The importance of war memorials and shrines in honouring the war dead in Japan is a central issue to the themes of historical remembrance and narratives. Yasukuni Shrine is a Japanese Shinto shrine housing the souls or Kami of the war dead who laid down their lives for the Emperor of Japan extending back to the shrine’s creation in 1869. 1 The shrine has become increasingly controversial due to its militaristic implications, I will evaluate these central issues to contemplate the politics of remembrance and memorialisation.
The Yasukuni Shrine remains one of the most contended aspects of Japanese post-war memorialisation, and this alludes to how the shrine is identified as a representation of reviving Japanese militarism and also a symbol of Japan’s reluctance to redress its wartime atrocities. 2 One of the prominent arguments of critics is that the souls of war criminals who were found guilty by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East are enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine. 3 Consequently, rather than the shrine being simply a memorial to the Japanese war dead, it has become symbolic as a nationalistic centre for the right-wing by holding the souls of Class A war criminals. The right-wing referred to here tend to glorify Japans wartime past, and therefore they regard the shrine as a symbol of the continuity of Japans national identity and tradition, allowing them to remember those who died for the Japanese nation. 2 In Japan, this issue is prominent, as since the end of World War Two there have been differing opinions over how to represent, memorialise and compensate for Japan’s deeds across Asia and the Pacific.
Many supporters of the Shrine have articulated that the government, alongside Japanese citizens, have a duty to contribute to the commemoration of the military war dead. 4 This is highlighted by how the act of remembering those who gave or lost their lives in war has traditionally been an act of citizenship and is often deemed a social responsibility, mutually “affirming the community at large and asserting its moral character”. 5 This explains why Japanese statesmen believe it is crucial to “normalize the post-war state’s relations with its war dead, even if this should strain bilateral relations with neighbouring countries”. 3 However, whilst the Japanese right-wing and conservative politicians have maintained that “Yasukuni is no different from the war cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, or the Cenotaph in London”, I would argue that there is a clear distinction. 6
Other nations have formed similar historical narratives that are resolute within public memory to venerate the war dead and to keep their memory alive. Yet the Yasukuni Shrine focuses on projecting a one-sided national identity and historical narrative. What makes the Yasukuni Shrine so different from the other multitude of Shinto shrines across Japan and other nations memorials is that “the Japanese war dead—including the Class A war criminals sentenced in the Tokyo trials—are revered as divine heroes”. 7 Therefore, the shrine lies at the centre of the deliberation over whether nations have the right to choose how they commemorate their historical past.
The politics of memory and remembrance continues to be disputed with regards to the Yasukuni shrine and its representation of World War Two, especially as it is debated that the shrine upholds the glorification of Japan’s past and its war dead. 3 The Yasukuni Shrine exposes and symbolises the contentious issues surrounding Japanese historical memory which continue today, as exemplified by current textbook divisions in Eastern Asia and the tension still associated with Japan’s approach to its wartime atrocities, all of which make the Yasukuni Shrine politically charged.
- John Breen, Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, (New York, 2008), p.8 [↩]
- Daiki Shibuichi, “The Yasukuni Shrine Dispute and the Politics of Identity in Japan: Why All the Fuss?”, Asian Survey 45 (2005), p.198 [↩] [↩]
- Yongwook Ryu, “The Yasukuni Controversy: Divergent Perspectives from the Japanese Political Elite”, Asian Survey 47 (2007), p.706 [↩] [↩] [↩]
- Ibid., p.90 [↩]
- Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, (Cambridge, 1995), p.85 [↩]
- Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt, (London, 1994), p.219 [↩]
- Sebastian Conrad, “Japanese Historical Writing” in Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf (Eds.) The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 5: Historical Writing Since 1945, (Oxford, 2011), p.650 [↩]