At a bit of a loose end last Friday as part of my three-day holiday I met a friend at Yasukuni Shrine in Kudanshita. Like Meiji Shrine I think that the walk preceding the actual shrine is more interesting beginning with a giant wooden torii gate leading the way through gingko trees and the usual food stalls and a statue of the bloke who founded the Japanese army or something like that.

     

It must have been three years since I visited this place and back then I knew very little about the controversy surrounding it. When former Prime Ministers such as Junichi Koizumi have gone there it has caused uproar as fourteen class A war criminals among the 2.5 million war dead are enshrined here. Most of these protests are from China and Korea who suffered most from Japanese aggression during WWII. No such protests when I visited and nothing too controversial either.

In fact the most controversial thing to happen involved myself daring to take a photo in the Yushukan Museum where photographs are prohibited! This museum is next to the shrine but we only just made the last entry and so had to really rush round in order to see everything which didn’t bother me too much as I was getting a little bored and tired of looking at all the military related stuff.