It seems like several leading LDP politicians now agree that the war criminals should be seperated from the regular war-dead in Yasukuni. It is also interesting that there are now thoughts about changing the shrine into a secular monument or alternatively to build a secular war memorial. Very interinstin article in Asahi yesterday:
"Can old twist on old plot defuse Yasukuni?
08/09/2006
BY YU NOGAMI
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
Foreign Minister Taro Aso has stirred the bubbling Yasukuni pot by urging the controversial war-linked
Shinto shrine to voluntarily disband as a religious entity and become a national secular memorial.
The proposal changes the terms of the contemporary Yasukuni debate, which in recent years has largely focused on whether the prime minister should pay his respects there.
Instead, Aso suggested the Diet pass a law to make Yasukuni secular, and that the Diet decide who to honor there.
Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki is another voice calling for Yasukuni to take action of its own accord.
Tanigaki, who has said he will not visit the shrine for the time being, endorses the idea of separating the 14 Class-A war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni from the war dead.
It is Yasukuni's enshrinement of war criminals alongside the war dead in the first place that is the problem, he said.
"The ball is now in Yasukuni's court," Tanigaki said.
In some ways, Tanigaki and Aso are similar. Both plan to run in the Liberal Democratic Party presidential election to choose Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's successor. And both are urging the shrine to take voluntary action.
But Aso has gone a step further and suggested that the Diet be the one to decide who to honor at the shrine--including the possibility of separating the Class-A war criminals.
In his proposal, Aso said that prime ministerial visits are transforming Yasukuni into a political issue, and obscuring the shrine's true aim of offering a place to pray for the sprits of the war dead.
He has given his proposal to both Yasukuni Shrine and Nippon Izokukai, a national association of bereaved families of the war dead.
Aso has also indicated that he will not pay respects at Yasukuni until the shrine takes up the burden of change. That burden, he made clear at a news conference Tuesday, is squarely on Yasukuni's shoulders.
Hidenao Nakagawa, LDP policy chief, backed up Aso by mentioning that he could submit a bill to allow the government to manage Yasukuni.
Consensus is far from secured, though. Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe told reporters Monday that he does not want any review on Yasukuni's enshrinement policy.
"The government is not in a position to state opinions on Yasukuni Shrine's religious positions and rites," Abe said.
The debate has only begun. But it seems increasingly likely to force Japan to finally come to terms with its role in World War II in addition to the pros and cons of a secular Yasukuni and treatment of Class-A war criminals.
"Whether Yasukuni should be secular was debated some 30 years ago," pointed out LDP veteran Taku Yamasaki in a speech Monday.
But, said Yamasaki, "it is unlikely that the shrine will give up its religious status."
Rather, Yamasaki believes a better solution is to build a separate, secular war memorial.
In fact, in the 1960s and 1970s the LDP drafted a bill to put Yasukuni Shrine under state control, and submitted it to the Diet five times. But it never passed, and was eventually scrapped in June 1974.
Yasukuni Shrine itself was open to the idea of state management, being under the jurisdiction of the navy and army ministries during the war. But things did not work out that way. Some argued that making Yasukuni state-run would be a return to wartime policies. Others pointed out that making the shrine secular was procedurally difficult, involving changing the wordings of celebratory speeches there.
While the shrine resisted such changes, Nippon Izokukai changed tactics: It started encouraging prime ministers to make official visits to Yasukuni.(IHT/Asahi: August 9,2006) "