Yasukuni Shrine

• 1. Introduction

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  Yasukuni Shrine, in the Chiyoda district of Tokyo, keeps a register with 2,466,532 entries. Each entry records a name, a place of origin, a birthdate and a place of death. Yet the shrine holds no ashes, and no spirit tablets either. Behind the main hall stands a building made to protect a handmade paper document, and that document is the shrine's dead. Emperor Meiji founded the place in 1869, and it commemorates people who died in service of Japan, from the Boshin War of 1868-1869 to the First Indochina War of 1946-1954. Today it is also among the most controversial sites in East Asia. Who is written into the register, and who is kept out? Why did one emperor, after repeated visits, stop going? And how did a shrine so closely tied to wartime Japan come through the years of foreign occupation?

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• 2. A Shrine for the Emperor's Dead

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  In 1869, with the Boshin War just ended, Emperor Meiji chose the Tokyo site himself and ordered a shrine built there. Its first name was Tōkyō Shōkonsha. It was meant to honor the souls of men who died fighting for the Emperor. It also stood at the top of a nationwide network of smaller shrines, which feudal lords had first created for their own retainers and which kept enshrining local men who died in imperial service.

  A sumo exhibition celebrated the founding in 1869. In 1870, a horse racetrack, the first in the country, was laid out along the outside of the shrine approach. It closed in 1898.

  In 1877, after the Satsuma Rebellion, the Emperor had 6,959 souls of the war dead enshrined at Tōkyō Shōkonsha. Two years later, in 1879, the shrine took the name it still carries. Emperor Meiji drew it from a phrase in the Zuo Zhuan, a classical Chinese text. Yasukuni means "Pacifying the Nation," and the name is written in the older character forms common before the end of the Pacific War.

  The men honored here include Yoshida Shōin, Sakamoto Ryōma and Takasugi Shinsaku, who helped topple the Tokugawa shogunate. Soldiers who fought for the shogunate are not honored in the main hall, and neither are the Shinsengumi. Saigō Takamori is also absent. He helped make the Restoration, but he later revolted against the Meiji government, and that revolt cost him a place.

  Growth came quickly once Japan began fighting abroad. The festivals of 1904-1906 and 1907 added 30,883, 29,960 and 24,657 names after the Russo-Japanese War. By 1911 the total stood at 118,499.

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• 3. The Rules of Belonging

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  Of the names in the register, 27,863 belong to Taiwanese and 21,181 to Koreans. Enshrinement at Yasukuni does not depend on Japanese descent. That openness has a history. As the Empire of Japan expanded, Okinawans, Ainu and Koreans were enshrined beside ethnic Japanese. Emperor Meiji refused to admit Taiwanese, because of the organized resistance that followed the Treaty of Shimonoseki. They were admitted later, when Japan needed to conscript them during World War II.

  The general rule is narrow. A person must be military personnel killed while serving Japan in armed conflict. Civilians killed by war are left out, apart from a handful of listed exceptions. Factory workers, mobilized students, Japanese Red Cross nurses and air-raid volunteers qualify if they were killed on duty. So do Merchant Navy crews and crews lost when exchange ships such as the Awa Maru sank.

  Okinawan schoolchildren evacuees killed when the Tsushima Maru went down are counted too. So are civilians who died in Soviet labor camps, and officials of Karafuto Prefecture, the Kwantung Leased Territory and the Governors-General of Korea and Taiwan.

  As of the 17th of October 2004, the Russo-Japanese War accounted for 88,429 enshrined people. The Second Sino-Japanese War accounted for 191,250. World War II, including the Pacific theatre and the Indochina War, accounted for 2,133,915. Japan fought 16 other conflicts after the Boshin War, and the register draws on all of them.

  There is also a cutoff. Nobody killed in a conflict after Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951 has qualified. That excludes personnel of the postwar Self-Defense Forces.

  The shrine carries out enshrinement on its own, without consulting surviving family members, and sometimes against their stated wishes. Some families, particularly from South Korea, have petitioned for relatives' names to be removed. They argue that enshrinement contradicts what their loved ones believed.

