Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, told a television audience that she is attempting to create a “suitable environment” for visiting Yasukuni Shrine and seeks understanding from neighbouring countries. The remark, broadcast publicly, elevates a long-standing biliteral flashpoint into an explicit policy aim: to normalize pilgrimages to a site that embodies imperial Japan’s wartime legacy.
Yasukuni Shrine holds the war dead of Imperial Japan and, controversially, the spirits of 14 Class-A convicted war criminals. Visits by senior politicians have repeatedly provoked diplomatic protests from China and South Korea, where memories of occupation and wartime atrocities remain politically potent. The shrine has for decades functioned less as a religious site than as a symbol of unresolved historical memory and of a domestic political current that favors nationalist revisionism.
Domestically, the push to legitimize visits speaks to calculations within Japan’s conservative camp. For a segment of the electorate and many in the Liberal Democratic Party’s right wing, acts such as visiting Yasukuni are signals of pride in Japan’s past and a rejection of postwar pacifist constraints. For the prime minister, cultivating a “suitable environment” is therefore as much about cementing her political base and normalizing a muscular national identity as it is about ritual.
Regionally, the diplomatic costs are immediate and predictable. Calls to normalize shrine visits risk deepening distrust with Beijing and Seoul at a time when cooperation—on North Korea, trade, and supply-chain resilience—remains intermittent and fragile. The United States, which prefers its allies to manage bilateral disputes without escalating them, has in the past urged restraint, but Japan’s domestic politics often push in the opposite direction, complicating alliance management.
The episode underscores a wider strategic problem in East Asia: when domestic politics prioritize symbolic gestures over reconciliation, they make practical cooperation harder and raise the chances of miscalculation. Takaichi’s televised declaration will not only revive old grievances but also test how much neighbouring governments are willing to tolerate symbolic provocations while confronting shared security challenges.