Abe visits controversial shrine

Hannah Beech has a Time article about a bad move by the Japanese Prime Minister:

He could only stay away for so long. On 26 December 2013, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where wartime criminals are honored. It was exactly a year after the conservative Prime Minister had taken office. Although the hawkish Abe had until today avoided visiting the religious site while Prime Minister, he had said that one of his regrets during his first stint as Japan’s leader (from September of 2006 to September of 2007) was not personally paying his respects at Yasukuni. His arrival at the Shinto shrine, in a solemn morning suit, was broadcast live on Japanese television.
Yasukuni honors the nation’s 2.5 million wartime dead, including those convicted of committing atrocities during imperial Japan’s march across Asia in the past century. A history museum located on the shrine’s leafy grounds downplays Japan’s brutal World War Two record, labeling the Nanking Massacre, in which Japanese soldiers engaged in a weeks’-long slaughter in the former Chinese capital, a mere “incident”, among other revisionist claims.
Since coming to power for the second time a year ago, Abe has proved a muscular and decisive leader, in contrast to his less-effectual first term. He has launched a fiscal-reform package dubbed Abenomics, and has beefed up the country’s military profile, warning that Japan must contend with a rising and more assertive China.
Earlier this month, Abe signed off on the largest defense-budget hike in nearly two decades, albeit a mere two percent increase in spending year on year. Some of the money will be used to bolster Japan’s defense of contentious islets in the East China Sea that Tokyo administers, but to which Beijing also lays claim. Last month, the Chinese government announced the formation of an East China Sea Air-Defense-Identification Zone that encompassed those bits of rock, as well as other territory claimed by South Korea.
Despite being a member of Japan’s largely pacifist postwar generation, Abe has called for Japan to transform its military into a more conventional force. Under the current Japanese constitution, which was written by the victorious Americans after World War Two, the Japanese armed forces are prohibited from any offensive military action.
Abe’s own grandfather, a wartime Minister of Industry, was once arrested as a suspected war criminal by Allied occupation forces. But the charges never stuck, and he went on to serve as a postwar Prime Minister. In a memoir called Toward a Beautiful Country, Abe described his maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi as a “sincere statesman who only thought about the future of his country”. While Prime Minister in the late 1950s, Kishi, like many other Japanese leaders after him, visited Yasukuni, too.
That didn’t spark much international outcry then. But the shrine now occupies a far more sensitive place in regional geopolitics. No sitting Japanese Prime Minister has visited Yasukuni since 2006. East Asian nations, particularly China, are sure to decry Abe’s pilgrimage. Hopes for an easing of regional tensions with the dawn of a new year just faded.

And there's more, of course:

For a nation that technically doesn't even possess a conventional military, Japan's fighter pilots have been working overtime of late. Territorial tensions between Japan and China have intensified over a scattering of islands in the East China Sea, which Japan administers, but to which China lays historic claim. From April to June of 2013, seventy Japanese jets were deployed (photo) because of perceived threats from China, compared with just fifteen during the same period last year. September was just as busy, with Japan's Self- Defense Force (SDF) responding to the first confirmed flight of a Chinese drone over Japan and a flotilla of Chinese coast-guard vessels sailing through waters near the disputed islands.
Japan is still a nation divided over its martial past and future. After World War Two, the country's DNA was shaped into a pacifist helix, reinforced by a constitution that renounces war altogether. Now, under hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan is expanding its military footprint and speaking out more forcefully against nations it sees as threatening its sovereignty, most notably China. For Abe and other conservatives in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Japan's samurai spirit is just as integral to the national makeup as any paeans to peace. And a real debate is emerging about whether Japan can finally evolve into a normal country with normal armed forces. 

Rico says it's hard to come up with an American equivalent, but maybe visiting the Arizona Memorial and then making a speech about our war dead...