Japan marks 80th anniversary of WWII surrender as concern grows about fading memory

TOKYO -- TOKYO (AP) — Japan is paying tribute to more than 3 million war dead as the country marks its surrender 80 years ago, ending the World War II, as concern grows about the rapidly fading memories of the tragedy of war and the bitter lessons from the era of Japanese militarism.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba expressed “remorse” over the war, which he called a mistake, restoring the word in a Japanese leader's Aug. 15 address for the first time since 2013, when former premier Shinzo Abe shunned it.

“We will never repeat the tragedy of the war. We will never go the wrong way,” Ishiba said. “Once again, we must deeply keep to our hearts the remorse and lesson from that war.”

Ishiba, noting Japan’s mostly postwar-born population “who don’t know the war," pledged to pass on “the memory of the tragedy of war and non-war determination through generations and stick to actions toward achieving a lasting peace."

In a national ceremony Friday at Tokyo's Budokan hall, about 4,500 officials and bereaved families and their descendants from around the country observed 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.

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 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.