JAPAN: The controversy over prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a war memorial shows it is a live issue, writes David McNeill in Tokyo
The countdown to decide who will replace prime minister Junichiro Koizumi has begun, with two serious likely candidates emerging from the liver-spotted ranks of his party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP).
Mr Koizumi's supporters stress the achievements of an iconoclastic reformer whom they say dragged the LDP into the 21st century and survived several near-misses to become Japan's third-longest serving prime minister.
But the debate about who should helm the world's second-largest economy when Mr Koizumi steps down in the autumn is in danger of being drowned out in the controversy over a 10sq km plot of land in the centre of Tokyo.
Since taking office in 2001, the prime minister has paid five visits to the war memorial, Yasukuni shrine - a political rite of passage that has played well with his nationalist supporters but caused diplomatic havoc.
Although the memorial enshrines 14 class-A war criminals from Japan's brief but brutal colonial era in Asia, Mr Koizumi has stubbornly insisted that his annual pilgrimage is a "personal" display of respect for the country's 2.5 million war dead and not a public endorsement of militarism.
The problem is that South Korea and Japan's fast-growing neighbour, China, are not buying this argument. Seoul calls the visits "the biggest stumbling block to South Korea-Japan relations", and Japan's biggest trading partner, China, says they are a "serious provocation". Both countries have effectively frozen high-level diplomatic ties with Tokyo in protest. In much of the Chinese and Korean popular media, Mr Koizumi is a figure of hatred rivalled only by US president George W Bush.
Until now, Washington has stayed on the sidelines of the dispute - odd considering that Mr Koizumi's visits to the shrine are widely seen by his supporters as a snub to the US-run tribunal that convicted the war criminals in 1948.
But in the run-up to a visit to the US next month by Mr Koizumi, powerful American congressman Henry Hyde has waded into the controversy with a diatribe against the Japanese leader that may have a major influence on who replaces him.
Mr Hyde, who is chairman of the House of Representatives International Relations Committee and served in the US navy during the war, said that another visit to Yasukuni by Mr Koizumi this summer would be "embarrassing to the US Congress" and "offend" American veterans. The US should get "prior assurance" that the Japanese prime minister will not go to the shrine, he said.
The comments were widely discussed in Japan, not least by the man hand-picked by Mr Koizumi to take over the country's top political job in the autumn, the hawkish chief cabinet secretary Shinzo Abe. He reached for Tokyo's boilerplate response that Japan must "make greater efforts" to help the rest of the world understand the shrine visits.
Former prime minister Yoshiro Mori, who heads the LDP faction behind Mr Abe, gave a more memorable reply when he said that the visits were a "matter of the soul", but Mr Koizumi's supporters have done a poor job of keeping the issue of Japan's undigested war history in the metaphysical world and out of the political.
Foreign minister Taro Aso has been taking flak recently after amateur historians dug up documents on his family firm, a mining company that enslaved thousands of Koreans, Chinese and even some British and Australian POWs during the war. Mr Aso, who supports the Yasukuni visits, has never apologised or offered compensation to survivors.
The most unexpected sign that the shrine issue worries Japan's political elite, however, is the recent conversion of the country's largest newspaper, the Yomiuri, to the anti-Yasukuni side, after years of supporting nationalist causes. The Yomiuri is waiting for the official start of the election race before recommending its preferred candidate to 14 millions readers, but there is little secret about who it hopes will succeed Mr Koizumi: Yasuo Fukuda, a moderate old hand widely seen as "pro-Asia".
So far, Mr Abe has ridden high in the polls, helped by his youth (51) and impeccable political pedigree (he is the grandson of a former prime minister). But Mr Fukuda, who has yet to announce his official candidacy, is narrowing the gap, a sign that the past is likely to be a major player in the coming election.