Abe and his right-wing cohorts have also endorsed a whitewash of the war in Japanese school textbooks and pushed for the revision of Japan's pacifist constitution.

Some of Abe's actions have also irritated its closest ally the United States. The US has repeatedly voiced its disappointment at Abe's visit to Yasukuni and described it as exacerbating regional tensions.

Jonathan Pollack, director of the John L. Thornton China Center of the Brookings Institute, said he is not going to speculate on Abe's psychology.

"He probably calculates that the US needs me so much that I can do what I want to do. But I think what he did not sufficiently anticipate and maybe he did not really care is the damage you can very quickly do to what is such a vital bilateral relationship," Pollack said.

"(It's) not so much in terms of the American commitment to Japan, but the trust and comfort that the American leadership has in dealing with the Japanese leadership. That's what I think, Abe, if anything, really did not calculate his interest carefully enough and we're dealing with the consequences today," Pollack said.

Douglas Paal, vice-president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the US needs to send seasoned diplomats to Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul to listen to respective complaints and claims, and rephrase them to the counterparts with a view of eliciting ideas about reducing tensions.

"Abe is trending toward taking a view of history significantly at odds with the American view, and that should be voiced," he said.

Paal, who came back from a visit to South Korea last week, said Koreans expect Abe to apologize for his visit to the shrine. "But if he continues repeatedly to visit Yasukuni Shrine, high-level substantive meetings will not be possible."

In Paal's view, Seoul started to relax gradually its stance toward official meetings, but the Dec 26 visit to Yasukuni killed that initiative, much as it did China's reported attempt to thaw relations after China's ambassador called on Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida on Dec 20.

P. J. Crowley, former US assistant secretary of state for public affairs and now a professor at George Washington University, believes in a highly charged political environment, Abe will listen carefully to what the US will tell him.

"But he is a political animal. He is going to do the things he is going to do, first and foremost as part of his own governing philosophy and his governing convictions," Crowley said.

Contact the writer atchenweihua@chinadailyusa.com