Sputnik satellite in 1957, and both events turned the spotlight on American education. US bureaucrats purposely pushed that analogy. In 1982, Ernest Boyer, a former US Commissioner of Education, publicly declared, "What we need is another Sputnik" to reboot American education, and he said that "maybe what we should do is get the Japanese to put a Toyota into orbit." Japan was both a threat and a model for human resource development in education and the workforce, which merged with the image of Asian-Americans as the "model minority." Both the animosity and the superhumanizing peaked in the 1980s, when the term "Japan bashing" became popular, but had largely faded by the late 1990s. Japan's waning economic fortunes in the 1990s, now known as the Lost Decade, coupled with an upsurge in the US economy as the Internet took off, largely crowded anti-Japanese sentiment out of the popular media. Yasukuni Shrine The Yasukuni Shrine is a Shinto shrine in Tokyo, Japan. It is the resting place of thousands of not only Japanese soldiers, but also Korean and Taiwanese soldiers killed in various wars, mostly in World War II. The shrine includes 13 Class A criminals such as Hideki Tojo and Kōki Hirota, who were convicted and executed for their roles in the Japanese invasions of China, Korea, and other parts of East Asia after the remission to them under the Treaty of San Francisco. A total of 1,068 convicted war criminals are enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine. In recent years, the Yasukuni Shrine has become a sticking point in the relations of Japan and its neighbours. The enshrinement of war criminals has greatly angered the people of various countries invaded by Imperial Japan. In addition, the shrine published a pamphlet stating that "[war] was necessary in order for us to protect the independence of Japan and to prosper together with our Asian neighbors" and that the war criminals were "cruelly and unjustly tried as war criminals by a sham-like tribunal of the Allied forces". While it is true that the fairness of these trials is disputed among jurists and historians in the West as well as in Japan, the former Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, has visited the shrine five times; every visit caused immense uproar in China and South Korea. His successor, Shinzo Abe, was also a regular visitor of Yasukuni. Some Japanese politicians have responded by saying that