It’s not the “war criminals shrine”. The shrine honors all Japanese and Japanese colonial soldiers killed in Japan’s wars. That includes some individuals convicted of war crimes.
I agree with you, but so long as it has the war criminals enshrined there, enshrined after a bit of a delay, the place will always be viewed as the war criminals shrine by the countries who suffered at Japan’s hands.
It’s difficult (for me) to understand the social and spiritual significance of the Yaukuni Jinja shrine to the Japanese. It clearly is not a “war criminals” shrine, that’s true. On the other hand, the material on its official website is deeply ambivalent about the Japanese guilt issue, and explicitly promotes the idea that the Japanese nation was acting in the interests of the people of Eastern Asia during the first half of the 20th Century.
For instance, “Japan’s dream of building a Great East Asia was necessitated by history and it was sought after by the countries of Asia. We cannot overlook the intent of those who wish to tarnish the good name of the noble souls of Yasukuni. … The Noble Souls of Yasukuni–Eternally The noble souls who are worshiped at Yasukuni offered up their lives with deep love for their families, their race and their nation. With heartfelt thoughts for the increasing prosperity of generations and generations to come of their families, relatives and their fellow countrymen, these noble souls endured hardships and offered even their lives for the sake of their nation and race.”
This is the shrine’s own presentation of the history of Japanese expansion prior to 1945. Of course it’s true that western colonialism was by no means entierely benevolent in Easter Asia (or anywhere else).
The general picture that I have from Japan is that they feel that
(a) They represent Asia
(b) They have many years behind them as victims of western imperialist adventures - their expansionism was a correction or response.
© They were ultimately the victims of western brutality in the use of nuclear weapons: this was so overwhelmingly awful that it blots out any need for introspective guilt on their part
(d) They are too subtle in their understanding of history (war included) and spirituality to be properly understood by westerners.
My Korean and Chinese colleagues really, truly dislike them.
I think some of the specific individuals “enshrined” were condemned as war criminals by the Allies after the war. Being enshrined there is an individual thing, and differs from just being included in blanket commemoration, I think. It’s not like a “war memorial” in that regard.
From MrAlpen’s link above:
I correct myself: it is the war criminals’ shrine.
I wonder, was the Rape of Nanking done by a couple dozen guys? A few hundred? Or tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers? What about the horrors of the Phillipines? A couple dozen soldiers? Or many, many more.
I think a LOT of Japanese soldiers in WWII honestly, truly, deeply, qualified as war criminals by any sane standard. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, perhaps. So any blanket glorification of Japanese soldiers in WWII must necessarily include glorifying war criminals. A lot of war criminals. A good thing? I think not.
Also the language of the shrine is deeply misleading. Sure, some of the Japanese soldiers gave their lives for their country. They also bayoneted babies, raped Korean women wholesale and tortured American POWs for their country. Do they sound so noble now?
I think the shrine is an abomination, and I don’t see how any rational person who is aware of the conduct of the Japanese army in WWII could see it otherwise.
“Fighting for all of Asia.” Pathetic. I think the Chinese who were tortured and murdered, the Koreans who were raped, and many other Asians, would disagree.
Deeply misleading? How about flat out false? The shrine’s website has it that the war criminals themselves weren’t criminals but rather victims of the cruel and unjust conquering allies.
I believe that once Japan quits pretending to be a victim of WWII, then the nations it has treated cruelly will accept their apologies. Right now, the apologies from Japan are just empty words which are in opposition to Japan’s actions.
I dont really care for the idea of group apologies, so for me I don’t care whether or not “Japan” apologises for the past. I feel that the issue here is a lack of KNOWLEDGE of the past within Japan. It was politically expedient after WWII for both Japan AND the allies to turn a blind eye to this issue, and this has proved to be A Bad Thing for the region. Japan is seen as an untrustworthy ally because it is able to be so two-faced about its past.
I find the shrine’s web pages bizarre, but it helps me to understand a much broader ambivalence about the past that I meet in many of my Japanese colleagues and friends (on whose behalf it is not explicitly speaking).
But the Germans did apologize, and in ways deeper than words; they passed numerous laws restricting hate speech, they made reparations to Jews, etc. There was/is a palpable national guilt.
I think very few would say that Japan has done this. To pick one issue that was in the news while I was living in Korea: there were women who had been made into sex slaves by the Japanese Army. Some of them still had their ID papers that identified them as official “comfort women.” The Japanese government for decades refused to pay reparations to them, claiming that they had chosen to be prostitutes.
Their “official apologies” have been very widely seen as vague, pro forma and insincere.
I appear to be wrong and the issues are a lot deeper than I realized. I wasn’t aware of many of those underlieing issues until I saw Monty and cckerberos (and others) back and forth posts. Consider ignorance fought for me on this subject…I now have at least a bit of a deeper understanding as to why resentment in the region is still there towards the Japanese…and its a lot different than why I THOUGHT it was.
-XT
I had a longer post, which unfortunately did not save, and which I’m not going to repost, but in summary.
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The shrine honors all the Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese soldiers who fought in Japanese wars since the Restoration, not only those who fought in World War II.
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While the Japanese government and Japanese army units did do terrible things in the Second World War, that doesn’t change the fact that Japanese soldiers, both conscripts and volunteers did fight for their country and the Emperor, and did fight bravely and with patriotism.
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There are memorials in Germany to the soldiers who died in WWII, and in America to the Confederate dead. You can memorialize soldiers who died without at the same time saying that the cause they fought for was justified.
