In his Oct. 12 article, Hisahiko Okazaki writes that the time is ripe for Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to visit Yasukuni Shrine because Beijing has no choice but to restrain itself from provoking Chinese people into anti-Japanese demonstrations. Reading Okazaki's argument, one cannot help feel that Okazaki thinks it's a prime minister's duty to visit Yasukuni at any cost, even furtively like a watermelon thief.
It was Gen. Hideki Tojo, a wartime prime minister, who authored the Field Service Code for the Imperial Army and indoctrinated every soldier into believing that committing suicide was far more honorable than being taken as a prisoner of war. The mass suicides that took place in Okinawa during the war were an extension of this heinous indoctrination. Ironically, Tojo survived the war and was tried by the Allied Forces as a prisoner of war, which he was so eager to teach every soldier not to be.
Why must a prime minister make visits to Yasukuni Shrine and keep honoring people who were irreparably responsible for the war? Okazaki and his rightist coteries must answer this first.
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