The Yasukuni Shrine, located in Tokyo, was created to honor the dead who served Japan during times of war. It remains shrouded in controversy influencing the geopolitical dynamic of Southeast Asia, and preventing the spirits of the Japanese war dead from finding the rest they deserve.

Established at the end of the Boshin War that began the Meiji Era of Japan, Yasukuni Shrine was created to honor the dead who served Japan during times of war. Despite the equal treatment of names among the dead, the shrine has been shrouded in controversy due to the names of the fourteen Class-A war criminals that were enshrined within Yasukuni, as well as attempts to nationalize the shrine. The controversy influences current geopolitical relationships, especially between South Korea, and China. Yasukuni, however, is ultimately a religious site that has the responsibility of ensuring that the spirits of the Japanese war dead find rest, which seems impossible in light of the ongoing controversies.

Yasukuni is dedicated to those who served Japan in a military capacity regardless of their actions during the war; the dead are not revered for their actions beyond their shared military service. To the south of Yasukuni’s Honden, or main hall, is a smaller spirit pacification shrine or Chinreisha that is dedicated to all the dead from World War II (WWII), not just military servicemen or those who died in service to the emperor unlike those enshrined within the Honden. This marks Yasukuni as a true WWII memorial in spite of its service to the dead before the conflict as well.

As mentioned earlier, there are fourteen enshrined names who were military and government leaders that were tried by a military tribunal during the Tokyo Trials and found to be Class-A war criminals and were supposedly barred from being honored at Yasukuni. The relationship between Japan and the rest of Southeast Asia has been strained since the revelation that Yasukuni had enshrined these fourteen names in secret as described by The Japan Times in 2007: “Among the documents are lists dated from Jan. 31, 1969, presented at a meeting between shrine officials and the then Health and Welfare Ministry of people who could be enshrined at Yasukuni and the document says the shrine and the ministry shared the view that Class-A war criminals are “able to be honored.” The ministry and the shrine also agreed not to make public the idea that Yasukuni would enshrine the war criminals, a decision that appears to be linked to the constitutional issue of state and religion remaining separate.”

The resultant controversy has befallen on any government official visiting the shrine in an official capacity. The conspiracy between Health and Welfare Ministry officials with the Yasukuni officials is viewed as a direct violation of Japan’s Constitution. During the Allied forces occupation, Yasukuni was under threat of demolition as part of concern that the Shinto shrine was the reason behind the Japanese military’s radicalization. However, due to a Catholic priest’s efforts, Yasukuni remained standing, thus protecting the historic site as well as respecting the religious significance of the shrine itself.

The shrine’s controversies did not begin on the international stage. Instead, controversies began within Japan in 1969 when members of the Japanese Liberal Democratic party attempted to renationalize the shrine, which would go against the Japanese constitution. Without the shrine being nationalized, the Japanese government has no say in who is enshrined within but this fact does not shield the government from these controversies. The international implications of honoring those who were responsible for the Japanese’s war of aggression across Southeast Asia and the Pacific are significant. Once the news broke that Yasukuni had enshrined the fourteen Class-A war criminals broke, international tensions within Southeast Asia rose. This was primarily centered on confronting the Japanese collective memory about their past as noted by Fujita and Kusano: “Indeed, there have been calls in China and South Korea, both former victims, for Japan, the former perpetrator, to follow Germany’s example in confronting its colonial and wartime history. Controversy over Japan’s past and its remembrance thereof, its so-called history problem, has become fiercer than ever, often causing Tokyo’s relationships with China and South Korea to worsen.”

The shrine became a lightning rod of controversy as the Japanese memory of WWII came under both international and national scrutiny. The controversies polarized the Japanese people, typically along political lines with the nationalists wanting a return to a strong Japan and the progressives who want to recognize what happened in the past and move past it. Due to international relations and the view of the shrine in the Southeast Asian region, the shrine has been under attack for various reasons including a 2015 bombing attack by a South Korean national.

The Yasukuni Shrine and the Hiroshima monument represents opposite ends of the spectrum of the Japanese experience of World War II (WWII); Hiroshima as a remembrance of Japan as a victim and Yasukuni as a celebration of militarization. Where Hiroshima focuses on peace, the museum attached to Yasukuni, the Yushukan, focuses on war and Japanese exceptionalism. The Yushukan museum sanitizes the actions of Japanese aggression during WWII while being silent on the horrors perpetrated at the hands of the Japanese military. Ultimately, however, both museums represent the conflicted Japanese perspective on the war itself. The issue of WWII education including the full story of the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan is one of balancing educating the nation’s youth about the war without inflicting the burden of the sins of the past on them. it.

While education may bring the shrine closer to removing the fourteen names and enshrining them elsewhere, there is no guarantee. The soldiers, politicians, and commanders each served Japan, each served under the emperor meeting the requirements for enshrinement within Yasukuni. For Japan to remove the fourteen names without the head priest of Yasukuni’s permission would go against their constitution which includes the separation of church and state. With the controversies getting in the way of international relationships with other nations, the Japanese are between a rock and a hard place without the ability to interfere with the shrine’s operation. The Yasukuni Shrine remains a formidable obstacle to a potential Japanese reconciliation with South Korea, despite the looming threat of China’s expansionism, with the path forward unclear.

