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I guess my boyfriend also supports the yasukuni shrine..

we were talking about the new PM, and i said:
"oh, he reopened dialogue with china! it's good, isn't it?"

and he answered:
"if he's going to pay a visit to the yasukuni shrine... nothing will change..."

I don't know what to think about it!

Here in Japan, we just observed the 59th anniversary of the dropping of two atomic bombs with their own names, Little Boy and Fat Man, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. Coming from a soul-broken home, the mass evil duo, in two swoops, killed about 190,000 nameless lives immediately, and continued to kill survivors to this day, with the total number of killed now standing at 237,062. To give a sense of proportion, according to official numbers in Hiroshima, a good 40 percent of the population was incinerated in temperatures reaching tens of thousands of degrees, almost instantly. To the people of that city, it must have looked the same as if a terrorist attack of ungodly proportions wiped out over one-and-a-half million residents of Los Angeles today.

The anniversary was marked by reminders of divisions internal to Japan, as well as of divisions between Japan and her neighbors. Some of the internal rifts have been repressed out of sight, while others occasionally make it out of the bag; and the external ones refuse to go away.

As the daily news from Iraq gets bleaker by the day, and as the clouds of smoke rising from Najaf grow darker by the hour, not all Japanese politicians can keep face. At the Aug. 6 Hiroshima city’s official proceedings commemorating the atomic tragedy 59 years later, with Prime Minister Koizumi attending, the mayor in his speech chose to ruffle whatever feathers he could, by referring to, “The egocentric view of the United States,” which, according to Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, “has reached the extreme.”

Yasukuni basically ensrines everyone who died in the line of duty defending Japan in WW2, there's more than 2 million people enshrined there. But the main controversy is that there are many convicted war criminal enshrined there, including 14 convicted of Class A war crimes. The museum at Yasukuni has been accused of having material that "revises history."

I find it interesting that PM Koizumi insists that when he visits Yasukuni, he's going as a private citizen, not as a public figure. Also, while people approved of Koizumi's visits, more than half of respondants in a recent Mainichi survey don't want the next PM to make such visits.

(I changed the title of this thread because it better reflects the topic of this thread and because I found the old one rude, please refer to the ground rules)

Becuase it also in shrines the world war 2 soliders rolleyes

the emperor wont go becuase then china and korea will go crazy.