Most people reading this blog probably know about Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Jinja, which commemorates/enshrines Japan's war dead -- including 14 class-A and over a thousand lesser war criminals. About a month ago, a document to light which (pace the possibility of forgery etc.) was written by TOMITA Tomohiko (富田朝彦), former head of the Imperial Household Agency (宮内庁長官), and records the Shōwa Emperor's decision not to visit the shrine because of the class-A criminals there.

You can find Japanese and English stories about the "Tomita Memo" here and there on the internets, and I don't like blogging about politics anyway, but my attention was caught by the memo's final phrase:

だから　私あれ以来参拝していない。　それが私の心だ

So, since then, I haven't worshipped [at Yasukuni]. That is my kokoro.

Kokoro is a tough word to Englishify. To put that more accurately, it doesn't map to English very neatly. Depending on context, it might be translated as "heart", "spirit", "soul", "feeling", "mind", "mood", "opinion", "sensibility", "hope", "situation", "meaning", "plan", "reason", "center", "topic", and I'm sure there are others, and that's only if you insist that the translation be a single noun like the source. For example, one of the articles I linked above goes with "feeling", but this article translates the relevant phrase as "That is from my heart."

In other news, jokey references to the memo in the form "だから私[あれ以来](action)していない。それが私の心だ" are already popping up. Good old tubes.