Shinzo Abe’s December 27 visit to Yasukuni shrine will certainly not improve East Asia’s already tense relations, but it is hardly the root cause of this tension, as I argue today in my CNN op-ed. History shows us that sometimes former adversaries seek to improve their relations, often out of strategic necessity. As David McCann describes in a nice piece about Anglo-Irish peace-building, such countries remember and commemorate the past in ways that nurture — rather than antagonize — their reconciliation. While recent headlines are rightfully focused on Japanese moves that torpedo regional amity, Chinese and Korean commemoration similarly reflect that those countries have other priorities than putting World War II behind them.