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Here's a multi-page rundown of the 75th anniversary of the end of the war at Yasukuni Shrine from Japan's most right-leaning national newspaper, the Sankei Shimbun: https://www.sankei.com/life/news/200815/lif2008150010-n1.html
I'm obviously not a Sankei partisan nor an apologist for Yasukuni. What does interest me is the representational gap between discussions of the shrine internationally and this kind of coverage domestically.
What stands out in these pages is less the chauvinistic nationalism of many of the shrine's most vocal champions and the advocacy for a more muscular foreign policy by its key political allies, and more the sentimentalization of violence and sacrifice.
This is not to say that both can't coexist or anything like that. But it's a helpful reminder to me at least of how often military violence is sanctified afterward by a narrative focus on individual soldiers and the family legacies they left behind.
And I'm not defending Koizumi Shinjiro's decision, or that of any other official, to visit the shrine on the 15th (though I have to admit to being curious about Koizumi's motives and calculations, as I don't believe the decision was based only on personal conviction).
But we tend to equate nationalism with the kind of angry posturing we see in rightist movements, in anti-Japan demonstrations overseas, and the like. But to function effectively, it needs to pull at the heartstrings a lot more than that, and the Sankei series is a solid reminder.
