A delegation of 168 lawmakers, mostly right-wing, visit Yasukun this week (Kyodo)
With the return of self-avowed nationalists to power in the Abe-led LDP government, Yasukuni has once again become a political football to be kicked with gleeful relish into the faces of those who suffered Japan’s war crimes in WW2. Rather than seek reconciliation with former enemies, the polticians choose to visit a shrine that acted in secret to enshrine Class A war criminals. Even the emperor was opposed. The deliberate provocations are simply designed to further reassertion of national prestige and military muscle.
That Yasukuni is a place where ordinary people go to pay respects to the spirits of those who died in the war cannot be denied. That it is also a place for political posturing by right-wing politicians also cannot be denied. The two top Shinto researchers who have spent a lengthy time researching the issue – John Nelson and John Breen – are both agreed that the shrine has been made into a political rather than a purely religious issue. Former governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, called politicians who do not visit Yasukuni ‘not Japanese’. It’s a loathsome comment by a loathsome nationalist.
The war-glorifying Yashukan museum, an integral part of the Yasukuni shrine, is a physical representation of where its sentiments lie – with the militarists who drove Japan into death, destruction and defeat in WW2. Nowhere is compassion shown for the millions of victims. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Monday that the Yasukuni issue is connected to whether Japan has faced up to its history of militarist aggression and whether it can respect the feelings of the countries it attacked. He’s right.
‘As a museum operated by the Yasukuni Shrine, its exhibits stir up militarism and glorify it. There’s something strange about the prime minister going to worship there.’ Who said that? A Chinese politician? Someone who hates Japan? Someone who doesn’t understand Shinto? No. It was Tsuneo Watanabe, chairman of the Yomiuri Shimbun group, in an interview with Nikkan Gendai in Feb 2006.
Yasukuni is simply political poison.
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Leafy Yasukuni shrine stirs raw emotions
By Hiroshi Hiyama Japan Today APR. 27, 2013
For Japan’s neighbors the leafy Yasukuni shrine is a brutal reminder of Tokyo’s imperialist past and wartime aggression, but for many ordinary Japanese it is merely a place to worship ancestors who died fighting for their country.
The controversial war memorial is a flashpoint in a bitter dispute between Japan and its Asian neighbors, particularly China and South Korea.
The long-simmering issue made international headlines this week when nearly 170 Japanese lawmakers made a pilgrimage there to mark a spring festival, angering Beijing and Seoul and sparking diplomatic protests.
Critics of the shrine point to the inclusion of the names of 14 war criminals among the 2.5 million honored at the wooden temple, while the nationalistic museum on the site also draws fire.
For many, however, walking down Yasukuni’s stone paths lined with cherry trees and past imposing gates dedicated to Shinto—an animist religion with elements of Japanese history—is part of a ritual far removed from politics.
Hideo Chikuni choked back tears as he explained that he had traveled more than 200 kilometers to honor his brother, a Japanese soldier who died during World War II.
“If you have lost family members, you would understand,” he told AFP as a light rain fell.
“Japanese politicians visiting the shrine seem to cause all this controversy… but I don’t think other countries have any business in this.
“People who are enshrined here suffered and died for the nation. They fought to protect Japan. And it is thanks to them that we live in a prosperous time today. We cannot forget that.”
Yasukuni was originally built in 1869 to honor those who gave their lives for Japan and contains the names of soldiers who have fallen in armed conflicts including World War II.
But it also honors 14 men convicted of war crimes by a U.S.-led tribunal after Japan’s 1945 surrender, including General Hideki Tojo, the prime minister who authorised the attack on Pearl Harbor which drew the U.S. into the war.
For foreign critics, the shrine is a stark reminder of Tokyo’s brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula and imperialist expansion leading up to World War II.
Even at home there is significant opposition to Yasukuni, including among some relatives of those honored there, who say it glorifies war and the darker chapters in Japan’s history.
The site is presided over by Shinto priests and a ritual prayer that sees visitors clap and bow as they call on the spirits of ancestors adds a religious element, further complicating the site’s reputation. Discussions about moving the memorial to a more secular location have gone nowhere.
Conservative Japanese lawmakers still routinely visit to pay their respects and underscore their ideological views, while liberal politicians tend to stay away.
Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi prayed there once a year during his 2001-2006 tenure, enraging China and South Korea, but subsequent leaders have remained absent, including current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Still, Abe has staunchly defended his colleagues’ right to visit the site, and paid for equipment, bearing his name and title, which was used to decorate an altar.
In response, China has insisted that “no matter in what capacity or form Japanese leaders visit Yasukuni, in essence it is an attempt to deny Japan’s history of aggression through militarism”.
South Korea on Thursday summoned Japan’s ambassador to lodge a strong protest over the lawmakers’ visit, and President Park Geun-Hye has warned Tokyo against shifting to the right and aggravating historical grudges.
“If Japan has a different perception of history and aggravates the scars of the past, it will be difficult to build future-oriented ties,” she said this week.
Yuji Miyata, whose uncle is enshrined at Yasukuni, said he understands why the high-profile visits are a troubling reminder of the past for some, including a Chinese man who unsuccessfully tried to burn it down in 2011.
But Miyata, a 48-year-old businessman, said most of the shrine’s five million annual visitors come to honor fallen ancestors and pray for peace.
