Right-wing ice-cream vans

Last week I visited Nogi shrine in the centre of Tokyo. This is where a Meiji-era general, Nogi, is revered by quite a few Japanese.
General Nogi and his wife committed 殉死　(junshi - the act of a subject commiting ritual suicide when his master dies) upon the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912.
Nowadays this is difficult for Japanese people to understand. However, in feudal times it would have been natural, the retainer seeing the lord as near God-like.
The general’s house is austere but picturesque. I guess the cherry blossoms helped to soften it up a bit. But overall it had a very sad atmosphere. Black and white portraits of the dead couple stare out at you through the house’s windows, and you can’t help but wonder what sort of bonds of loyalty or honour or sacrifice they believed in.
The actual Shinto shrine is adjacent to the house. It’s small and pretty and quite what you’d expect a shrine to look like.
Usually such shrines are to honour nature or animals, with Shinto-ists believing that everything in the environment has some sort of spirit.
However, over time many such places have come to enshrine human beings - some good, some bad and some very, very bad. This issue raises its ugly head every year when Prime Minister Koizumi chooses to pay his respects at Yasukuni shrine. Yasukuni entombs the spirits of many millions of war dead, including convicted war criminals.
I have no idea what this guy Nogi was like. But I got a very uncomfortable feeling entering the shrine.
Outside they had a big poster which read ‘If a woman is ever made Empress of Japan, this shrine will shut its doors!’
The whole topic of the possibility of female succession is a real hot potato over here right now. It looked like the constitution was going to have to be changed to allow Princess Aiko to become Empress on the death of her father (the now Crown Prince Naruhito). But her aunt, Kiko, had the fortune (or misfortune) to go and fall pregnant in her mid-forties, bringing about the possibility of a male heir being born.
I stand square behind the idea of letting Princess Aiko ascend to the throne regardless, though I fear she’ll have a really sad and crappy life, despite all the wealth and palaces, and so on.
Many of the people who oppose the idea are right-wingers, not unlike European Neo-Nazis.
To illustrate my point, and heighten my discomfort, a skinhead man dressed in black was worshipping at the shrine as I entered. Bent at the waist an almost ninety degree angle, I knew he meant business and saw this as a very important place. Most right-wingers are not too keen on foreigners living in their country, so I didn’t exactly feel I should hang around too long.
Right-wingers haven’t always made me nervous though.
When I first moved to Japan, gangs would occasionally drive around a nearby neighbourhood, blasting out patriotic music at ear-splitting volume. I could only see them from afar and remember thinking the first time I saw such a vehicle, ‘Wow! That’s a bit loud for an ice-cream van! They’ll scare all the kiddies away.’ Little did I know I was the one who was supposed to be doing the running. They’ll have to try harder than that.