Japan Marks WWII Surrender With Mixed Sentiments

Japan marked the 59th anniversary of its World War II surrender on Sunday, caught between regret for the suffering it inflicted and resurgent nationalism that is pushing the country to become a global military power.

“I renew our deep remorse and offer sincere condolences to the victims,” Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said at a government ceremony at a cemetery for war dead in Tokyo. As Emperor Akihito looked on, Koizumi said the era of invasion and colonization that ended with defeat in 1945 had “caused huge damage and pain to people in many countries, particularly in Asian nations.”

But Koizumi also asserted his government’s determination to make Japan a prominent international player. Encouraged by the Bush administration, which is seeking a more active East Asian partner, Koizumi’s government wants to revise Japan’s war-renouncing constitution in order to deploy troops in overseas conflicts more easily.

The prime minister’s words were a measure of the fine line he travels between trying to reassure wary neighbors of Japan’s benign intentions and speaking to the potent domestic constituency of staunch nationalists. His carefully couched message did not satisfy them.

Thousands of them skipped Koizumi’s speech to gather at the nearby Yasukuni shrine, a controversial Shinto temple in the heart of Tokyo where the nearly 2.5 million Japanese war dead since 1869 are commemorated -- 13 of whom were condemned as Class A war criminals in trials after World War II. The fallen soldiers honored at Yasukuni are worshiped rather than simply remembered, and critics have campaigned to remove the names of war criminals from its rolls.

Koizumi has visited this spiritual home of ultranationalism four times since becoming prime minister in 2001, a far more enthusiastic view of Yasukuni than any of his predecessors. But he has never satisfied nationalist demands that he visit on Aug. 15, the anniversary of Japan’s defeat that has become the day the right wing parades its vision of a resurgent country.

As usual, nationalist demonstrators at the shrine denounced Koizumi for failing to show up Sunday. But four of his Cabinet ministers did attend, provoking a swift diplomatic rebuke from the Chinese government.

“Such negative behavior by a small number of political figures in Japan is deeply regrettable,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan.

“We hope Japan would take action to fulfill its promise to face history and repent for its invasions, and not to do things to hurt the feelings of people in China and other victim countries again,” Quan said.

Despite a downpour Sunday, thousands of people swarmed over the shrine’s huge pebbled grounds. Many came simply to honor those killed in battle.

But the crowd included hundreds of grim-faced ultranationalists, many dressed in 1930s and ‘40s military uniforms, posing defiantly with the old Imperial flag under which the country’s troops once marauded through Asia.

All but a few dozen members of the crowd were barred from the service at Yasukuni’s inner shrine, where a group of veterans knelt on tatami mats alongside a younger generation of survivors in quiet prayer.

But noise from the nationalist demonstration, with its anti-Koizumi shouts and the spontaneous singing of the Kimigayo national anthem that is strongly associated with Japan’s colonial past, wafted across the courtyard to mix with the prayers and hand claps for the dead.

Some veterans complained that what they saw as a legitimate pilgrimage to Yasukuni to honor fallen comrades was stained by boisterous nationalism.

“Crazy,” said Iwao Miura, a 77-year-old veteran, when asked his opinion of the right-wing demonstrators driving past the shrine in black jeeps trailing flags and blaring martial music from loudspeakers. “Some people see us as the same as those people, and we resent the comparison.

“People need to watch out because politicians [use this] and then ordinary people end up sacrificing their lives.”

There were a few critics who came to the shrine Sunday to protest any hint of remilitarization, focusing their fire on Koizumi’s decision to deploy Japanese troops to Iraq.

But after a week in which politicians used the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to issue pleas for peace and denounce Washington’s plan to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons, the Aug. 15 anniversary remained very much a bastion of nationalist expression.

Among those attending the ceremonies at Yasukuni was Tokyo’s powerful Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, a popular and charismatic figure among those who reject the politics of atonement.

Ishihara told reporters that the way to resolve the dispute over Yasukuni was to have the emperor himself visit next year, a brazen suggestion in a culture that does not freely offer the emperor advice.

“If the emperor visits Yasukuni on the 60th year since Japan’s defeat in the war, I believe he can fulfill the great responsibility to the nation that only the emperor can fulfill,” Ishihara said.