  Those left outside the main hall are not entirely shut out. A small second shrine called the Chinreisha, or Spirit Pacifying Shrine, was built in 1965. It is dedicated to those killed in wars or incidents worldwide, regardless of nationality. It also holds the shogunate forces and rebel factions excluded from the main hall. Its festival falls on the 13th of July.

  In October 2005, priests, Japanese foreign ministry representatives and officials from the South Korean embassy gathered for a brief ceremony. The Pukkwan Victory Monument was handed over to South Korean officials, who returned it to its original location, now in North Korea.

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• 4. Wartime and Occupation

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  In 1887, the job of enshrining war dead passed to military control. By the 1930s, the military government wanted the state to run the memorialization of the dead, which gave Yasukuni a more central role. Enshrinements were first announced in the government's official gazette, so that the souls could be treated as national heroes. In April 1944 that practice ended, and the identities of the spirits were hidden from the public.

  The shrine became a focal point for the morale of soldiers and civilians, with an emphasis on devotion to the Emperor. In the last days of the war, soldiers sent on kamikaze missions commonly said they would "meet again at Yasukuni." Military songs carried the theme, among them "Doki no Sakura" and "Calming the Country." Allied powers saw a Japan in a tight corner using the shrine for propaganda.

  In 1932, two Catholic students from Sophia University refused to visit Yasukuni, saying it went against their religious convictions. In 1936, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, part of the Roman Curia, issued the instruction Pluries Instanterque. It approved visits as an expression of patriotism. That ruling let the Jesuit university avoid possible repercussions, though it also aligned the school with national policy.

  After the surrender, the US-led Occupation authorities, known as GHQ, issued the Shinto Directive in December 1945. It ordered the separation of church and state. The shrine had to become either a secular government institution or a religious body independent of the government. Yasukuni chose the second path. It has been privately funded and operated since 1946, and it does not belong to the Association of Shinto Shrines.

  In October 1945, according to some reports, GHQ planned to burn the shrine down and build a dog race course in its place. Father Bruno Bitter of the Roman Curia and Father Patrick Byrne of Maryknoll pressed GHQ with an argument. Honoring their war dead, they said, is the right and duty of citizens everywhere. GHQ decided not to destroy the shrine.

  In 1951, the Roman Curia reaffirmed its 1936 ruling that Catholic visits could be acceptable as a patriotic gesture rather than a religious act. The first great Reitaisai festival after the war was held on the 18th of October 1951.

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• 5. The Fourteen

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  In 1956, the shrine and the Ministry of Health and Welfare set up a system for the government to pass the shrine information on deceased veterans. The year 1957 alone brought 470,010 new names. By April 1959, most of Japan's war dead not already enshrined had been added this way.

  War criminals prosecuted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East were at first excluded. In 1951, after the Treaty of San Francisco was signed, authorities began considering their enshrinement, along with veterans' benefits for their survivors. In 1954, the government directed some local memorial shrines to accept war criminals from their areas. No convicted war criminal entered Yasukuni until after the last imprisoned ones were paroled in 1958.

  In 1959, the Ministry began forwarding information on Class B and Class C war criminals, those not involved in planning, preparing, starting or waging the war. They were enshrined gradually between 1959 and 1967, often without permission from surviving family members.

  In 1966, the details of fourteen men charged with Class A war crimes reached the shrine. Eleven were convicted on those charges, one was convicted of Class B crimes, and two died before their trial ended. The group included wartime prime ministers and top generals. In 1970, the shrine passed a resolution to enshrine them, leaving the timing to head priest Fujimaro Tsukuba. He delayed until his death in March 1978.

  His successor, Nagayoshi Matsudaira, rejected the verdicts of the Tokyo tribunal. In 1978, he enshrined the fourteen in a secret ceremony. The shrine has since used the designation Shōwa Junnansya for them. The details became public in 1979, yet there was little controversy for several years. Today the shrine's list includes 1,068 convicted war criminals from the Pacific War.

  Junna Nakata, head priest of Honzen-ji Temple in the Shingon sect, asked Pope Paul VI to say a Mass for everyone in the shrine. His request counted 1,618 men condemned as Class A, B and C war criminals, a higher figure than the shrine's own count. The Pope promised, but died in 1978 without saying it.

