Memorial to war dead or reminder of dark past: Tokyo shrine divides Japan
TOKYO—Eight decades ago, when Japan’s kamikaze pilots were crashing their planes into American ships and its soldiers were dying from the Aleutian Islands to Guadalcanal, all were given the same promise: Upon death, their souls would be enshrined at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. 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.
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