Who Do the Dead Belong to? A Look into Religion, Emotions, and Memory in Sino-Japanese Relations
In the book “Atonement,” Ian McEwan writes, “It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy… it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.” The ‘Yasukuni Shrine’ controversy showcases the lapses in transnational empathy and the tendency to oversimplify important contextual details so that our perceptions are not challenged. However, it is precisely this comfortable socio-emotional gap that creates lingering misery.
Every year, there is incredible media coverage in Japan to find out whether the Prime Minister and his cabinet members will visit the Yasukuni Shrine and how they will pay their respects. In brief, the souls of 14 WWII leaders convicted as Class-A war criminals, including Hideki Tojo, the wartime Prime Minister, were enshrined secretly in 1978 according to Shinto religious practices. This creates two major key problems for Tokyo.
Firstly, paying respects to the Shrine generates major diplomatic friction with Seoul and Beijing. As the primary victims of Imperial Japanese aggression, the two countries suffered from atrocities such as the Comfort Women system and the Nanjing Massacre. So, when Japanese government officials visit, even in an ‘unofficial’ capacity, Seoul and Beijing interpret the act as glorifying Japan’s past spirit of nationalistic militarism, minimising its past aggressions, and honouring war criminals. Notably, since 1989, Emperor Hirohito and successive emperors have boycotted the Shrine, while Prime Ministers and other government officials continue giving it support.
Secondly, since the Yasukuni Shrine is a religious site, there has been international and domestic criticism that Tokyo officials are violating Article 20 of Japan’s Peace Constitution (heiwa-kempo) that outlines: “[t]he state and its organs shall refrain from religious education or any other religious activity.” Hence, visiting the Shrine not only undermines Tokyo’s acts of remorse and repeated apologies for its wartime actions, offending its Asian neighbours, but also has some legal ambiguity behind it.
In recent years, prime ministers refrained from in-person visits, opting to send Shinto ritual (masakaki) offerings to the Shrine, but that did not shield current Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida from criticisms last year. This pattern of diplomatic friction has continued yearly without much substantive change, much to the frustration and confusion of domestic and international audiences.
From a political lens, a plausible explanation for Kishida’s behaviour is that the Shrine is seen as a means to signal nationalist resolve and mobilise right-wing groups historically who acted as a strong base for political pressure. However, this treats the Japanese Right as a monolith and presumes that the Prime Minister's actions reflect the attitude of Japanese nationalism, negating the significant efforts taken to close emotional gaps.
Tokyo’s political groups from the left and right-wing have presented various proposals to resolve the controversy. One resolution was to challenge Shinto priests and remove the 14 enshrined souls directly; another approach was to circumvent religious constraints by converting the Shrine status to a ‘special public corporation’ (tokushu hōjin) to then reverse the ‘gōshi’ of the 14. Another resolution suggested using alternative commemorative sites like the nearby Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, which has been used by common people and royalty alike to honour the war dead and pray for peace. This would defuse nationalist arguments that claim visiting the Yasukuni Shrine is an internal right for the Japanese who use the site for the same purpose. A final suggested approach was from a 2001 government panel to build a state-run, secular memorial facility as a replacement site, but this also failed to gain traction.
This shows the need to critically examine the generalised understanding of the Yasukuni Shrine issue and what it truly means for the dead, the bereaved, and Japanese society. Opening these perspectives and extending empathy will facilitate reconciliation in greater bounds than insisting on playing the same geopolitical narratives. The attachment to the Yasukuni Shrine is deeply entrenched in Japanese society because it represents the primary channel for the bereaved to hold Tokyo to its emotional commitments.
Historically, the Shrine was built for the purpose of honouring and pacifying the souls of the war dead, known as Tokyo Shōkonsha (“Shrine where the divine spirits are invited”). Its purpose was to facilitate open transaction with the dead where sincere mourning and reflection could occur but also to encourage soldiers to fight and die for the emperor.
