Memorial to war dead or reminder of dark past: Tokyo shrine divides Japan

The shrine was the symbol of the religious-military state that sought to mobilize the population to fight in the name of a divine emperor. Some 2.5 million soldiers were memorialized there as deities of the Shinto religion.

Japan lost the war 79 years ago this month—but Yasukuni survived, and has recently deepened its ties with the nation’s military of today.

That alarms some in Japan as well as in China—which fought to repel Japanese invasions from the 1930s until Japan’s defeat in 1945—while encouraging Japan’s conservatives who never fully accepted the separation of religion and state placed in the U.S.-written postwar constitution.

Japan is nearly doubling its defense budget, its forces are preparing to work alongside the U.S. to defend the region, and it has changed its policy so that it can attack bases in China and North Korea if it is threatened—the kind of proactive defense that was long unthinkable.

That has put Yasukuni’s leafy precincts at the heart of a debate about Japan’s revived military power and how the country should ready itself if its soldiers again are ordered to the front lines to fight and die.

Japan still has no public state memorial for those who gave their lives to their country, no equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington. Yasukuni is a private religious body, and no prime minister has visited since 2013, when then-leader Shinzo Abe drew condemnation from both Washington and Beijing for doing so.

Supporters of Yasukuni see an opening to make the shrine once again an official government memorial honoring war dead.

“It would be wonderful if the time comes when the American president visits Yasukuni, just as Japanese prime ministers have been visiting Arlington. Then Japan-U.S. relations would for the first time proceed to a new chapter," said Shingo Yamagami, a former Japanese ambassador to Australia, in an interview.

Rather than creating a new memorial, Japan should make use of the one it already has, Yamagami said. “It carries that history," he said. “It has the people’s respect, admiration and awe."

This April, Umio Otsuka, a retired vice admiral in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force or navy, became Yasukuni Shrine’s chief priest. He is only the second ex-officer to hold the position since World War II, and the highest-ranking one since a retired four-star general served as chief priest during the war. 

A fluent English speaker who also served as Japan’s ambassador to Djibouti, Otsuka has said Yasukuni represents the “soul of the peace-loving Japanese people."

Otsuka, who declined to be interviewed, wrote in the shrine’s bulletin shortly before his appointment that in his previous roles, he often brought foreign military officers and ambassadors to pray at Yasukuni.

Longstanding Defense Ministry policy says military units aren’t supposed to visit religious places and officers shouldn’t compel subordinates to go. Yet in January a group of army soldiers visited the shrine using official vehicles. 

The next month, it came to light that graduates of the naval officer candidate school had visited the shrine in uniform en masse last year ahead of an overseas training voyage. The navy described the visit as private and voluntary.

Japan’s constitution says the nation shouldn’t maintain land, sea or air forces or use force to settle disputes, and the country developed an allergy toward the military after World War II, in which U.S. bombing destroyed most of Japan’s major cities—including Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. 

Among intellectuals, the media and average people, a determination arose never again to let the country fall into the hands of militarists.

Sayuri Saito, law professor at Keisen University, said Yasukuni Shrine represented the essence of the theocratic state that led Japan into WW2. She described the growing presence of the shrine in today’s military as a sign that the ancien régime was making a comeback.

“Little by little, the prewar is linking up to the postwar," Saito said.

Her concerns are shared by China’s government, which criticized the retired admiral’s appointment as chief priest and said Tokyo should “make a clean break with militarism."

In China, the shrine is widely seen as a symbol of the war. In late spring, a group of Chinese people posted a video on social media in which someone appeared to urinate on a stone pillar at the entrance to the shrine and spray-paint the word “toilet" on it. Last month, Japan said it arrested one person in the incident and was looking for two more.

Yasukuni supporters say today’s Self-Defense Forces differ from Imperial Japan’s military, which occupied vast swaths of Asia, but in a way, they agree with Saito about the return to prewar values. They argue that Japan of that era recognized the need to commemorate war dead in a dignified, holy place.

Retired Gen. Yoshifumi Hibako, a former top army officer, last year urged the Japanese government to nationalize Yasukuni, writing in a magazine published by a nationalist lobbying group. Others making similar arguments have said the Ministry of Defense’s current memorial, buried in a corner of the ministry accessible only to authorized people, is no substitute for an official public site and hardly a place to reassure soldiers fighting far from home that their sacrifice would be remembered.

Masahisa Sato, a former army officer and current member of Parliament who is friendly with the Yasukuni chief priest, recalled a mission to Iraq in 2004 preparing for a Japanese peacekeeping unit to serve there. He said he had to bring coffins to Iraq on his own initiative because the army had never gone on a mission that required thinking about the possible death of personnel.

In today’s Japanese military, Sato said, “there are more and more situations in which people will face a danger to their lives. We have to consider how to deal with it if they die."

Those enshrined at Yasukuni include 14 men labeled by the U.S. as Class-A war criminals, who were added to the ranks in 1978 under the last military officer to serve as chief priest.

Emperor Hirohito, in whose name Japanese soldiers fought the war, last visited the shrine in 1975. Historians say he was displeased over the enshrinement of convicted wartime leaders. No emperor has visited the shrine since.

The U.S. denounced Abe on the same day of his 2013 visit, saying he risked worsening relations with Japan’s neighbors—a reference to countries such as South Korea, which was colonized by Imperial Japan, and has long denounced Yasukuni.

Yet the U.S. rarely talks about Yasukuni these days. It is a difficult balance because Washington and Tokyo are working closely together to counter China—a country that jumps to criticize Yasukuni at the slightest opportunity.

Yamagami, the former Japanese ambassador to Australia, said the U.S. would accept the shrine’s significance given the importance of its alliance with Japan. “Japan and America don’t have the luxury of squabbling over past historical issues," he said.

Andrew Oros, a professor of political science at Washington College, said U.S. acceptance of Yasukuni would be unlikely, given the efforts by the U.S. to bring Japan and South Korea closer together. He said he “would be surprised to see a U.S. high-level visit anytime soon, including by a potential future President Trump."