Yasukuni Shrine
Andy and Sue had taken me to two small shrines that showed how shrines and temples fit into Japanese society, and I'm glad they did that before we visited Yasukuni, because if I?d only seen the famous shrines tourists visit, I probably wouldn't have understood about it. Some of Sue's colleagues were a little upset that we were going to the shrine and the attached musem, but it was a place that Sue very much wanted to visit.
It's difficult to write about the shrine at all without upsetting someone, and Andy would welcome your views if you are offended by anything on this page. Yasukuni is the Japanese shrine to the war dead, and in that it's similar to the Commonwealth War Memorials in northern Europe. If you want Andy's take on war in general and some aspects of the First and Second World Wars in Europe, you may want to look at his pages on Ieper and the Somme before returning here.
When the Emperor Meiji visited Tokyo Shokonsha in 1874, he composed a poem.
I assure those of you who fought and died for your country
that your names will live forever
at this shrine in Musashino.
The shrine was established in 1869, and renamed Yasukuni (wishes for peace for the nation) in 1879.
It commemorates something like two and a half million people who have died for their country since 1853, all treated equally regardless of their rank or social standing. The first thing that makes it different from the European memorials is that each of these people is considered a divinity, because of the way that the Shinto religion works. In itself this is controversial, but makes sense when you understand Sengaku-ji. It's simply a different way of expressing the same sentiment seen at Ieper or on the Somme.
More controversial is the fact that over a hundred people convicted of war crimes after the Second World War are commemorated here, fulfilling the emperor?s pledge about rank and social standing, and protected by Japan?s strict laws on religious freedom. Whilst I understand that this might upset some people, I also know that many aircrew who deliberately bombed civilians are commemorated in Allied and German war cemeteries and I think people who are upset might feel differently if the Japanese asked them to remove those names.
Enough said. The shrine itself is stark in its simplicity, with the main buildings surrounded by the commemorative plaques, and a square set with cherry trees. A little way from a sculpture hoping for world peace is a statue of a Kamikaze pilot. There was an empty sake bottle on it and I thought it was litter, but Andy explained that before leaving on their last flight, the pilots would drink sake and agree to meet in the next life ?under the third cheery tree from the right at Yasukuni?. He took me to find the special tree donated by the veterans? association. It wasn't cherry-blossom viewing time, but there were still a lot of people obviously remembering friends and relatives who had died. I pretended not to notice that Andy?s eyes were damp.
Then we went into the museum. This contains thousands of exhibits from many wars, and includes a good description of the evolution of the suicide weapons, not just aircraft but boats and torpedoes. What some of Sue?s colleagues don?t like about the museum is that it presents a very different view of Japan?s entry into the World War Two from the one in Western history textbooks. It?s certainly true that America imposed crippling sanctions on Japan, which has to import virtually all raw materials, before the war: whether these were deliberately manipulated in order to force Japan to take action is open to question and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but telling people that it?s wrong to read the other viewpoint won?t make it go away, and stops people understanding each other.
Afterwards, we walked away in silence and found a small bar in the back-streets to have a couple of drinks. Visiting Yasukuni wasn?t the happiest trip we made, but I decided that it was important, whether or not I agree with the viewpoints.