Families Sue Over Shrine Honoring War Criminals. Japan: 'Who, Us?'
Families of Koreans forcibly conscripted during WWII are suing to remove their deceased relatives' names from Japan's Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines 14 Class A war criminals. This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Japan's consistent efforts to whitewash its wartime atrocities. For decades, official visits by Japanese politicians to Yasukuni — like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's in
2013 and current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's offerings — have been met with outrage across Asia, yet Japan continues to offer performative apologies while glorifying its imperial past. Instead, we get boilerplate articles about the 'controversial' shrine without exploring *why* it's controversial. Perhaps a nation that has struggled to acknowledge its militaristic history fully just doesn't see
the problem with honoring men convicted of orchestrating horrifying wars. One might wonder: how many 'Class A war criminals' does it take before a shrine becomes less a site of remembrance and more a monument to selective amnesia?