Snow said his boss doesn't want to get involved in the defusing of tension between the two East Asian neighbors "because that's something they can do themselves." Reporters didn't have much luck in getting anything from State Department spokesman Sean McCormack either. He would only repeat the same line: "It's up to Japanese politicians and prime ministers to make those decisions for themselves."

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This is certainly not the result of a lack of trying from Beijing and Tokyo. Both parties have been desperate to seek Washington's favor. When Robert Zoellick was still the deputy secretary of state, he said both Japan and China raised Yasukuni with the United States.

"It's sort of striking from my perspective that two of these major powers want to talk about the subject at length with the United States," he said in Chengdu in January.

For months, panda huggers have tried to present a spin of US interests being hurt by Japanese stubbornness, hoping Bush would tell his good friend Koizumi not to visit the Shinto shrine where 14 out of the 2.5 million souls honored are Class-A war criminals.

Even if the US president had tried, he might not have prevailed anyway. According to Kyodo News, when Bush visited Japan last fall, Koizumi brought up Yasukuni himself and said: "Even if I'm told by the United States not to, I will go."

Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the almost certain successor to Koizumi, said recently: "I do not think the United States is particularly worried." Instead, Abe believes that there are more American officials who think it's odd for China to close its doors over one issue. And Zoellick previously had also said: "I don't think it has affected our interests."

Yasukuni has attracted strange bedfellows in the United States, I must say. Two major opposing voices I'm aware of come from Republican Congressman Henry Hyde, a conservative chairman of the House International Relations Committee and The New York Times.

Hyde wrote to the Speaker of the House expressing his reservations about letting the Japanese leader speak in Congress in late June if Koizumi were to visit the Yasukuni shrine weeks later. The Times, on the other hand, slammed Koizumi's annual visit as "shameless pandering to the right."

Other than these exceptions, I don't find much discussion on Yasukuni in this country. And when I did, such as in the Washington Post Sunday , I found two influential columnists more critical of China than Japan.

Jim Hoagland said China is engaged in the pursuit of tactical advantage, not historical truth, in pretending it possesses moral superiority over an unreconstructed Japan. It is the unfinished transformation of China, not Japan, which is the urgent moral and political question today in Asia. "It is China's military buildup not Japan's increased willingness to take on the burdens of global security, that is the destabilizing force in Asia. Americans and Europeans should not be taken in by Beijing's flim-flammery on the Yasukuni visit," he wrote.

George Will believed that the controversy about Yasukuni shouldn't mystify Americans. "With their comparatively minor but still acrimonious arguments about displays of Confederate flags, Americans know how contentious the politics of national memory can be, and they understand the problem of honoring war dead without necessarily honoring the cause for which they died," he said.

Will also pointed out a few things Beijing would never admit. Most Chinese resistance during the war was by Chiang Kai-shek's forces. "And Mao, to whom there is a sort of secular shrine in Beijing, killed millions more Chinese than even Japan's brutal occupiers."

Washington is correct in not interfering in the Yasukuni issue. As a senior administration official told reporters before Koizumi's sayonara summit with Bush, "I don't think it's the place of either leader to tell the other one what he can and cannot do domestically."

But Beijing would argue that by not doing anything, Washington is in fact siding more with Tokyo. China could ask the United States how it can support Japan becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council and embrace its re-emergence when the Japanese have not fully come to grips with their own history?

The best answer came from former deputy assistant secretary of state Randy Schriver. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute earlier this year, he said: "We can do it because we have full faith and confidence in our friends in Japan, that their intentions as a democracy, as a like-minded country and as a country with a track record of over 50 years of being a constructive participant in regional and global affairs, and we have every reason to believe they will continue to do so."

Schriver said the United States- Japan relationship and the United States-China relationship are not co- equals. Japan is a close friend, strategic partner and treaty ally while China is not yet a responsible stakeholder. The United States should not be apologetic for that, he said.