It also just so happens to be the burial ground for 1068 war criminals.

Every few years or so some left-wing activists will turn up to the shrine with a monk or Shinto priest who will wave their arms around in an attempt to exorcise the spirits, much like trying to waft a bad smell from a room.

This will invariably trigger a tidal wave of outrage from the conservatives who will insist that World War Two is part of Japan's history, that these men died fighting for the nation, and that they should be given the "respect they deserve".

The exorcism seems to wear off after a while, because no matter how many well-paid priests work their magic the same debate keeps bobbing up to the surface like an unflushable wet wipe.

As we stare into the toilet bowl of history we face a dilemma: should we feel proud of our history, our ancestors, our national identity, or should we be ashamed of them?

This question has reared its ugly head in Wagga, where members of the community are hotly debating the fate of Captain Cook Drive and Lord Baden Powell Drive.

If we are to feel proud as Australians of their accomplishments, their pioneering spirits, their legacies, then does it not also follow that we should feel ashamed of their failures, their sins, the suffering they have left in their wake?

To me the answer is obvious: we should feel neither.

We are not our ancestors, we are not beholden to our history or slaves to our traditions - we are individuals who should feel pride at our personal triumphs and shame at our personal failings.

We bear a responsibility to Indigenous people not out of shame for our history, not to pay a debt owed by somebody else, but because it is the right thing to do.

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First Nations people still suffer from the real consequences of historical injustice, from disadvantage, from persecution, and the pain they feel is more important than our petty pride.

History does not care whether you are proud or ashamed of it, because the cold hard facts of the past are not contingent on your feelings or your race or your ancestry.

I share no ancestry with the first settlers, but that makes me no less responsible for the past.

It is utterly irrelevant who our ancestors were.

If it was relevant I'd certainly be in a pickle, being the half-Japanese and half-Chinese mongrel that I am.

As a Japanese man should I be apologising for the rape of Nanking, or should I be angrily demanding reparations on the basis of my Chinese heritage?

Neither is an appropriate reaction to historical injustice; we do not inherit the sins of our ancestors, nor can we take credit for their past achievements.

What matters are the injustices that are happening today, and to dismiss those injustices on the grounds that "all lives matter" is intellectual dishonesty.

It is a pathetically weak strawman version of the Black Lives Matter protesters, who never claimed that only black lives matter.

I can't imagine that the "all lives matter" crowd genuinely believe in this strawman they have created; it is just a form of rhetorical trickery, a self-told lie to avoid confronting the real grievances at hand.

There are those who desperately want to feel proud of their history, their ancestors, their national identity, and to this end they will lie to themselves over and over again.

But history is not something to be proud of; we should be proud of our own efforts, our own achievements, and what we as individuals can do for others.

The reverse is also true; you are not culpable for your ancestors' crimes, you are not guilty by dint of your white skin, you are responsible for your actions in the present.

We should care about the present because that which has been done can never be undone, and we cannot exorcise the ghost of the past no matter how much mystical hand-waving we do.

You can smash the symbols of the past, topple statues, rewrite the calendars, expunge street names from the face of Google Earth, but you can never change the cold hard facts of history.

Of course, that won't stop people from trying. Walk into any Japanese bookstore and you'll see authors who try to deny, downplay, and discredit the atrocities committed in World War Two.

In Australia we have the likes of columnist Andrew Bolt, who has attempted to deny and downplay the Stolen Generations as a myth perpetrated by self-hating lefties.

We should not copy their example, nor should we attempt to defend the legacies of Captain Cook or Robert Baden-Powell in our own backyards.

For me, whether or not the names of Lord Baden-Powell Drive and Captain Cook Drive get changed is a matter of profound indifference.

When we argue over names, symbols, and ghosts, what we're really arguing over is our injured pride. We're better than that.

Kenji Sato is a reporter for The Daily Advertiser