Here are some quotes from the full article:
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Yasukuni is a beautiful, private Shinto monument in Tokyo to Japan's 2.5 million war dead. It also glorifies more than a thousand Japanese war criminals, most notoriously a dozen top leaders convicted as Class A war criminals by the Allied war crimes tribunal at Tokyo, including Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister.
A rallying point for revisionists, the shrine includes a newly renovated museum that showcases a fiercely nationalist version of Japanese military history -- one that glosses over Imperial Japan's invasion of Manchuria and skates past its brutal slaughter in Nanjing without mentioning the massacre of Chinese civilians. Small wonder that Japan's neighbors react with revulsion and fury when Mr. Koizumi visits the shrine.
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On top of that, the Yasukuni visits are propelled by domestic politics. In 2001, when Mr. Koizumi was campaigning for the leadership of the longtime ruling Liberal Democratic Party, he promised influential right-wingers that he would visit Yasukuni annually. He has kept his word -- although never yet on Aug. 15. This cemented a popular image of a statesman of integrity and won him favor with the powerful conservatives.
Now the party is in the midst of the leadership race to succeed Mr. Koizumi. Once again, many of the likely candidates -- including the front-runner, Shinzo Abe, the chief cabinet secretary -- have been tempted to pander to the right.
If Mr. Koizumi changed his own position on the shrine, he would give cover to the others to do the same. Better that a lame-duck prime minister take the hit with conservatives than a fresh one. And whoever Japan's next prime minister is, he will be better off taking office without the dead weight of Yasukuni around his neck.
Many Japanese are troubled by Mr. Koizumi's visits to the shrine. In recently discovered palace diaries, Emperor Hirohito is quoted saying he stopped visiting Yasukuni after the Class A war criminals were added to the rolls in 1978. His successor, Emperor Akihito, has never visited since taking the throne.
Japan's main opposition party opposes the visits, as does the junior partner party in Mr. Koizumi's coalition, as well as much of the powerful business community. A recent Asahi Shimbun poll found that 60 percent of Japanese respondents thought their next prime minister should not visit Yasukuni, against 20 percent who backed more visits.
So the door is open to a new Yasukuni policy. It could well be domestically popular, and would certainly be diplomatically shrewd and morally wise. And it offers Mr. Koizumi one last chance to be remembered as a statesman.
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So my questions include whether he visited annually before he was Prime Minister. If not, this appears to be simple pandering to the right.
The full Op-Ed piece is still available for free (for now) at
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/05/op...rssnyt&emc=rss.
I subscribe to the NY Times home delivery and also have access to 100 Times Select articles each month should anyone be interested in a reprint.