"I
assure those of you who fought and died for your country that your
names will live forever at this shrine in Musashino." –
the Meiji Emperor, 1874
"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." – Hua
Chunying, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the
People's Republic of China, 2013
Into a
leafy, unassuming six hectares in Tokyo's Chiyoda ward, is
concentrated Japan's bitterest, most explosive cocktail of history,
religion and politics.
The
Yasukuni Shrine commemorates the souls of two and a half million
people – deified as kami,
as is the custom – who died in service of Japan since the shrine's
establishment by the Meiji Emperor in 1869, particularly in the
catalogue of conflicts Japan was involved in since: those being the Boshin War, Satsuma Rebellion,
First Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, WWI, invasion of
Manchuria, Second Sino-Japanese War, and of course the Greater East
Asian War (WWII). In other words, a memorial to war dead, grounded in
cultural and religious commemoration – as is common in many
countries.
It is
also, more infamously, the focus of an seething international
controversy. This is because as far as the last of those wars is
concerned, the souls esnshrined include among them fourteen officials
convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East
(1946-8) of class-A war crimes, and a further thousand similarly
implicated in Japanese atrocities during what was assuredly a rampage of aggression and bloodthirst across East and Southeast Asia.
The
controversy arises from the miring of this matter in today's morass
of confrontational regional politics, swaggering nationalisms, and
painful histories improperly learnt from and now bent in service of
agendas in today's contestations, whether on what kind of country
Japan should be, or in its relationships with its neighbours,
particularly China and Korea. With the protests that flare up each
time Japanese politicians – including Prime Ministers – visit
Yasukuni, its name frequently become synonymous with the
unapologetic, right-wing uyoku dantai that would rewrite
Japan's wartime madnesses out of history books and substitute shame
for pride, and even now parade through the streets of Tokyo in dark
cars festooned with imperial banners, speakers blaring patriotic
nostalgia, and banners calling for the expulsion of foreigners,
murder of Koreans, or other miscellaneous exhortations to
ethno-national supremacist pride.
Japan's part in the great mid-twentieth century cataclysm is a subject I have discussed on this blog before, and return to here. On a matter
obscured from informed inquiry by the explosiveness of extreme
positions on all sides, I set out to examine Yasukuni myself – and
its attached war museum – so as to develop my own conclusions.
