His landslide victory in the Sept. 11 snap elections and the Diet passage on Oct. 14 of the postal services privatization bills apparently have emboldened Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. He made his fifth visit to the Yasukuni Shrine since he came to power in 2001 on Monday, which marked the start of the shrine's autumnal festival.

Unlike his earlier visits, he did not enter the hall of worship nor autographed his name or title in a visitors' book. Ostensibly to weaken the political impact of his visit, he threw money into an offertory and joined his hands together in prayer before the hall as ordinary visitors do. In whatever form, however, his visit to the shrine, which enshrines Japan's 2.46 million war dead and 14 Class A war criminals, including wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, calls into question his thinking as the nation's leader, not only concerning Japan's relations with neighboring countries and how to view Japan's war past but also concerning the constitutional principle of separation of religion and state.

China and South Korea have asked time and again that Mr. Koizumi refrain from visiting Yasukuni, which served as a spiritual vehicle to mobilize the Japanese for war in the 1930s and '40s in China and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Mr. Koizumi appears to have chosen to satisfy his emotional attachment to the shrine and to have discarded efforts to rectify Japan's already-soured relations with its neighbors. His Yasukuni visit will also pour cold water on the six-nation talks to solve the issues of North Korea's nuclear-weapons program and abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents because the talks' success hinges on cooperation with China and South Korea.