  Pope John Paul II kept the promise. On the 22nd of May 1980, a Mass was held in St. Peter's Basilica. Nakata attended and presented the Pope with an eight-foot replica of the five-story pagoda of Daigoji temple. Inside it were memorial tablets he had made himself for all 1,618 men. The Pope blessed the replica but took no special interest in it.

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• 6. Visits and Boycotts

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  On the 21st of November 1975, Emperor Hirohito visited Yasukuni for the last time. It was the eighth of his postwar visits, and it came three years before the secret ceremony of 1978. He never returned. The shrine's history ties his absence to displeasure over the enshrinement of the top convicted war criminals. His successors, Akihito and Naruhito, have never visited.

  That same year, on the 15th of August 1975, Takeo Miki became the first prime minister to visit on the anniversary of the surrender. He went in a purely private capacity. He used no official vehicle, brought no other officials and did not use his title. Visits of this kind continued without international protest, even after the enshrinement of war criminals became public.

  On the 15th of August 1985, Yasuhiro Nakasone paid his respects, and the People's Republic of China criticized a prime minister's visit for the first time. The criticism was so intense that neither he nor several of his immediate successors went again. In 1996, Ryutaro Hashimoto visited to keep a promise to a childhood mentor.

  Junichiro Koizumi turned the visit into a campaign pledge. In the 2001 race for the presidency of the Liberal Democratic Party, he promised to go every year regardless of criticism. That won him support among nationalists and helped him become prime minister, serving from 2001 to 2006. He first went on the 13th of August 2001. Further visits followed in April 2002, January 2003, January 2004 and October 2005.

  In China, the visits stoked anti-Japanese sentiment and influenced power struggles within the Chinese Communist Party. The Japanese government officially called them private visits to express respect and gratitude to those who lost their lives. They were not meant, it said, to honor war criminals or to challenge the tribunal's findings. On the 15th of August 2006, Koizumi went on the anniversary of the surrender, the first prime minister to do so in 21 years.

  On the 26th of December 2013, Shinzo Abe visited the shrine and the Chinreisha. China's government called it an effort to glorify Japan's militaristic history of external invasion and colonial rule. The US embassy in Tokyo said it was disappointed. South Korea's culture minister, Yoo Jin-ryong, warned that the visit damaged stability in north-east Asia. Abe said he wished to "report before the souls of the war dead how my administration has worked for one year and to renew the pledge that Japan must never wage a war again." His was the most recent visit by a sitting prime minister.

  In January 2014, a poll by the Sankei Shimbun found that 38.1% of respondents approved of Abe's visit and 53% disapproved. Most of those who disapproved cited harm to Japan's foreign relations. Yet 67.7% said they were not personally convinced by Chinese and Korean criticism. A 2015 poll by Genron NPO found that 66% saw no problem with prime ministerial visits, particularly private ones. That was down from 68.2% the year before.

  On the 15th of August 2014, the 69th anniversary of the surrender, three cabinet ministers visited the shrine while Abe stayed away. On the 13th of August 2021, Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi became the first sitting defense minister to visit since 2016. South Korea's Foreign Ministry called it "deplorable." Two weeks after leaving office, Yoshihide Suga went too, while his successor, Fumio Kishida, only donated masakaki ornaments.

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• 7. Anger Beyond the Gates

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  In January 2005, a shrine official said the shrine's website had been barraged by e-mails, believed to come from China, since September 2004. The shrine called it "a dirty act of terrorism." In December 2008, hackers cracked the website and replaced the homepage, and a Chinese national flag appeared on it once.

  On the 14th of June 2005, about fifty relatives of Taiwan's war dead came to attend a ceremony to remove the spirits of Taiwanese Aboriginal soldiers. They canceled it because of sound trucks and requests from police. On the 11th of August 2009, Atayal legislator Ciwas Ali and about 50 other Taiwanese Aboriginal people protested before the haiden. They also sued Koizumi for his visits. Shrine officers were injured, and police were dispatched.

  On the 26th of December 2011, a Chinese man set the shinmon gate on fire. In September 2013, a Korean resident of Japan threatened arson and was arrested. On the 23rd of November 2015, an explosion in a public toilet near the south gate damaged the ceiling and a wall.

