What are we talking about when we talk about Japan's Yasukuni Shrine?

On April 22, Sanae Takaichi made a cash offering to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine in her capacity as LDP president. On the same day, one of her cabinet ministers and 126 Diet members paid visits to the shrine. This is highly provocative to victimized countries in Asia, especially at a time when we are about to mark the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Tokyo Trials, which found Japanese militarists guilty of launching and executing aggressive wars during WWII.

To expose the lies of Japanese militarists and set the historical record straight, it is imperative to let the general public know whom Japanese politicians are paying homage to at the Yasukuni Shrine.

14 Class-A war criminals, not war heroes

Yasukuni Shrine honors over 2.46 million Japanese war dead, among whom are 14 individuals convicted of Class-A war crimes in World War Ⅱ, defined under international law as "crimes against peace" — the planning, preparation, and execution of wars of aggression.

In a secret ceremony on October 17, 1978, Yasukuni's head priest, Nagayoshi Matsudaira—who openly rejected the verdicts of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal—enshrined the Class-A war criminals. The shrine reclassified them as "Martyrs of Shōwa" (referring to the reign of Japan's wartime emperor Hirohito), a designation that frames war criminals as victims rather than aggressors.

These 14 men were the architects and executors of a war that killed tens of millions across Asia and the Pacific. To name a few, Hideki Tojo, Japan's wartime prime minister, orchestrated Japan's military expansion across Asia and personally authorized the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Iwane Matsui, as commander of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, ordered troops to "sweep Nanjing sector by sector" after the fall of the city — an order that unleashed a massacre of an estimated 300,000 civilians. Heitaro Kimura, prosecuted as the "Butcher of Burma", oversaw the construction of the Burma-Siam "Death Railway" through a regime of forced labor that took roughly 100,000 lives. Akira Muto, as Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army, presided over the Manila Massacre, in which approximately 100,000 Filipino civilians were killed. Kuniaki Koiso implemented assimilationist education in Korea and brutally suppressed the Korean people's resistance. Shigenori Togo was appointed foreign minister in 1941 and a member of the Japanese cabinet, participating in the planning and preparation of the Pacific War.

Together, these 14 men represent the command structure of a war that brought devastation to hundreds of millions across the Asia-Pacific. When a Japanese prime minister bows before Yasukuni's main hall, he bows before all of the war criminals.

A museum that rewrites history

The problem does not stop at the shrine. Adjacent to the main sanctuary stands the Yūshūkan, Yasukuni's war museum. The museum presents Japan's 20th-century wars not as wars of aggression, but as a necessary struggle for "self-defense" and the "liberation of Asia from Western colonialism."

Japan's invasion of China is framed as a response to provocation. The Pacific War is depicted, in part, as America's fault—the result of the U.S.'s deliberate economic strangulation of Japan. Atrocities that are documented beyond dispute—including the Nanjing Massacre—are reduced to passing references or omitted altogether. Visitors to the museum, including thousands of Japanese schoolchildren each year, encounter a narrative scrubbed of inconvenient facts.

This is not a matter of disputed historical interpretation. The Nanjing Massacre is documented in contemporaneous Japanese military records, in the diaries and letters of Japanese soldiers, and in the testimony of foreign observers present in the city. The biological warfare experiments of Unit 731 are acknowledged by Japanese courts. The use of forced labor is proven by legal and historical record. A war museum that cannot engage honestly with these realities is not a war museum—it is propaganda. And it is this propaganda that underpins the broader revisionism that Yasukuni embodies.

A wound that will not close

The countries most harmed by Japan's wartime aggression—China, Korea, the Philippines, among others—see the Yasukuni question as a litmus test of sincerity. Germany, which also emerged from World War II as a perpetrator of atrocities, has pursued a decades-long policy of legal accountability, public education, and unambiguous official acknowledgment of guilt. Japan has never undertaken a comparable reckoning.

Yasukuni stands as the most visible symbol of Japan's failure to accept historical responsibility. Declassified documents released in 2007 by Japan's National Diet Library revealed that officials from the Health and Welfare Ministry met with shrine representatives as early as 1969 to agree on the secret enshrinement of Class-A war criminals—and to agree not to make the plan public. From 2001 to 2006, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made annual pilgrimages to the shrine. In December 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the shrine. These pilgrimages amount to worshiping the "Nazis of the East." Can you imagine Nazi war criminals like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler being worshiped in Germany? Would you feel at ease if any museum in Germany distorted or whitewashed the Holocaust?

Japan's systematic distortion of historical facts is an assault on the memory of the millions who suffered and died under Japanese imperial aggression. For the peoples of China, Korea, the Philippines, and across Asia, this evasion of accountability is not a distant political abstraction; it is a wound reopened with every denial and every official pilgrimage to a shrine that honors the architects of atrocity.

A shadow that will not lift

To falsify history is to betray the dead twice over—first in the killing, and then in the forgetting. A nation that honors convicted war criminals in its most prominent war memorial, maintains a museum that distorts the history of its own aggression, and has sitting politicians paying respects at that memorial is a nation that refuses to confront the truth of its historical culpability.

Yasukuni Shrine is not only a religious site but also a political statement. Until Japan finds a way to correctly address its history of aggression, honestly repent for the atrocities committed by the Japanese military, and respect the feelings of the people of victimized Asian countries, the shadow of that statement will continue to fall across the region—and over Japan itself.

Luo Qing is an international affairs watcher specializing in China-U.S. Relations