But Yoshida is not only praying for the 2.5 million ordinary soldiers and family members whose souls are enshrined here, after losing their lives in an indiscriminate war. He is also paying homage to the souls of 14 Class-A war criminals and the logic of the brutal conquests they led through China and East Asia.

After giving his prayers he wanders through an adjacent museum where guns, canons and a Mitsubishi Zero fighter are displayed and their tactical achievements glorified. There is no mention of the catastrophic strategic and moral failures that led to well over 10 million lives being lost and 90 million displaced in China alone.

"It was a necessary war," Yoshida says. "We had to fight to break the US oil embargo and show the US, Britain, and China that our country is not a slave country."

The Yasukuni cocktail of personal mourning and national denial has proven to be dangerously alluring for Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Abe's brand of historical revisionism melds the national story with that of his own grandfather, a cabinet minister who ran the wartime economy in Manchuria and narrowly escaped prosecution for war crimes.

"Some people used to point to my grandfather as a 'Class-A war criminal suspect', and I felt strong repulsion," wrote Abe in his nationalistic tome, Beautiful Country, published in 2006, shortly before his first stint as prime minister. "Because of that experience, I may have become emotionally attached to 'conservatism'."

In Australia, many commentators and retired leaders have focused on Abe's historical revisionism to explain dangerous territorial clashes with China in the seas and skies around the Japanese-administered Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, north-east of Taiwan. But Japan's geo-strategic predicament, straddling the widening fault line between the US and China, owes at least as much to parallel dynamics taking place on the other side of the Sea of Japan.

Abe's great Chinese "princeling" rival, Xi Jinping, is driven by a similar impulse to live up to his luminous father, a Red Army leader and then vice-premier. He wants to continue his father's revolutionary pursuit of family and national honour, glory and revival. Abe and Xi both surfed to power late in 2012 on waves of nationalism partly generated by the other.

Privately, some officials nominate China's relentless territorial challenges across its maritime periphery as the greatest potential threat to the global rules-based order, notwithstanding the recent audacity of ISIS and Vladimir Putin's Russia. The US and Australian response has been to step up efforts to weave a latticework of US-anchored security arrangements with other nations that fear the growing muscularity.

The US "will become more regional", said Prime Minister Tony Abbott's national security adviser, Andrew Shearer, at a forum in Washington this year. "Australia will become much more focused in maintenance of the regional order and the maritime balance in the Western Pacific as it comes under growing strain."

Under Abbott, this regional work has focused particularly on "our best friend in Asia", Abe's Japan.

Last December, a Japanese defence white paper listed Australia as Japan's third-most important military partner, behind the US and its fellow US ally and neighbour, South Korea. Less than one year later, however, officials on both sides acknowledge that Australia and Japan are clearly the second-most important military partners for each other.

Officials in both countries make no secret of the personal rapport between the two conservative leaders and how they have tightened ties between the Australian military and its nominally pacifist Japanese counterparts. "Mr Abe wants to raise the relationship between Japan and Australia considerably, his instructions are very clear, and he wants good trilateral relations between Japan, Australia and the US," said Takuma Kajita, principal deputy director of the National Security Policy Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On April 1, days before Abbott commenced a high-wire tour of North Asia, Japan's Ministry of Defence created a unique Australia bureau inside its international division, to handle the escalation of activity. Unofficially, Japanese officials even talk about a "quasi-alliance", pointing out that they are now willing to share their prized submarine military technology, but they stop short of any treaty-like obligations that might apply in the event of war.

Abe's Japan and Xi's China have blamed each other for their own escalating actions but, of course, each has armed the other. Abe's commitment to a glorified and sanitised Japanese history far predates his election as Prime Minister. The Chinese political system is far more opaque but there is evidence that Xi was moving to mobilise military support for a stand-off against Japan in mid-2012, well before his own ascension.

Around that time, Xi also took control of a special maritime command group responsible for territorial disputes in the East China Sea, according to sources citing Taiwanese intelligence. In September, when the then-moderate Japanese prime minister clumsily attempted to stop development on the Senkaku Islands, Beijing deemed it to have been a hostile act of "nationalisation" and responded with full fury.

"Some political forces in Japan have not deeply reflected on the wounds of war ... but have further intensified and are repeating the same mistakes," he said at the time, reflecting on the 81st anniversary of the Japanese invasion, while propaganda and police respectively inflamed and facilitated violent anti-Japanese protests across China.  "The international community must not allow Japan to attempt to negate the results of the World Anti-Fascist War," Xi said.

On the day Abe was elected as prime minister, December 26, 2012, Xi commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Nanjing massacre by sending an air force plane over the Senkakus deep into Japanese-administered airspace, for the first time in over 50  years. A month later, in January 2013, Chinese warships locked "fire control radars" on a Japanese destroyer and helicopter, raising concerns at the highest levels in Washington that the two countries were one misstep away from outright conflict.

Late in 2012, the People's Liberation Army conducted amphibious and cross-military region exercises of unprecedented ambition.  "We concluded that the PLA has been given the new task of being able to conduct a short, sharp war to destroy Japanese forces in the East China Sea following with what can only be an expected seizure of the Senkakus," said the director of intelligence for the US Pacific Fleet, Captain James Fanell.

