It is here that departing kamikaze pilots vowed to meet one another after death as Shinto deities, and here that the argument about the rights and wrongs of Japan’s devastating war has raged. Never in six decades has the argument been more bitter than it is now.

On Tuesday Junichiro Koizumi, the outgoing Japanese Prime Minister, is expected to visit Yasukuni to pray to the war dead on the 61st anniversary of Japan’s surrender, an act that will have far-reaching consequences.

It will delight the Right. It will complicate the race to succeed Mr Koizumi, who will step down as Prime Minister next month. And it will plunge the country’s already fraught relations with its Asian neighbours, China and South Korea, to their lowest level in 30 years. Above all it will open further division among Japanese themselves. A poll in this week’s Yomiuri Weekly newspaper found that half of the population opposes visits by the Prime Minister to the shrine, while 40 per cent supports them.

Takeshi Kawakami, a salaryman who was praying at the shrine last week, said: “Worshipping the spirits of the war victims is a domestic issue and nothing to do with foreign countries. Japan may be isolated in Asia but if this is our decision we have to accept that.”

But plenty of other visitors to the shrine pay their respects to the war dead while rejecting the Prime Minister’s visits and the right-wing ideology with which it has become associated.

“We’ve got to do what Germany did long ago, and create a place where all victims of the war can be mourned, not just our own,” Hiroshi Isaka, 73, said. “Unless we take that attitude, Japanese will never be accepted by Koreans and Chinese.”

Since the 19th century Yasukuni has been a place of commemoration for the war dead and the home to which their spirits go when they die. To nationalists, it is a patriotic necessity, a place of national mourning as essential as the Cenotaph, or Arlington National Cemetery in America.To its opponents, Yasukuni is a shrine to lies and jingoism, an incubator for the kind of aggressive nationalism that sends shivers through Japan’s former colonial subjects in Korea and China. Above all this is because of the shrine’s invisible occupants — as well as 2.46 million war dead, they include 14 Class A war criminals, among them Hideki Tojo, the wartime Prime Minister who was hanged in 1948.

Their secret enshrinement in 1978 caused such anger in China that Japanese prime ministers stopped making visits in 1985. When Mr Koizumi took over in 2001 he promised to offer annual prayers and has stubbornly kept his word, provoking rage among Chinese and South Korean leaders and citizens. There have been violent demonstrations, summit meetings have been suspended and Japan has found itself frozen out by the two most powerful countries in the region.

Fearing a boycott of Japanese goods the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, one of the most powerful business organisations in the country, has begged Mr Koizumi to change his mind, as have members of his own party and the country’s bestselling Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. But the focus now is on the man who will almost certainly succeed him — Shinzo Abe, his chief Cabinet secretary and protégé.

On paper, Mr Abe is more conservative than his mentor, a grandson of the former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, who was himself arrested, but never charged, as a Class A war criminal. Mr Abe has refused to confirm reports that he visited the shrine last April, and declined to talk about his future intentions, leaving the possibility that he will sacrifice personal principle for the sake of diplomatic harmony.

Last month this was made easier by the leaking of comments made 18 years ago by the former Emperor Hirohito.

A memo written by his Grand Steward recorded the late Emperor’s disgust at the enshrinement of the war criminals — a source of embarrassment to the ultranationalists, whose respect for the hanged wartime leadership is exceeded only by their reverence for the Emperor. And this could be the future Prime Minister’s excuse to right-wing supporters for avoiding the shrine — the words of a dead emperor echoing from beyond the grave.

In memory of the dead

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