Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past
By John Breen (Ed), C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2007, 202 pages, ISBN-10:850659079
Review by Sean Curtin
Long-standing disputes surrounding Japan’s wartime conduct in China during the 1930s and 1940s continue to plague present day diplomatic relations between the two neighbours, making bilateral political ties volatile and prone to bouts of instability. One of the key Sino-Japanese points of friction is the relatively obscure Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. In this impressive English language work John Breen brings together eight scholars who represent a diverse array of perspectives spanning the entire spectrum of thought on the Shinto shrine. The conflicting Chinese, Japanese and foreign opinions found in this volume, illuminate the radically differing standpoints and national narratives surrounding the shrine. They also demonstrate the daunting challenge the two countries face in their efforts to resolve this highly emotive and contentious issue.
In an excellent introductory chapter John Breen puts Yasukuni firmly in its historical and contemporary context. The shrine is dedicated to the Japan’s war dead and is primarily controversial for two reasons. Firstly, twelve convicted Class A war criminals are enshrined within it, and secondly its attached museum, known as the Yushukan, presents a highly selective account of Japan’s actions in China and during WWII. The establishment was unexpectedly catapulted into the international arena during the entire tenure of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (2001-2006) who visited it annual, each time creating waves of regional protest which effectively crippled Sino-Japanese political exchanges and seriously damaged links with South Korea. Since Koizumi left office in September 2006, bilateral political ties have markedly improved but the shadow of Yasukuni continues to pose a threat to long-term progress and stability. A future Koizumi-style flare up over the shrine could easily wipe out recent political advances which are constructed on a fragile basis.
Breen’s opening chapter sets the scene for Caroline Rose’s informative piece on the shrines place in modern Sino-Japanese relations. She analyzes why Yasukuni is such a curse on current political dynamics and looks at Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s 15 August 1985 pilgrimage, which ignited the first international protest and thrust the sleepy shrine to global prominence. Nakasone did not visit the shrine again and much later confessed in his memoirs that this was to avoid offending Beijing. Her analysis then focuses on the damage caused by Koizumi’s six forays and the severe problems created in the diplomatic sphere. Despite pleas from several of his predecessors, including Nakasone, to cease the contentious pilgrimages, Koizumi doggedly ignored all requests. Rose notes, “Nakasone suggested that Koizumi could have demonstrated greater courage by choosing not to visit the shrine (page 46).”
PM Nakasone’s 15 August 1985 visit first thrust Yasukuni to global prominence
In the following chapter, “A Religious Perspective on the Yasukuni Shrine Controversy” Kevin Doak gives us a spiritual perspective on the controversy, and also reminds us why academics seldom make good politicians or diplomats. With regard to Koizumi’s controversial annual sojourn Doak declares, “I wish that he had abandoned his reserve and visited Yasukuni monthly or even weekly, instead of the annual visits of his premiership, to gain greater familiarity with the sacred nature of the sacrifices that are commemorated there (page 54).” Doak is also against the removal of war criminals arguing, “Can the Chinese leaders and those that argue that the Class A war criminals should be removed from Yasukuni really be so arrogant as to believe that they themselves are perfect human beings? (page 56)” Doak passionately believes that future prime ministers should frequently visit the shrine and strongly encouraged Koizumi’s successor, Shinzo Abe, to do so. He must have been bitterly disappointed that Abe and his following two LDP successors never went near the shrine and that current Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has clearly stated his intension not to step foot in its grounds.
In the next chapter Wang Zhixin clearly explains why Chinese people find it so utterly offensive when Japanese political leaders visit the controversial shrine. He manages to capture many of the mainstream arguments that circulate amongst ordinary Chinese people and are frequently found in the Chinese media. For example, he explains, “Thirteen of the fourteen Class A war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni, men who inflicted the gravest harm on the Chinese people in modern history, had hands soiled with Chinese blood…the Prime Minister is the leader of a nation and a public figure. His very act of visiting Yasukuni was calculated to reflect the feelings of the whole of Japan, and embodied the attitude of the Japanese government towards Japan’s war of aggression and Class A war criminals (page 75).”
When a Japanese leader visits Yasukuni he believes, “Asian nations, and particularly China, cannot forgive such an outrage. (page 72).” He strongly condemns Koizumi’s Yasukuni forays as, “reprehensible in emotional and rational terms, unforgivable in both Eastern morals and international ethics. (page 73).” Wang is offended by those who try to down play Japan’s wartime record and deny its wartime guilt. In present day Japan, some, including elected politicians, openly question whether the Nanjing massacre occurred (see chapter six by Nitta Hitoshi), if women were forced in to sexual slavery by the military, as well as the validity of the war crimes trials. Doak touches on this last aspect in the previous chapter, when he writes, “The legitimacy of the verdicts is highly questionable from a legal perspective, given that they were judged according to ex post facto law, it is only natural that some Japanese oppose the verdicts, even though they do not necessarily justify the war (page 57).” Yasukuni also acts as a gathering point for extreme rightwing groups which deny the country’s wartime guilty.