“I can understand why foreign politicians are critical,” he said. “They may see this in the context of the Japanese empire invading other countries. But for us, the general public, we don’t think about those things when we come here, we just pray for our relatives who died.”
Surprising to see such an anti-shrine position on this blog, especially seeing as Jinja Honcho makes Yasukuni practically its center principle. For uninitiated readers, this post is like stating one’s vehement opposition to Arlington National Cemetery.
You may see how such attacks on Yasukuni fare in the Japanese diet by reading this translation.
Avery, thank you for your input but you are either extremely naive or wilfully disingenuous if you think Yasukuni is not being used a a political space by revisionists and nationalists. By contrast, there is no political controversy over Arlington, which is an interfaith cemetery. There are many people who have studied this matter in some depth – Sheila Smith, for instance, author of “Japanese Domestic Politics and the Rise of China” (Columbia University Press). Here is what she writes…
“There are some who would liken it to America’s Arlington Cemetery, but this is wrong. There are no deep divisions in the United States over Arlington, or over those who lie there. Postwar Japanese however have been deeply ambivalent about the politics of Yasukuni Shrine, and the effort to try to give it the same standing as Arlington cemetery—to legally designate it as a national war memorial—has been defeated over and over again in the Japanese parliament on the grounds that the Shinto shrine violated the postwar Constitution’s separation of church and state.
Yasukuni Shrine also carries the stigma of state secrecy and complicit activism. The inclusion of the Class-A war criminals was done furtively in 1978 at the behest of a Yasukuni Shrine official, Nagayoshi Matsudaira. When the Japanese media found out almost a year later, it reignited the emotional differences between left and right over the proper place for commemorating Japan’s defeat and the losses, both civilian and military, the nation suffered. It is significant that Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, who had presided over the invasion of China and the Pacific War, stopped visiting Yasukuni Shrine once the Class-A war criminals were included.Not all of those whose family members died in World War II find solace in the politicization of Yasukuni. During the Koizumi-era debate, the idea that the Emperor of Japan could visit Yasukuni seemed more important to some families of Japan’s war dead than the prime minister’s visit.
Likewise many Japanese were forced to consider the question of war responsibility. A Yomiuri Shimbun series of articles prompted a national conversation, and even those with longstanding and deep differences over the question of Japan’s history—the leading editorial writers of the Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun respectively—got together to discuss the assumptions in their positions on the war and on how it shapes Japanese postwar national identity.
Yet this remains an incomplete conversation, one that today has become deeply entwined with Yasukuni Shrine’s role as a symbol of conservative nationalism. For others, Yasukuni Shrine has become a symbol of Japan’s inability to make a break with its past, and to fully allow the generation who died in the war—civilians and those who wore the Emperor’s uniform—to be given a place where all Japanese can honor them.
Yasukuni Shrine visits have always been steeped in politics. The domestic debate over Yasukuni prompted by Koizumi’s pledge to his followers in many ways encouraged a healthy conversation about topics that had long been too difficult for many Japanese to address. But it did not legitimize the practice. Since then, many individual politicians have made their own trips to Yasukuni, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has visited on several occasions although not as prime minister.
But there is a new edge to the domestic activism on Yasukuni this week.
Nationalism seems to beget nationalism among the nations of Northeast Asia, and political leaders should find little comfort in the growing popular sensitivities in Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo to perceived slight and impugned motive. The diplomatic protest, and cancellation of the visit to Tokyo by South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se, seemed to invite a reaction in kind. The defiant march into Yasukuni Shrine on Tuesday, sponsored by the Let’s Go to Yasukuni Together group of politicians, was clearly meant as a political signal to Japan’s neighbors.
Even the language used in Japan’s parliament to the effect that Japanese won’t be intimidated suggested a new reactive motive for Yasukuni Shrine visits, a motive that many of us outside the country find difficult to understand.
Tokyo today needs to look outward, to find common cause with its friends in Asia and across the globe, rather than retreat into isolation. Postwar Japan’s accomplishments, not the divisive symbols of its past, should continue to guide its choices. Japan’s postwar generation, conservatives and liberals alike, embraced a new future with different values, and created the tremendous energy needed to lead their nation into a different era.
Rather than turn to defiant gestures, Japan’s contemporary political leaders—conservative and liberal alike—must have the courage to lead the way to firmer ground upon which to base their children and grandchildren’s future. Yasukuni may always be the place of commemoration for a generation of Japanese who seek to honor their family members who fought in the name of the Emperor.
But for the Japan of today, the nation that has committed itself to avoiding war and building peace and democratic values, perhaps the time has come to embrace Mr. Fukuda’s plan for the construction of an alternative memorial, one where all Japanese and non-Japanese can honor those who gave their lives for their country.”
I have also studied this matter in depth, I wrote my BA thesis on related issues. The Yasukuni situation is exactly as Abe describes it in the link I provided. If people find it “hard to understand”, then they do so willfully, because explanations are being provided. If Yasukuni is any different than Arlington National Cemetery, that is only because the American Occupation forcibly privatized it, and not because of any action on the Japanese side. Japanese people, as much as Americans, have the right to honor their veterans and those who died in battle, and Jinja Honcho is rightfully proud to do their part for that cause.
Something not often said on the subject is this : no country have the right to intrude in religious practice or national sovereignty of others. It may go when a government does it to it’s own citizens, but that doesn’t mean they can do it with someone else’s citizens.