If the fourteen names are poisoning the shrine’s reputation, is it worth keeping them within the main shrine? Would returning the names to local shrines fix the problem? This was the assumed status of the fourteen until they were deemed “worthy of enshrinement” into Yasukuni alongside their fellow servicemen. Prior to the enshrinement of these fourteen names, foreign dignitaries, including the United States, would visit the site. Importantly, the shrine still hosts festivals for the Japanese people while serving as a religious center.

Education surrounding Japan’s actions in WWII could be the beginning of change. The modern Japanese aren’t responsible for the actions of their ancestors, though they are responsible for teaching the lessons learned from the past. The glossing over of the horrors of war as seen at Yushukan serves to sanitize Japan’s actions during WWII. Yushukan and Yasukuni have the potential to be excellent teachers of the realities of war. I feel the dead deserve their rest, and the fourteen names should be displayed, but contextualized with the full history. These fourteen names served the emperor and thus should be able to rest on the grounds of Yasukuni, however they served dishonorably and should remain separate from those that served with honor. Barring government officials from thanking the dead for their sacrifices is a disservice to those who served honorably. Hopefully, education surrounding the actions of the fourteen can set Japan on the path of healing as Yasukuni remains an important site in the rich history of the nation.

(edited by Brad Poss and Laura Bailey)

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Memory is showcased in a myriad of ways within a society and that collective memory is then given a physical representation by way of a memorial, through an institution of living memory, or ruins that have survived the ravages of time. The same can be said when analyzing a war memorial, “whether a statue, a place, a building, or a combination of these and other elements, we see a social and physical arrangement of space and artifacts to keep alive the memories of persons who participated in or are affected by war”. This such relationship between space and memory is complex but can be used to explain why Hiroshima chose to preserve the remains of the Genbaku Dome and how the decaying building became such an integral part of present day society.

Ruins tell an intriguing story of what a society deems worth remembering or what deserves to be forgotten. A unique characteristic of ruins is that they are not “passive remains but active cultural agents that transverse their status of remaining parts of a lost whole and accrue an identity of their own as ruins; they become monuments qua ruins and not just ruins of monuments.” In the years after the post atomic bomb drop, the identity of the Genbaku Dome has transformed from one of intense pain and suffering into a noteworthy beacon of peace on a global scale. What makes the ruins of the former Promotion Hall particularly distinctive is that Japan, specifically Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are the only victims of nuclear warfare so no other structure in the world can compare in terms of having such global significance and eventual societal inclusion.

The original domed building was built in 1915 by Czech architect Jan Letzel and is located 260 meters away from Aioi Bridge (the original target of the atomic bomb “Little Boy”) in the once bustling military city of Hiroshima. Thanks to Letzel’s use of steel and stone construction, the former Promotion Hall was one of a few structures left standing near the bomb’s hypocenter (the building stood 160 meters from the blast site). When observing the ruins that are now the focal point of a staggering Memorial Peace Park, onlookers are met with a stark image of seemingly paradoxical origin, destruction framed by revival. The message of this scene is that remembering how completely the city was destroyed enables us to fully appreciate the miracle of Hiroshima’s rebirth. The notability of this dilapidated structure has carried on through time except in the present day, the building has taken on an entirely new meaning than that of utter destruction.

The concrete ruin itself “performs a visualization of different forms of mourning: we mourn loss, death, decay and destruction; humanity’s futile and successful attempts to master nature; and nature’s indifference to humans and their cruelty against one another”. The ruins of the Genbaku Dome are a physical representation of what happened to the city and the destructive capabilities of human versus human violence. The aftermath of such immediate and total devastation is that the urge to mourn is in direct competition everywhere with the urge to forget, creating the dilemma of whether to leave or remove one of the few physical reminders remaining from that infamous day. What was once a martial city held firm in their military prowess, was reduced to nothing more than the apocalyptic, scorched traces of a former life. Hiroshima was much like the solid bronze dome of the original Promotion Hall, once supported by sturdy walls of brick and stone, extirpated within minutes.

Survivors had mixed emotions when reminiscing about the Genbaku Dome as it represented the loss of everything they once knew. Two-thirds of the population were in favor of its preservation, and one-third preferred its removal. The preservation of the Atomic Bomb Dome remained a contested issue well into the 1960s dividing Hiroshima’s citizens into two camps: those who wanted the site gone because it either brought up painful memories or the location right in the city-center seemed too valuable to be wasted on a ruin, and those who regarded the dome as a persuasive warning against nuclear warfare and as a crowd-puller for visitors to Hiroshima.

In an interview with atomic bomb survivor, Koji Numata, when asked about his thoughts on the dome, he responded with “I don’t want to remember anything (on August 6th). I want to forget it all. When that scene comes back to my head it makes me sick. I want to forget it.” Survivors who experienced the bomb instinctively wanted the ruins torn down almost like a defense mechanism. Citizens of Hiroshima were too busy reeling from shock, trying to gather up the remnants from their lives and did not even consider commemoration until years later. At that specific moment in time, the ruins of the Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall were just that, ruins. A crippling reminder that needed to be removed from the landscape of the throttled, ash covered city so that eventually she could be reborn.

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