John Breen's edited volume features authors from Great Britain, the United States, both Chinas, and Japan. Despite the absence of a Korean perspective, it includes a wide variety of views on Yasukuni Shrine. Breen contributes an introduction, “A Yasukuni Genealogy,” and an essay, “Yasukuni and the Loss of Historical Memory.” His introduction notes that Yasukuni was founded in 1868 to propitiate the spirits of those who had died fighting in the brief civil war that accompanied the Meiji Restoration. Yasukuni subsequently enshrined all modern Japanese war dead as kami (divinities), including Tōjō Hideki and others whom the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal convicted of Class A “crimes against peace” and sentenced to execution after World War II.
Controversy recently arose when Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō made annual Yasukuni visits between 2001 and 2006. Breen's two essays, Caroline Rose's “Stalemate: The Yasukuni Shrine Problem in Sino-Japanese Relations,” Wang Zhixin's “China, Japan and the Spell of Yasukuni,” Takahashi Tetusya's “Legacies of Empire: the Yasukuni Shrine Controversy,” and Philip Seaton's “Pledge Fulfilled: Prime Minister Koizumi, Yasukuni, and the Japanese Media” each contextualize Koizumi historically, mentioning Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro's visit in 1985, which upset many both inside and outside Japan. As Rose in particular notes, several postwar premiers have visited the shrine, but before 1985, they did so as private citizens, or they maintained ambiguity regarding their visits' status. Following Nakasone's official visit, and with the exceptions of what Seaton calls Miyazawa Kiichi's “secret” visit in 1992 and Hashimoto Ryūtaro's “deliberately ‘private’ worship on his birthday” in 1996 (p. 165), premiers did not pay respects at Yasukuni until Koizumi.
Those who argue for the legitimacy of Yasukuni patronage, including Kevin Doak, Seki Hei, and Nitta Hitoshi in the present volume, tend to characterize the shrine as meaningful in religious, spiritual, or traditional terms, but Breen's genealogy suggests that tradition at Yasukuni is something of a façade. Before 1868, Japan's cultures involved shrines and worship of kami, but in locale-specific ways generally combining Shinto and Buddhism. In 1868, the state separated Shinto from Buddhism, destroying myriad local cultures and causing Japanese to refocus religiosity on the emperor, whose putative ancestor is the solar divinity Amaterasu, worshipped at Ise Shrine. The state also constructed new shrines, including Yasukuni, largely divorced from tradition.
Breen's introduction broaches a controversy that ensued in 2007 when a newspaper revealed that the late Emperor Hirohito's chamberlain suggested in his diary that the monarch never visited Yasukuni after 1975; three years later, in 1978, it enshrined the Class A war criminals. This report corroborated a memo by the emperor's chief steward published in another newspaper in 2006. Chinese and Koreans vehemently oppose postwar Japanese premiers' visits to Yasukuni because it enshrined these very same war criminals. The chamberlain's diary and the chief steward's memo suggest Hirohito's sympathy with the views of Japan's neighbors.
Takahashi discusses the Japanese right's downplaying of the emperor's apparent disapproval, and an opinion voiced by two major Japanese dailies, Asahi shinbun and Nihon keizai shinbun, that if the emperor objected to Yasukuni's enshrinement of the war criminals, premiers should not patronize the shrine. Some have hoped to sidestep the war criminals issue entirely by proposing their dis-enshrinement. Breen mentions Nakasone's 1985 recommendation along these lines, which Yasukuni priests refused, asserting that once enshrined in a Shinto fashion, kami can never be removed. Rose details the Chinese government's predictable calls for dis-enshrinement, but also reports that in a 2006 effort to depoliticize Yasukuni, even a chairman of the influential and conservative Japan Society for the War Bereaved fruitlessly proposed likewise. Despite calls from various quarters for dis-enshrinement or similar alternatives, many remain invested in Yasukuni's apotheosis of the war criminals. For example, Nitta Hitoshi's “And Why Shouldn't the Prime Minister Worship at Yasukuni?” argues that because Japanese leaders convicted of Class A war crimes had little in common with their German counterparts, their worship at Yasukuni should be unproblematic. He implies that his country's imperialism and militarism were not unusual among modern nation-states and that convicted Japanese leaders were the victims of victor's justice. This may be true, but in contradistinction to Nitta's Japanese-as-victims consciousness, Takahashi makes the salient point that by making only certain wartime leaders scapegoats, the Tokyo Trials actually exonerated the emperor and Japanese in general, making both useful under U.S. hegemony during the Cold War. From this perspective, Hirohito's alleged shunning of the spirits of his erstwhile underlings can be read as self-serving.
Seaton documents Japanese progressives' stance that official Yasukuni visits violate a sacrosanct separation of church and state. In repudiating this argument, Doak's “A Religious Perspective on the Yasukuni Shrine Controversy” and Seki's “Plumbing the Depths: The Yasukuni Controversy in China,” each defend Yasukuni religiosity, declaring that communists in particular cannot understand the shrine because they are atheists. This seems at odds with what Breen reminds us about Yasukuni's preeminently nationalistic character. Takahashi takes a similar tack in discussing the shrine's role in an “alchemy of emotion” that converts horrors of war into occasions of national glory (p. 120). While Wang agrees with Takahashi's critique of simple-minded Japanese nationalism, his suggestion that Japanese are exceptional in not coming to terms with a lamentable past rings hollow. Leaders of modern nation-states, including those of Wang's People's Republic of China, have seldom done so.
Contrasting with the partisanship of many of the contributors, Rose provides above-the-fray analyses of the political uses of Yasukuni in both Japan and China: Koizumi's visits bolstered his domestic appeal as a maverick, while Chinese Communists fastened on Koizumi's patronage of Yasukuni to “secure the party's longevity” (p. 39). Koizumi's shrine visits afforded Chinese leaders the opportunity to emphasize their party's role in defeating Japanese imperialism, which usefully diverted attention away from their own more recent shortcomings. To this reader, Rose offers new insight into why Koizumi's Yasukuni patronage mattered so much to so many. During his tenure as prime minister, Koizumi presided over an economy that was anything but miraculous; at a time when postwar pride in Japan Inc. was eroding, his visits evoked long-suppressed memories of a history of regional intervention, “leadership,” and nationalist bravado. For their part, Chinese leaders responded to social crises concomitant with economic liberalization in the post-Tiananmen era by demonizing Japanese.
Breen states in the introduction that there are “multiple Yasukunis” (pp. 11–12), a valuable perspective that is lacking in a number of the essays but reflective of the book's strength as a whole. At the same time, Breen's own essay, “Yasukuni and the Loss of Historical Memory,” which discusses the implicit narrative of the shrine's Yūshūkan war museum, usefully reminds readers why the controversy rages on. He identifies the museum's “strategy of display” (p. 151) as one that honors Japan's war dead in emphasizing the evils of Western imperialism and Japan's putative role in precipitating post–World War II decolonization in Asia, while remaining silent regarding “the horrors of war” and “the historical facts of Japanese war crimes” (p. 155). The ideology behind a long-gone Japanese empire—that Japanese were saving Asia from Western imperialism—remains what is truly at stake in debates about Yasukuni. Defeat foreclosed the possibility of mainstream Japanese opinion affirming that their country's imperialism was righteous. An inability to take unquestioning pride in their country's history may be troubling to many today with its implication that Japan is not a normal country. However, if normality entails blissfully blinding oneself to unpalatable aspects of national history, one wonders whether it would not be better for all of us to become as abnormal as Japanese supposedly are.
