Is Yasukuni worth the fuss?

Here we go again: Japanese Prime Minister visits Yasukuni Shrine; angry protests from China and South Korea as this edifice is supposed to contain the spirits of Japanese war dead that include individuals who were convicted of war crimes after World War II; the United States, Japan’s ally, says “tut-tut” and leaves it at that; Japanese PM is totally unrepentant and likely to repeat the process again at some future date.

Come on, guys, isn’t it about time we used some common sense here? The war has been over for almost 70 years. Yes, there were some rather nasty things done by the Japanese during its occupation of parts of China, but aren’t nasty things done in all wars throughout history? Didn’t Genghis Khan do a few nasty things in his sweep through Asia? Aren’t there some pretty nasty things going on today is Syria and South Sudan? Wasn’t the Holocaust a nasty business as well?

Of course, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is being a bloody minded in visiting the shrine just at this time, but it should not take a Nobel Laureate to work out that it is nothing to do with the honouring Tojo Hideki and his crew back in the 1940s and everything to do with raising the finger to Beijing in 2013.

Abe, in common with many colleagues on the conservative side of Japan’s politics, is afraid his country is being sidelined in the Asia of the 21^st century, its efforts in lifting itself from the ruins of war to become a world economic powerhouse unappreciated. He has listened to one too many speeches made by politicians around the world and including Australia about “the rise of China”, and he has had a gut-full.

Hence the continuing row with China over the disputed island chain in the East China Sea, which Japan administers and calls the Senkakus and China the Diaoyus; hence the visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. It is essentially Abe telling the world that Japan is still around and specifically to Beijing: “you want to be Asia’s top dog? Then you’ve still got us to deal with”.

Beijing has been naïve to allow itself to be manipulated by the Yasukuni controversy. After all, the Head of State, Emperor Akihito has not visited the shrine since he came to the throne and his father, Hirohito, stopped going after the 1978 decision to include the war criminals. Surely that should carry greater symbolic weight than the occasional decision to visit by a transient political leader?

As it is, Abe has achieved his purpose. The world’s attention is switching back to Japan. China, while making its usual comments about Abe’s "extremely dangerous" direction, is looking rather powerless. The deterioration in Sino-Japanese relations to new lows is something to be deplored and, indeed, feared, but it seems unlikely that there will be significant improvement as 2014 dawns.