  Not every visitor came from Japan's political class. On the 7th of June 2007, Lee Teng-hui, the former leader of Taiwan, paid respects to honor his older brother, who died as a Japanese soldier. In May 2011, Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uyghur Congress, visited. In April 2014, the Canadian singer Justin Bieber visited, then apologized for posting a photo after heavy criticism from Chinese and South Korean fans. He said he had not known the background of the shrine.

  In August 2021, a viral photo pulled the Chinese actor Zhang Zhehan into the dispute. He had posed before cherry blossoms in March 2018 while following a "Sakura route" suggested by state-sponsored news agencies. The background architecture was recognized as the shrine's Saikan office area. Zhang apologized, but many still accused him of betraying national dignity. Twenty-two brands ended their endorsements, and his upcoming films and television shows cut all ties.

  The China Association of Performing Arts called for a total entertainment ban. Chinese music and streaming platforms removed his work, and Sina Weibo and TikTok deleted his studio and personal accounts.

  The shrine's own leadership has not been free of rows. Kunio Kohori took office as chief priest on the 1st of March 2018. He resigned on the 31st of October 2018, after criticizing the Emperor.

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• 8. Grounds and Objects

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  A visitor walking west from the east entrance meets the Daiichi Torii first, a steel gate about 25 meters tall and 34 meters wide. When first erected in 1921, it was the largest torii in Japan. The original was removed in 1943 because of weather damage, and the current one went up in 1974. Next comes the Daini Torii, put up in 1887 and still the largest bronze torii in Japan.

  After it stands the shinmon, a 6-meter hinoki cypress gate first built in 1934 and restored in 1994. Each of its two doors bears a Chrysanthemum Crest 1.5 meters across. The last gate before the prayer hall, the Chumon Torii, was recently rebuilt from cypress harvested in Saitama Prefecture in 2006.

  The shrine occupies 6.25 hectares, with a further 4 hectares of causeway. The haiden, or main prayer hall, was built in 1901, and its roof was renovated in 1989. White screens hanging from its ceiling are swapped for purple ones on ceremonial occasions. The honden was built in 1872, refurbished in 1989, and is generally closed to the public. In 1972, a private donation from Emperor Shōwa paid for the quakeproof concrete building behind it that protects the register.

  The Yūshūkan museum was first built in 1882 and was repaired and expanded in 2002. Its collection includes a Zero Fighter plane and a Kaiten suicide torpedo. Its exhibits are widely criticized as a revisionist account of Japanese history, especially from 1931 to 1945, seen as denying war crimes and glorifying militarism. The museum and the shrine's website have claimed that the United States "convinced" Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. They also say Japan went to war to create a "Co-Prosperity Sphere" for all Asians.

  On the grounds, a bronze kamikaze pilot stands left of the museum entrance. A plaque donated in 2005 by the Tokkōtai Commemoration Peace Memorial Association lists 5,843 men who died in suicide attacks on Allied naval vessels. Elsewhere a statue of Ōmura Masujirō, made by Okuma Ujihiro in 1893, is Japan's first Western-style bronze statue. Another monument, raised in 2005, honors Radhabinod Pal, the Indian jurist who alone found every defendant before the tribunal not guilty. On the 29th of April 2005, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Koizumi that Pal's dissent "will always symbolise the affection and regard our people have for your country."

  Three animal statues stand here as well. A horse was placed in 1958, a pigeon atop a globe in 1982, and a German shepherd in March 1992. Visitors often leave opened, full bottles of water at them.

  Other corners are quieter. A Noh theater, built in Shiba Park in 1881, was moved here in 1903. Almost 300 white doves are bred in a dovecote on the grounds. The archives opened on the 7th of October 1999 and hold more than 100,000 volumes. In 1933, Minister of War Sadao Araki founded a society on the grounds to preserve old forging methods. About 8,100 "Yasukuni swords" were made there for officers between 1933 and 1945.

  Every July from the 13th to the 16th, the Mitama Matsuri fills the approach with walls of more than 30,000 lanterns, each wall 40 feet high. Thousands come to honor lost relatives and friends. Rites are held daily, including a ceremony named the Perpetual Kagura festival.

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