I doubt that any reasonable person has any problem with Japan honouring its war dead as war dead, at Yasukuni or anywhere else. Every nation is entitled to do that, as distinct from honouring a bad cause, or possibly a reasonable cause pursued badly which to some extent applies to Japan, in which they died.
Australia is probably the Western nation some of whose people retain the greatest bitterness over Japan’s southward advance, but even here we honour Japan’s war dead http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/ajrp2.nsf/Web-Pages/Cowra-Essay?OpenDocument and even did so during the war, albeit not from entirely pure motives.
The bodies of the four Japanese crewmen from the midget submarines launched by I-22 and I-27 were recovered when these two midget submarines were raised. They were cremated at Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs Crematorium with full naval honours. Rear Admiral Muirhead-Gould, in charge of Sydney Harbour defences, along with the Swiss Consul-General and members of the press, attended the service. The admiral’s decision to accord the enemy a military funeral was criticised by many Australians but he defended his decision to honour the submariners’ bravery. He also hoped that showing respect for the dead men might help to improve the conditions of the many Australians in Japanese prisoner of war camps. ……….
In 1968, Lieutenant Matsuo’s mother travelled to Australia to visit the spot where her son had died. During her visit she scattered cherry blossoms in the water where her son’s midget submarine had been located and later she presented a number of gifts to the Australian War Memorial.
http://www.ww2australia.gov.au/underattack/sydharbour.html
The problem with Yasukuni is that it has become a symbol for the retrograde fascist/ militarist/ nationalist elements in Japan, and notably at the most senior levels of Japan’s national government right up to today, which not only refuse to acknowledge Japan’s war crimes and crimes against humanity but persistently try to deny them.
The problem in Germany, at least from my viewpoint outside it, is that it has gone too far in the other direction for too long. Several generations have reached maturity in Germany since WWII. It is time to stop rubbing their noses in the evil some of their ancestors, and many of the ancestors of people in other European nations, did and let them get on with life as a renewed nation and people, aware of their nation’s bad past but free of continuing guilt for a historical aberration in which they did not participate. Which aberration, after all, was no worse in nature than, say, what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but which has not resulted in the various ethnic groups involved in that appalling conflict being saddled with the same moral guilt which some people still want to burden Germany with long after all signs of national sympathy for Nazi evils have disappeared.
I attribute much of the unreasonable maintenance of German guilt to the Zionists in Israel and their prominent and vocal supporters in the West who persist in the nonsensical argument that they are entitled to a Jewish homeland because of the Holocaust, for which the Germans are wrongly blamed as the only actors when much of occupied Europe happily engaged in that evil. German guilt is kept alive by the Zionists to try to avoid their own guilt for engaging in morally equivalent, if not as homicidally genocidal, assaults on the Palestinians as untermensch not worthy of consideration as human beings when they stand between the Zionists and what they want.
It is a pity that the Western world doesn’t have the same zeal for getting the Zionists to acknowledge and atone for their guilt in their evils in Palestine instead of giving the Israelis a free run while the West and the hypocritical Israelis condemn Germany for what are becoming ancient crimes while Israel has been continually engaged in crimes against humanity from the end of WWII until now, and will do so for the foreseeable future because the Holocaust apparently entitles them to treat Palestinians as subhuman the same way way Jews were treated as subhuman by others.
Japan might be behind Germany in dealing with its war guilt, but it is a long way ahead of Israel as at least Japan hasn’t been continually engaged in crimes against humanity, and various war crimes, since 1945 as Israel has while Israel continually beats its empty guilt drum against Germany.
As for the Western nations, we’ve never been forced to account for our conduct leading to and during the war, let alone our crimes. Thanks to victors’ justice, we get to sit in judgment on everyone else. :evil:
