Japan, explained.
As Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi has sent offerings to the shrine instead of visiting (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)
Sending an offering while staying away was meant to placate both Beijing and the base. For this prime minister, it risks losing both.
Subscribe to The Informer for monthly expert analysis, and to Events for advance notice of visiting world leaders and distinguished guests.
You may unsubscribe from Lowy Institute newsletters at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
Takaichi’s Yasukuni half-measure satisfies no oneTakaichi’s Yasukuni half-measure satisfies no one
On 17 October, as Yasukuni Shrine opened its autumn festival, a masakaki – a potted evergreen used in Shinto rites – appeared in the precinct bearing the label “Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi”. Two days later a ritual fee followed, paid from Takaichi’s own pocket and delivered by a senior party figure (Opens in new window). Takaichi herself stayed away, as she had in April and on 15 August, when she bowed towards the shrine from a car park (Opens in new window) at the nearby Budokan rather than walk through its gate. Beijing and Seoul protested on cue (Opens in new window).
Yasukuni honours some 2.5 million of Japan’s war dead, but since 1978 it has also enshrined 14 wartime leaders, most of them convicted as Class-A war criminals by the Tokyo tribunal. That is why a prime minister’s presence there is read in Beijing and Seoul as an endorsement of Japan’s war of aggression.
The half-measure is not Takaichi’s invention. Since Shinzo Abe’s 2013 visit, which strained ties with Beijing and Seoul and drew a rare rebuke from Washington, every prime minister has sent offerings instead of visiting. For Fumio Kishida and Shigeru Ishiba the formula worked because it was protestable but not punishable. For Takaichi it no longer does. Critics on both left and right, including voices within her own conservative camp, identify the same trap from different directions. Her compromise is too much for Beijing and too little for her own base. It is a lose-lose bargain.
The question the half-measure was designed to defer – how Japan can honour its war dead in a place a prime minister and an emperor can attend without diplomatic penalty – goes unanswered.
Start with China. Beijing’s core grievance extends beyond the shrine. In November 2025, Takaichi said in parliament that a Chinese military contingency involving Taiwan could, depending on the circumstances, constitute a “survival-threatening situation” – the legal trigger for permitting Japanese collective self-defence. Her remarks intensified an already deteriorating relationship with China. She cannot retract without losing face, and as Sophia University political scientist Koichi Nakano has warned, “as long as she continues, there’s no way to work out our relationship with China (Opens in new window)”. With a meeting between Takaichi and China’s President Xi Jinping at next month’s APEC summit in Shenzhen still in doubt despite reported urging from US President Donald Trump (Opens in new window), her restraint at Yasukuni earns no credit, while every offering is counted. Chinese state media tallied the October fee as her fifth offering this year (Opens in new window), and China’s People’s Daily (Opens in new window)folded April’s masakaki into a catalogue of grievances alongside Taiwan, long-range missile deployments and loosened arms-export rules.
More striking, Chinese analysts now read the restraint itself as strategy. A Japan expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences described her offerings (Opens in new window) as a calibrated gesture designed to consolidate her right-wing base while testing neighbours’ limits. That signal, intended to read as moderation, is thus decoded as incremental remilitarisation. The same potted tree that drew only routine protest under Kishida becomes, from a known Yasukuni loyalist, a statement of intent.
Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo honours some 2.5 million of Japan’s war dead, but since 1978 it has also enshrined 14 wartime leaders, most of them convicted as Class-A war criminals by the Tokyo tribunal (jpellgen (@1105_jp)/Flickr)
At home the problem runs in reverse. Takaichi built her conservative credentials on Yasukuni. She visited as a cabinet minister when colleagues stayed away, insisted that the matter should not become a diplomatic issue (Opens in new window), and said she would keep visiting as prime minister. By staying away she concedes the premise she spent a decade rejecting: that Yasukuni is a diplomatic question after all.
The critique from the right is pointed. Nationalist voices have warned (Opens in new window) that staying away signals weakness. Visits by backbench lawmakers carry little symbolic weight; what matters to the base is whether a prime minister follows through once in office. Toru Hashimoto, founder and former leader of her coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai), has derided her as a “fashion conservative”. Coming from the right, that charge lands with precisely the voters Takaichi most needs.
What makes this lose-lose rather than a tolerable compromise is that Takaichi has closed her own exits. The remedy floated periodically since the Nakasone era is to separate the convicted wartime leaders from the ordinary war dead, so a prime minister could pray for the latter without honouring the former. Yet during the 2025 leadership race Takaichi ruled out such separation (Opens in new window), stating that convicted war criminals shed that status once their sentences had been carried out. She cannot go, cannot separate and cannot stop the offerings without further alienating the base. So she adds increments – a personal fee after each festival, a distant bow on surrender day – each enough to hand Beijing material, none enough to satisfy the right.
Seoul is the partial exception: South Korea’s President Lee Jae-myung’s two-track approach (Opens in new window), separating history from cooperation, has absorbed the offerings. But that compartmentalisation is paid for with Lee’s political capital, not Takaichi’s.
The danger is that a lose-lose equilibrium is not stable. Each offering keeps Beijing’s grievance alive; each absence feeds resentment on the right. Meanwhile the question the half-measure was designed to defer – how Japan can honour its war dead in a place a prime minister and an emperor can attend without diplomatic penalty – goes unanswered. No emperor has visited since 1975. Takaichi’s predecessors could afford to manage that question. Having promised to answer it, she cannot. A compromise designed to be protested but never resolved buys calm. It does not buy trust – abroad or at home.
About the author
Ria Shibata
Ria Shibata is a Senior Research Fellow at the New Zealand Centre for Global Studies and the Toda Peace Institute in Japan, specialising in identity politics, historical memory and conflict resolution in Northeast Asia.
The most-pressing world events explained by Lowy Institute experts and global contributors, in your inbox, every Thursday.
You may unsubscribe from The Interpreter at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