Yasukuni acts as a magnet for extreme rightwing groups
Looking at the issue again from a religious perspective, Seki Hei’s view is radically different from his fellow countryman in the preceding chapter. However, he agrees that “It is no exaggeration to say that for five years after Koizumi took office as Prime Minister, Sino-Japanese relations revolved entirely around the issue of his visits to the Yasukuni shrine (page 91).” Seki Hei visualizes the dispute in an entirely different light from his compatriot, observing, “China’s abnormal obsession with the issue of prime ministerial Yasukuni visits resulted in its government being forced into a cul-de-sac in terms of its diplomacy with Japan (page 93).” He arrives at his conclusions by interpreting the dispute from a deeply religious perspective. He believes Chinese leaders inability to “recognize the existence of the spirits of the deceased” inhibits them from fully comprehending what he sees as the religious dimensions of the issue. He writes, “the leaders of the CCP cannot accommodate the notion that ‘after people die, they become spirits of a different nature to living people,’ they cling to the belief that Tojo Hideki and the others venerated at Yasukuni are today the same Class A war criminals and the leaders of the war of aggression against China as they were before their deaths (page 99).” Seki Hei states that at the heart of the problem is a cultural gap in which the atheist Chinese communists are unable to understand the Japanese Shinto need to console the spirits of the dead through ritual performances at Yasukuni. Like Doak, Seki Hei sees the crux of the issue as a fundamental religious matter in which China has no right to interfere in. He concludes, “there will never be a solution to the antagonism and controversy between China and Japan surrounding the issue of Yasukuni visits; for it is a clash of civilizations (page 104).”
Neither Doak or Seki Hei explain why a political leader of a constitutionally secular state like Japan should indulge in controversial religious pilgrimages to a shrine of such profound symbolic significance. Constitutionally the prime minister is a political figure, not a religious leader, and both Daok and Seki Hei fail to properly address this issue in their analysis.
If one adapts Doak and Seki Hei’s logic for comparative purposes, it would seem to highlight this religious element as an important factor in explaining why Germany has been able to construct good political ties with its former foes. Imagine the storm of protest if a Berlin shrine deified Adolf Hitler and a German leader were to visit it, the country would become a Pariah.
Tetsuya Takahashi’s informative fifth chapter takes us away from the esoteric worlds of Seki Hei and Doak, examining Yasukuni as a legacy of colonialism and empire. He provides an excellent historical overview to support his case, observing, “Yasukuni shrine forms an inseparable unity with the imperialism and colonialism of the modern Japanese state. Given that Yasukuni is inseparable from Japan’s modern colonialism, and given that these war dead continue to be honoured publicly in the same way as the executed Class A war criminals, the extent of the denial of Japan’s responsibility for its colonial rule becomes fairly obvious (page 114).” He also sees the shrine as functioning as a means to sanitize and glorify war by ignoring its brutal reality, the suffering of all individuals involved and the conflict’s horrific consequences. He makes a very powerful argument by analyzing the various ways those remembered at Yasukuni died, pointing out that about sixty percent died either directly or indirectly from starvation rather than in action on the battle field. He warns, “Yasukuni ideology has sought to cancel out the violent nature of death in war by re-imagining it as ‘glorious death’ (page 119).”
In the following chapter, Hitoshi Nitta takes an almost diametrically opposing view to Takahashi, arguing that Japanese prime ministers, and indeed the general public, should as a matter of patriotic duty worship at Yasukuni. He writes, “I believe that it is a citizen’s important duty and right to pay respects, and other thanks, to those who sacrificed their lives for the nation (page 126).” Nitta believes Beijing exaggerates the extent of Chinese suffering during war in order to gain political advantage. For example despite the government’s 1993 acknowledgement and the massive amount of eye-witness testimony, he does not believe there is any “objective proof” (page 137) indicating the mass sexual enslavement and forced prostitution of women during WWII by the Japanese army. Nitta bemoans the 1993 official government apology for these horrendous sexual war crimes and considers the entire issue a “fabrication.” In a similar vein he also dismisses the Nanjing Massacre and the forced group suicides in Okinawa, stating, “these stories were fabricated (page 141).” He also denounces the following chapter by John Breen for questioning the Yushukan’s version of history which he sees as more accurate.
Breen examines the role of Yasukuni in what he calls a loss of historical memory. He echoes Wang’s early argument, seeing prime ministerial patronage as highly problematic because a visit by a prominent political leader accords the shrine with the status of a national shrine and thus its representation of history is likewise accorded an official status. By analyzing how the shrine presents itself and history, Breen is able to highlight the serious problems created by this approach which airbrushes out the suffering of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people during the war. Breen observes, “Neatly obliterated from the historical memory of the Yushukan are the historical facts of Japanese war crimes, of Japanese colonialism and aggression, and of Japanese defeat (page 155).”
Philip Seaton rounds off the volume with a fact filled look at the media’s treatment of Koizumi’s Yasukuni sojourns. Seaton see the saga as having the right elements for a good emotive media story. He methodically charts the national and regional press’s reporting as well as TV coverage. He concludes that “it is difficult to see how ongoing prime ministerial and particularly imperial Yasukuni worship could ever be part of any reconciliation process (page 188).”
How the relationship between East Asia’s two economic giants develops in the 21st Century will have a significant impact not only regionally, but also globally. This fact makes this impressive work, which encompasses the cardinal points of the Yasukuni issue, extremely valuable and allows the reader to understand difficult to grasp viewpoints. Breen must be congratulated for assembling such an enlightening collection of views on what still remains one of the most contentious issues in Sino-Japanese relations.
