What do you think of Yasukuni Shrine?

What do you think of Yasukuni Shrine?

[Yasukuni Shrine - Japanese]
http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/
[About a cyber attack of the homepage - Japanese]
http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/new/osirase.htm
[About a cyber attack of the homepage - J2E(with cache)]
http//www.excite.co.jp.nyud.net/...

[Wikipedia - English]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine
[Wikipedia - Japanese]
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9D%96%E5%9B%BD%E7%A5%9E%E7%A4%BE
[Wikipedia - Translates from Japanese to English(with cache)]
http//www.excite.co.jp.nyud.net/...

I don't think there's anything wrong with Yasukuni Jinja per se, but there are a few things wrong with people surrounding it. For one, some of the shrine officials are rabid right wing nuts who would like to see Japan remilitarized and who disbelieve any war atrocities committed by the Japanese, as it says so on their web page. For two, the rest of the right wing groups in Japan abuse the shrine by using it as a platform for their twisted beliefs and propaganda.

However, most people visiting Yasukuni Jinja are just ordinary Japanese people who don't believe most of this bullshit. They are poorly educated about the crimes that their nation committed during WWII, true, but that's the MoE's fault. Other than that they are just honest people who lost family in the war and come to worship and remember their dead. It's also not fair for other countries to see official visits to Yasukuni as some sort of political statement. It's not as if other countries get pissed when Bush visits a fundamentalist Baptist church, so why should Japan deserve such treatment?

Equating Japan with the crazy black-jeep driving right wingers and yakuza isn't fair. Every country has screwballs in its politics, but most of the population of any particular country doesn't support such positions.