BERLIN -- Junichiro Koizumi will resign as the Japanese prime minister at the end of this month and be replaced by Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe. Koizumi became prime minister in April 2001. After more than five years as prime minister, Koizumi's political record is checkered: He achieved big successes with domestic reforms and economic recovery, but caused a political disaster in relations with Japan's most important neighbors, China and South Korea.
Relations have not been this bad in decades. Sixty-one years after the end of World War II, the heads of state of China, South Korea and Japan are not talking to each other -- the result of Koizumi's policy. When Koizumi was running for office in 2001, he promised supporters he would visit Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo every year on Aug. 15, the anniversary of the end of World War II in Japan. Koizumi visited the shrine every year, but it was only this year that he went on Aug. 15.
Yasukuni Shrine is a memorial to 2.4 million Japanese soldiers who died in wars Japan has been involved since the middle of the 19th century. The problem is that since 1978 the shrine also has memorialized 14 top war criminals or war-crime suspects. The prime minister's visit to the shrine is, therefore, seen by Japan's neighbors as a sign of support for those mostly Japanese historians who depict Japan primarily as a victim of the war -- not as an imperialistic aggressor responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million people in the 1930s and '40s in East and Southeast Asia.