Japan shrine visits anger China on World War II anniversary

Yasukuni Shrine is exploited as a rallying point for Asian nationalists in China and Korea but it's a normal war memorial which serves as a resting place for the war dead since the 1860s and there are around 2,500,000 enshrined individuals regardless of their national origins including Koreans and Taiwanese who died in the line of duty. Around 1,000 Japanese officers and soldiers were executed as war criminals immediately after the war and the war crime trials held by the Allied powers were deemed unfair by the Japanese, which may be why Japan still refuses to remove their names from the Yasukuni's Symbolic Registry of Divinities that includes soldiers, as well as women and students who were involved in relief operations or worked in factories. Moreover, 14 convicted war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine are mostly former prime ministers and diplomats, who were not directly responsible for wartime atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers at the time with the only exception of Tojo, and few former generals among them were held responsible for colonising Manchuria but it was not technically a war crime. The real problem is anti-Japanese education campaigns aiming at inflaming anti-Japanese sentiment and Japan's wartime actions are still kept alive in TV series, films and government propaganda in China. Korean journalists and academics in the US also harbour similar prejudices against Japan and the assassin who killed a Japanese governor-general is celebrated as a national hero in Korea.