Continued wartime experiences led to its renaming and a transformed purpose of a political-religious process that deified their souls as gods (kami) that embodied the ‘national spirit’ and ultimately belonged to the nation-state. Professor Takahashi at the University of Tokyo describes this phenomenon as the ‘Yasukuni Doctrine’ which made the spirit of Yasukuni “synonymous with the spirit of the Japanese people” and an obligation for the emperor and government officials to worship and express gratitude, mandating an emotional relationship between the war dead and the state.
This relationship is ethically conspicuous because it takes away the emotional consent and agency of the bereaved by making the war dead a possession of the state, whose priorities do not always reflect their needs or interests. A twin problem emerges from this: ‘manufactured joy’ and ‘the right to mourn’.
Takahashi describes that the institutionalisation of grief causes a type of ‘emotional alchemy’ (kanjō no renkinjutsu). Yasukuni commemoration is unique, involving acts of social-religious worship in conjunction with the political dimension of ‘service to the emperor and nation’ and the regular reception of authority via the Prime Minister. This has the incredible ability to convert the private feelings of mourning and sadness into national joy. It has a perverse power to make war death ‘beautiful’ and even something to be welcomed.
However, the fact is that many of the war dead honoured at Yasukuni died in part or due to starvation instead of ‘glorious combat’. Even then, the nature of deaths on the battlefield is not something to memorialise. In her book, Akiko Takenaka highlights that legal action was taken by war-bereaved in 2007 to remove names from the Shrine’s register, based on the argument that their relatives died a “dog’s death (inu-jini)”, compelled to commit atrocities. Oftentimes, the very right to live was challenged as Utsumi Aiko writes, during the Imphal campaign, orders were to treat suicide as honourable war deaths, but not for soldiers who died as prisoners. Moreover, emotional alchemy is applied equally to the war dead grouping military leaders, combatants, civilians and children together. So, Yasukuni provides an invasive sense of equal responsibility and emotional comfort to the dead, who have very different experiences and degrees of liability.
A false meaning dictated by the state apparatus is more humiliating and shameful for the bereaved than the opportunity to have open relations with the dead and navigate through their own emotional memory to arrive at a personal understanding and remembrance.
Arguably the most egregious point is that the practice of remembering the dead is not solely a state-led practice. Traditionally, memorisation was linked to the old feudal domains (kuni), using local culture and practices that focused on mourning and contrition rather than honouring. However, during wartime, the state imposed Shinto as the de-facto national religion, cracking down on other religions. Hence, the Yasukuni Doctrine effectively took hostage the souls of the war dead, enshrining them without the consent of the bereaved, manufacturing joy in place of sadness for war purposes.
The practice of mourning and commemorating holds significant religious and emotional differences. The Yasukuni Shrine is like a gravity well, that pulls in the souls of the war dead, but transforms individual deaths into the ‘national spirit.’ What happens to personal ritual practices of aitō (regret, sorrow, and lament of the spirit), chinkon (pacifying of the spirit), and jōrei (cleansing of the spirit)? How do the bereaved confront the change from personal to collective remembrance, affects of ‘emotional alchemy’, and commemoration at the expense of mourning?
Manufactured joy strips the agency of the dead by disposing of their experiences and silences the emotional entitlements that should fall within the bereaved’s right to mourn.
All of this is to say that the disaggregation of the Yasukuni Shrine showcases the need for greater empathy from Tokyo and the international audience. Understanding what the Shrine means is necessary for reconciling with those who want, have, or must pay respects.
Yasukuni no
miya ni mitama wa
shizumaru mo
Oriori kaere
haha no yumeji ni
Your noble spirit rests
In the shrine of Yasukuni, My son.
But why don’t you come visit
Your mother every now and then
At least in her dreams.
Eulogy for a young soldier killed in China.
Image courtesy of Wiiii via Wikimedia, ©2010. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
