When four of the Liberal Democratic Party’s top executives visited Yasukuni Shrine on August 15, the 81st anniversary of the end of World War II, Japanese media flagged something unusual.
It was the first time the party’s entire senior leadership had done so together.
Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi visited the same day, the first sitting defense minister to do so since 2024. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi did not go.
She sent a ritual offering instead, and later bowed toward the shrine from the grounds of the Nippon Budokan, several hundred meters away.
A Coordinated Show, Not a Coincidence
Kyodo News and other domestic outlets read the joint appearance as a deliberate signal to the party’s conservative base—and, more pointedly, as cover being laid down for Takaichi herself.
Analysts cited by South Korean and Japanese outlets alike suggested the executives’ visit may be intended to test the waters, or soften the ground, for a future visit by the prime minister. Takaichi has held off since taking office in October despite a track record as one of the shrine’s more regular political visitors and a campaign-trail pledge to keep visiting as prime minister.
LDP Policy Research Council Chair Takayuki Kobayashi, asked about Takaichi’s decision to bow from a distance rather than enter the shrine, told reporters it was “something for each prime minister to judge appropriately at the time”—a studiously noncommittal answer that left open whether her restraint was a matter of principle or timing.
An LDP executive, speaking to The Sankei Shimbun, framed the joint visit in narrower terms: “This is a visit strictly from the party’s standpoint. It is important to pay tribute to the war dead with sincere devotion.”
However, Junya Ogawa, leader of the Centrist Reform Alliance, warned on social media that “there is responsibility regarding the impact on relations and diplomacy with neighboring countries,” adding that a group visit by the ruling party leadership risked “greater repercussions” than visits by individual lawmakers.
Domestically, a Yasukuni visit by a sitting prime minister remains politically loaded in a way ministerial, or backbench visits are not—a distinction largely lost in how the story played overseas.
China and Korea Respond, Predictably and Sharply
Beijing’s response arrived within hours. China’s Foreign Ministry called the visits “an affront to historical justice, a challenge to the foundational norms of civilization, and a provocation against the postwar international order.”
The Defense Ministry went further, with spokesperson Jiang Bin accusing Japanese politicians of “paying lip service to pursuing peace on one hand while bowing down before the perpetrators of wartime atrocities on the other.”
State media widely repeated this formulation in the days that followed, alongside commentary framing the visits as evidence of creeping “remilitarization.”
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said it deplored “the anachronistic and historically oblivious acts of responsible Japanese leaders” who visited Yasukuni Shrine, which “glorifies Japan’s past wars of aggression and honors convicted war criminals.”
Lawmakers from both of Korea’s major parties echoed the criticism. An opposition lawmaker known for favoring closer ties with Tokyo also described Koizumi’s visit as undermining “mutual trust between the two countries.”
Both governments’ objections cited the same underlying fact: the presence, since 1978, of 14 Class-A war criminals among the war dead Yasukuni enshrines.
What the Shrine Actually Represents, and to Whom
In Japan, Yasukuni functions for most visitors more as a national cemetery than as a political statement. It holds no remains; it is a registry of roughly 2.46 million names, honored in Shinto tradition as spirits who gave their lives for the nation.
Bereaved families make up much of its regular traffic, visiting not only on the August 15 anniversary but at life milestones—graduations, weddings, the birth of a child.
For politicians on the conservative end of the LDP, a visit is framed in identical terms: an act of mourning and gratitude, not a foreign-policy statement.
However, that framing has always had domestic critics too. Emperor Hirohito, a regular visitor before 1978, is reported by historians to have stopped going after the war criminals’ enshrinement became public the following year. No reigning emperor has visited since.
Some LDP lawmakers have periodically floated separating the 14 into a distinct, secular memorial to defuse the dispute. Shrine leadership has resisted, and Japanese courts have rejected legal efforts to remove individual names.
The Defense Ministry, citing the constitutional separation of religion and state, bars organized group visits by Self-Defense Forces personnel. A restriction that draws little attention outside Japan but underscores that the country’s own institutions treat the shrine’s status as unsettled.
For China, the objection is bound up with the 1931–45 war on the Chinese mainland. Beijing’s Foreign Ministry has for decades treated visits by Japanese officials as evidence that Tokyo has not squarely reckoned with that history, regardless of the visitor’s stated intent.
For South Korea, the reference point is Japan’s 1910–1945 colonial rule, when Koreans were compelled to worship at Shinto shrines, and the presence at Yasukuni of Korean and Taiwanese wartime conscripts, some enshrined over surviving relatives’ objections.
Shinzo Abe, during his own visits as prime minister, argued that folding all of this into a charge of “worshipping war criminals” misreads how Shinto practice works, since the enshrined are venerated collectively rather than singled out by name.
It is an argument Japanese conservatives still make. But it has done nothing to move Beijing or Seoul, whose objections are aimed less at Shinto theology than at what they read as a political message sent by the visit itself.
A Middle Path With a Shrinking Margin
Since Junichiro Koizumi’s visits in the 2000s froze relations with China and strained ties with South Korea, Japanese prime ministers have largely avoided the shrine in person, sending ritual offerings instead. Cabinet ministers and rank-and-file lawmakers are freer to visit—particularly around the spring and autumn festivals and August 15. Takaichi’s distant bow from Budokan fits neatly inside that pattern.
What doesn’t fit as neatly is a four-person, coordinated leadership visit—the kind of display Japanese commentators themselves flagged as a break from precedent. Chinese commentary was quick to read as the LDP’s inner circle standing in for a prime minister who, for now, appears to calculate that a visit of her own costs more than it’s worth.
RELATED:
Yasukuni Shrine Marks 80 Years of Peace, Honor, and Remembrance
(Read a related article in Japanese.)
Author: Daniel Manning
Continue Reading