LOS ANGELES -- Japan offers the world a culture of surpassing elegance, intellect, literature and political achievement, but it still remains something of an enigma. The great novelist Haruki Murakami understands, perhaps as well as anyone, this aspect of his country. His recent "Kafka on the Shore," a deserved literary hit in the United States as well as in Japan, conveys, as Waseda University professor Norihiro Kato recently put it in a newspaper interview, "the off-kilter, weird and uncertain feelings that remain in Japanese society."

Off-kilter and weird are adjectives that well describe some of the unfortunate public comments of Japan's current foreign minister. Taro Aso seems anything but uncertain these days. He sees nothing wrong with the prime minister's visits to Yasukuni Shrine (the memorial to Japan's war dead) and, indeed, sees no reason why Japan's emperor ought not visit there, too. In fact, for many years (thankfully) no occupier of the Japanese throne has cast wisdom aside to visit the controversial shrine.

In the postwar era, subtle Japanese diplomacy has often emphasized constructive engagement, economic aid and careful negotiation of differences and tensions. So it's as if Aso somehow misses the old days of a tightly wound region dominated by Japanese militarism.