, which moved to an expanded new building in 2003, displays the short sword used by Gen. Korechika Anami -- who advocated a continuation of the war after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- to commit suicide at dawn on August 15, 1945, the day Japan surrendered.

A film at the museum asks visitors to ponder the following statement: "The soldiers fought for the nation. Can you say they did a bad thing?"

There have been some calls to remove the names of war criminals to another shrine, so that Yasukuni can be more confidently used as a place to honor Japan's fallen heroes of the past. But the shrine's leadership opposes the idea, saying it is religiously impossible in Shinto to "remove" souls already enshrined.

"Those people dedicated their precious lives for the sake of the nation," said Shingo Oyama, a Yasukuni priest and the shrine's spokesman. "They are our ancestors. They are precious people to us."

Special correspondent Sachiko Sakamaki contributed to this report.