PM Koizumi's New Years Resolution: Avoid War Criminals

[Marked Trail]

Koizumi won't visit Yasukuni over New Year holiday seasonDaily Yomiuri, Japan - Jan 3
But Koizumi is not likely to stop visiting the shrine and will instead find an appropriate time to visit this year, in consideration of Japan-China relations ...

[DJEB]

No more meeting with Bush?

[Captain Japan]

TokyoNow: Japanese puzzled by China's renewed anger over Yasukuni
Kyodo

For Tokyo native Mie Kondo, 31, Yasukuni Shrine is no more than one of her hometown's sightseeing or beauty spots where she used to go with her family for seasonal pleasure and still likes taking visitors to.
Among the roughly 5 million annual visitors to the shrine, according to its tally, are apparently many people like Nakamura who, without any nationalistic sentiment, go there to enjoy the seasonal events of a large shrine, aside from the people -- including bereaved families and politicians -- who go to pray for the war dead enshrined there.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was part of the estimated 270,000 visitors to the shrine during the first three days of 2004 when he paid a visit on New Year's Day, fueling Chinese anger to be expressed in unexpectedly strong words during his separate talks with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao in November.

But prospects appear slim that the political stalemate between the two countries will be broken, and the Japanese public appears to be increasingly fed up with Beijing's repeated protests due in part to lack of knowledge about the dispute's background, political analysts say.

Set up in 1869 by imperial command and receiving its current name 10 years later, Yasukuni enshrines nearly 2.5 million spirits of Japanese people who died in wars since before the 1868 Meiji Restoration but mostly during World War II.

[FG Lurker]

No more meeting with Bush?

Bush isn't a war criminal! It's only a criminal action if you're the leader of side that loses the war, no?

[DJEB]

No more meeting with Bush?

Bush isn't a war criminal! It's only a criminal action if you're the leader of side that loses the war, no? ]
Oops. I forgot. Legal documents carry no weight if you're strong enough not to have to follow them.

[Captain Japan]

Yasukuni Shrine's website under attack since September
TOKYO, Jan. 6 Kyodo

The website of Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Class-A war
criminals from World War II along with Japan's war dead, has faced
cyber attacks intermittently since last September, a shrine official
said Thursday.
The shrine posted a notice on the website Wednesday, notifying
viewers about the attacks, believed to be originating from China, and
explaining about the countermeasures taken to deal with the situation.
Due to the unusually large number of access requests since Sept.
3, totaling up to 15,000 hits per second, the website has at times
been difficult for browsers to access and it has experienced
concentrated attacks lasting more than one hour on five occasions
last year, the official said.
The website notice said a Chinese-language spam using the
shrine's email address as the sender was sent in massive numbers to
third parties on Sept. 21 and infected many computers on the
receiving end. Some of the e-mails were found to have been sent using
a Chinese mail server.
The large number of cyber attacks came after a message posted on
an Internet bulletin board based in China in late December revealed
data concerning the Yasukuni site and urged readers to attack it,
according to the notice.
The shrine said it has taken steps in cooperation with the
police and other related authorities to build a system to protect its
website from the continuing attacks, at least for the time being.
Similar cyber attacks on the site have occurred on and off since
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi began making annual visits
to the Shinto shrine in August 2001.
The visits have triggered criticism and protests from Asian
neighbors such as China and South Korea that were victims of Japan's
military aggression through the end of World War II. They say the
visits glorify Japan's militaristic past.
In the late 1970s, Yasukuni, which is dedicated to the war dead,
included wartime Prime Minister Gen. Hideki Tojo and 13 other war
criminals on the list of those honored at the shrine.

Yasukuni Shrine: http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/

[Taro Toporific]

Yasukuni Shrine's website under attack since September
TOKYO, Jan. 6 Kyodo
Yasukuni Shrine: http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/

Yep, I'll keep clicking that Yasukuni site with my images turned off just to waste their bandwidth, hee, hee.

[FG Lurker]

Oops. I forgot. Legal documents carry no weight if you're strong enough not to have to follow them.

Yep, exactly! Murdering civilians is fine, as long as they are from some country your own citizens have been brain-washed into thinking is evil.

Oh, and don't get a BJ in the oval office... That's a serious impeachable offence.