The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
Hyperlink. No one, save a few far right-wing Japanese nutjobs, can dispute the horrors visited upon the Chinese and Korean peoples by the Imperial Japanese Army between 1895 and 1945. And there is room for legitimate disagreement about visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by prominent Japanese politicians, especially Prime Minister Koizumi. But I have to laugh whenever the Chinese government makes a fuss about the shrine. After all, Mao Zedong killed a hell of a lot more Chinese between 1949 and 1976 than the Japanese did between 1931 and 1945, and yet the Chinese Communist Party actively encourages pilgrimages to view Mao's corpse, preserved and displayed a la Lenin, in its shrine off Tiananmen Square, in the very heart of Beijing. The Japanese occupation was monstrous; the crimes committed in the Emperor's name rival those of the Nazis in Russia. But more Chinese died - broken, starving, humiliated, and alone - from the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution than from anything the Japanese did. The People's Republic of China will have every right to complain about Japanese officials visiting the Yasukuni Shrine the day after Mao's bloated corpse is finally put in the ground in an unmarked grave alongside his millions of victims.

The South Koreans, on the other hand, make a strong case about the offensiveness of the Yasukuni Shrine.