Japan marks 80th anniversary of WWII surrender as concern grows about fading memory
In a national ceremony Friday at Tokyo 's Budokan hall, about 4,500 officials and bereaved families and their descendants from around the country will observe a moment of silence at noon, the time when the then-emperor's surrender speech began on Aug. 15, 1945.
Just a block away at Yasukuni Shrine, seen by Asian neighbors as a symbol of militarism, dozens of Japanese rightwing politicians and their supporters came to pray.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba stayed away from Yasukuni and sent a religious ornament as a personal gesture instead of praying at the controversial shrine.
But Shinjiro Koizumi, the agriculture minister considered as a top candidate to replace the beleaguered prime minister, prayed at the shrine. Koizumi, the son of popular former Prime Minitser Junichiro Koizumi whose Yasukuni visit as a serving leader in 2001 outraged China, is a regular at the shrine.
Rightwing lawmakers, including former economic security ministers Sanae Takaichi and Takayuki Kobayashi, as well as governing Liberal Democratic Party heavyweight Koichi Hagiuda, also visited the shrine Friday.
The shrine honors convicted war criminals, among about 2.5 million war dead. Victims of Japanese aggression, especially China and the Koreas, see visits to the shrine as a lack of remorse about Japan's wartime past.
As the population of wartime generations rapidly decline, Japan faces serious questions on how it should pass on the wartime history to the next generation, as the country has already faced revisionist pushbacks under former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his supporters in the 2010s.
Since 2013, Japanese prime ministers stopped apologizing to Asian victims, under the precedent set by Abe.
Some lawmakers' denial of Japan's military role in massive civilian deaths on Okinawa or the Nanking Massacre have stirred controversy.
In an editorial Friday, the Mainichi newspaper noted that Japan's pacifist principle was mostly about staying out of global conflict, rather than thinking how to make peace, and called the country to work together with Asian neighbors as equal partners.
'It's time to show a vision toward 'a world without war' based on the lesson from its own history,' the Mainichi said.
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Britain and France agreed to travel to meet Hitler, who at that stage was aware that there was little appetite for war either among the German people or his own generals. Beneš, meanwhile, was preparing his people to resist the German threat. Troops were sent to the borders between Sudetenland and Germany, where Czechoslovakia had built considerable fortifications. Chamberlain and Daladier duly met Hitler in Munich, where over two days an agreement for the occupation of Sudetenland was thrashed out and a four-page document signed by the three leaders and Mussolini. No Czech official was involved in either the negotiations or the signing of the agreement. On hearing of the deal, Beneš said: 'Munich is a betrayal that will be its own punishment,' adding: 'Britain and France think they will save themselves from war and revolution at our expense, but they are wrong.' He stepped down a few days later. 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