Abe, for his part, did not waste time in using Xi's relentless territorial incursions to "normalise" his country's Self-Defence Force and loosen the shackles of a pacifist constitution, as his grandfather had desired. On December 26, 2013, as Xi was about to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the birthday of Mao Zedong, Abe marked his first year in office with his inaugural prime ministerial visit to the Yasukuni Shrine.

Through the first half of this year, China rolled armadas of naval and para-military vessels into Japanese-administered waters, while Japanese fighters were scrambled against apprehended air incursions more than 200 times. On two occasions, in May and June, Chinese fighters intercepted Japanese surveillance planes in international airspace, flying "dangerously" within 30 metres and displaying afterburners, according to Japanese security officials. In short, defence planners across the region have been bracing for a catastrophic miscalculation.

When Abbott departed on his April tour of each of Australia's top three export partners he toned down his overtly pro-Japan language, mindful of the sensitivities in China. It was only when he stopped over in Seoul, however, mid-journey between Tokyo and Beijing, that the tangible security costs of Abe's approach to history became more clear.

South Korea's economic and military interests are split between China and the United States, much like Australia but to a greater extreme. Korea sends about two-fifths of exports to China, compared with Australia's one-third, and its military is so enmeshed with the US that it has agreed to literally outsource command in the event of war.

Successive prime ministers in Australia and Korea have seen eye to eye on almost every economic and security question. But Abbott may have underestimated how far things had shifted with the ascendancy of yet another political aristocrat, President Park Geun-hye.

Like her Japanese and Chinese counterparts, Park hugely admires her father, the former strongman president Park Chung-hee, and sees herself on a mission to restore the honour of a nation he helped rebuild. But just as Xi pretends that his father's Communist Party played the leading role in fighting the Japanese (and that the Japanese were responsible for more Chinese deaths than they were), and Abe denies his father helped wage a senseless and barbaric war, Park has obscured her own father's activities during the Japanese invasion.

Earlier this year, a local institute released a report from the Manchurian Daily, in 1939, which showed not only that Park snr had applied to join the Japanese puppet government but, on one occasion, he did so with an oath of loyalty written in his own blood: "I pledge allegiance with my own life – Park Chung-hee." Park Geun-hye, the daughter, has ensured that nobody can accuse her of doing the same. Since coming to power in February 2013, she has flatly refused to meet Abe and cancelled high-level military meetings, taking particular umbrage at Abe's denial of forced-sexual slavery during World War II.

When Abbott arrived in Seoul he found that Park's advisers were insisting on deleting a section of what they thought was uncontroversial "vision statement" about working "closely with our friends and partners in the region to enhance our mutual security interests" and "recognising the contribution of the US rebalancing toward Asia". Abbott refused to budge, and the offending sentence was eventually retained, but a lesson had been learned about how far Park was being repelled by the politics of Abe's Japan and drawn towards the economic embrace of China.

Convincing Park and Abe to shelve their history wars has thus become a top priority for the US and Australia, so they can all get on with counterbalancing China. South Korea, they realise, could be where the balance of military might, money and diplomacy will hinge. Amazingly, however, Abe has not succeeded in meeting either Xi or Park in the nearly two years since they all came to power.

"We all need to be talking to South Korea," says Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to president George W. Bush, and now a Lowy Institute Telstra Fellow. "I think it's very important that Australia be trying to improve relations between Japan and Korea."

On Monday, when world leaders descend on Beijing for the APEC leaders summit, both Abbott and Obama will be hoping that the main action takes place away from the formal agenda, on the sidelines, with the three North Asian leaders whose political dynasties were forged in the ashes of World War II. They hope that Abe makes up with his neighbour in the middle, Park. At this stage, however, after several months of courting, a meeting between Abe and Xi looks more promising.

On Friday China's foreign affairs official, Yang Jiechi, met Japan's national security advisor, Shotaro Yachi, and agreed on nebulous but unmistakably positive principles for putting the relationsihp back on track.

Abe has stated his desires plainly and Xi has signalled indirectly, including by toning down the maritime incursions to a bare fraction of what they had been earlier in the year. What had been almost daily Chinese maritime incursions into Japanese-controlled waters has dropped to almost perfunctory levels.

"It used to be four, six or even eight ships [regularly] but now it is only three or four," said a high-level Japanese official, who recently attended the first high-level maritime co-operation forum between the two countries in 28 months. "Chinese ships now enter Japanese territorial waters every two weeks, for exactly two hours."

But Chinese maritime and air activities in the "contiguous zone", he said, have not diminished at all.

APEC AT A GLANCE

• The last time Beijing hosted in 2001 its GDP was worth $US1.2 trillion and now it is $US9 trillion;
  
• To date, news has focused on titillating side meetings and whether Beijing can strong-arm polluters into delivering blue skies, more than the formal agenda itself
• Rivals who will meet on the sidelines include Tony Abbott and Vladimir Putin; and possibly Shinzo Abe and Xi Jinping, while newcomers Narendra Modi and Joko Widodo will be eagerly sought after
• Internet users have coined the phrase "APEC Blue" for "something that is beautiful but fleeting and ultimately inauthentic"
  
• Back in 2001, China was asking humbly to get into the room; in 2014, China wants to take centre stage," Chen Fengying, of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, told Bloomberg.
• This year's "growth and prosperity" agenda has a decidedly Sinocentric flavour, after Beijing recently plans to fund a new Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank and also a "new silk road" of investment through Central Asia