TOKYO, May 6 (Xinhua) -- Last week, a memorial rite was held at the so-called "Grave of the Seven Martyrs" atop Mount Sangane in central Japan's Aichi Prefecture.
Before an audience of some 300 participants, Yuji Adachi, a member of the House of Councillors, brazenly declared that "the Tokyo Trials were a grave miscarriage of justice."
Hiroshi Morimoto, a former vice president of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, followed with claims that Japan's legal community had "not engaged in sufficient discussion" of the Tokyo Trials and would "pursue further study".
On the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Tokyo Trials, when the Allied powers tried Japanese war criminals at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo after World War II (WWII), such blatant attempts to vindicate Class-A war criminals constitute a grave affront to historical justice and human conscience.
The so-called Grave of the Seven Martyrs was established in 1960, funded through private donations raised largely by lawyers who had defended war criminals during the Tokyo Trials. It enshrines seven Class-A war criminals, including Hideki Tojo, who was executed by hanging following the trials.
The site is currently managed and maintained by a Japanese far-right organization, with memorial activities largely confined to closed circles and conducted mostly in private.
In its central burial area, a joint grave for the seven war criminals occupies a prominent spot, marked by a tall stone monument.
Nearby, more than a dozen memorial steles are scattered across a courtyard, their surfaces inscribed with terms such as "heroic spirits," "loyal souls," and "devotion to the nation."
Since its establishment, the seven martyrs' grave has repeatedly drawn strong opposition from residents. The local government has received a large volume of protest letters condemning the erection of monuments honoring Class-A war criminals in a publicly accessible space as "deeply offensive," and expressing firm rejection of any structures "associated with the dark history of aggression."
Koichi Nakano, a professor at Japan's Sophia University, told reporters that those who participated in the memorial at the grave are "shameless and ignorant."
He said that the root of their denial of the legitimacy of the Tokyo Trials lies in their persistent refusal to acknowledge that Japan waged wars of aggression and was ultimately defeated.
The seven martyrs' grave fabricated a distorted historical narrative, using the guise of "personal sacrifice" to whitewash crimes of aggression.
Pamphlets distributed at the site claim that Japan had no war criminals, attribute the outbreak of WWII to a reluctant response of Japan to international pressure, and explain Japan's defeat as the result of external factors such as the atomic bombings, denying outright the fact that Japan initiated wars of aggression.
Nakano said that such fallacies are not only a desecration of history but also a challenge to the fundamental principles that the international community will not tolerate.
Nobuyuki Kato, professor emeritus at Hokkai-Gakuen University, noted that the Grave of the Seven Martyrs is a deliberately constructed political space. Through highly emotive memorial rites, war criminals are recast as "patriots who died for their country."
Yasukatsu Matsushima, a professor at Japan's Ryukoku University, told reporters that denying the Tokyo Trials amounts to openly defying the postwar international order.
As "neo-militarism" is gaining momentum in Japan, moves to overturn the verdicts on war criminals are, in essence, an attempt to sanitize Japan's history of aggression and provide ideological support for the country's renewed military expansion.
"If such practices of reviving militarism and dismantling the postwar consensus are allowed to spread unchecked, it will gravely undermine peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region," Matsushima stressed. ■