This is true, though in this case I believe that the organization running Yasukuni does feel that the cause they fought for is justified. What you’re saying is probably true in regards to how the average Japanese feels about the shrine. I don’t think that the organization running Yasukuni is particularly represenative of Japanese mainstream opinion. Some notable politicians such as former Prime Minister Nakasone have pushed for the removal of the war criminals’ names from the list of martyrs, but given that Yasukuni is not officially affiliated with the government in any way, I’m not sure whether the government could make that happen.
I’m just a lurker in this thread, but thanks for that, cckerberos. That’s a very interesting childrens book.
This is a fair point - and the thread isn’t about this shrine, although it’s significance does raise relevant issues. Specifically, information about the nature of Japanese behaviour (in China, Korea and elsewhere) before 1945 is hidden or undiscussed. What is acknowledged is also slight enough to be disregarded.
It’s not (primarily) that the Japanese value-system or religion(s) make their wartime behaviour defensible in their own eyes. It’s more that there is a national conspiracy to avoid their own history. If acknowledged, the atrocities of the first half of the 20th century would be seen by them as being as reprehensible as they appear to Koreans and Chinese citizens.
And regarding Captain Amazing’s post, the shrine does not simply commemorate the entire war dead. It also “enshrines” (whatever that means) a specific, counted and named subgroup of particular individuals deemed as particularly noble. Their particular behaviour is held to be noble and appropriate in some sense. CA’s analogy to typical western memorials doesn’t entirely work. Well, at all really.
Thanks. While I’m giving links, I’ll toss this one out as well. It’s the website for the group that wrote the New History Textbook, the junior high textbook that helped spark anti-Japanese demonstrations when it was approved by the Japanese Ministry of Education. They’ve posted translations of the textbook into Korea, Chinese, and English. From what I’ve read of it, it’s an interesting view into the Japanese right’s perception of WW2 (though it’s not representative of Japanese history textbooks as a whole… there’s a reason less than 1% of Japanese schools use the book even though its free.)
Another thing that I think is very infuriating for those Asian nations who were victims of Japanese aggression in the Post WWI period is that, AIUI, the actions and policies of the government and military at the time are glossed over in domestic Japanese history books. Some are more egregious than others, but none are very open or honest.
I think to make a similar change in American History books you’d have to reduce the Jim Crow era to a paragraph.
A lot of Japan’s neighbors believe that until Japan admits what happened (For example I think the Mayor of Tokyo still claims that the stories of the Rape of Nanking are all anti-Japanese myths.) and is willing to teach it to the new generations of Japanese students that nothing has changed.
BTW, for those who criticize MacArthur’s decision to leave Hirohito alone - I’d like to remind them that it is possible that without the Emporer’s public support for the surrender and occupation it is possible that the fighting would have continued. I suspect it was a purely pragmatic decision, made for narrow reasons. Not wrong reasons, but reasons that weren’t considering Japan’s relationship with the rest of Asia. It’s one of the few of MacArthur’s actions that I won’t fault.
For the last several weeks, we’ve had countless specials on TV and Japanese magazines looking back at 60 years ago. Unfortunately, the overwhelming focus was on Hiroshima and very little, if any, on any kind of activity by the Japanese which lead up to the bombing. Before that, we had the specials on the battle of Okinawa and the civilian sufferings. If one’s view of the war was formed by Japanese mass media alone, one couldn’t help but conclude that Japan was a primary victim of the war. There are countless interviews with civilian survivors, showing their horrible scars and recounting the terribleness of the time. All well and fine, but no balance in a discussion of why events had gotten to there.
In one strong dissenting opinion, writer decried young people’s lack of knowledge that even Pearl Harbor occurred, (let along any of the atrocities in Asia, which even that article neglected to mention). Another talked of the dangers of letting the military run the government. But by and large, most Japanese under the age of 45 are not sufficiently aware of the chain of events from the colonization of Korea up to the end of the war. Friends report that modern Japanese history gets very little classroom time, so even if the textbooks were more open about Japan’s war responsibilities and atrocities, they still wouldn’t get much “air time.” (There seems to be unspoken conspiracy of silence by the elder generation to not discuss what facts they know.)
Antidotal evidence abounds. A Japanese friend living in the States was surprised that an elderly Korean woman could speak Japanese. My friend had no idea that Japan had colonized Korea for 35 years, let along the unpleasant particulars such as the slave labor, comfort women and forcing Koreans to use Japanese name.
In the years immediately after the war, the Japanese government denied responsibility for the war.
In the face of early denial and such widespread ignorance, the pronouncements from the various right wing politicians – with its poster child Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo, more than counter balance the weak “atrocities occurred” type of recent government apologies. I can see where other Asians would not accept these as true apologies.
Occasionally, there are more enlightening programs. There was a special this week on NHK (Japanese public television) concerning Yasukuni shrine and the war criminals. (Unfortunately, although my Japanese is good, discussions concerning war criminals is pushes the limits of my vocabulary.) In direct refutation of the obligations of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, war criminals were paroled and were given back salaried and had government pensions restored. Their status as war criminals was apparently revoked. (I didn’t completely follow this, and I’m still researching this.) This was then one of the reasons used for the justification of enshrining them at Yasukuni Shrine.
This comes from an American who has lived in and loved this country for more than 17 years, but is troubled by the lack of an honest look at history and the horrible unpleasant facts therein… Of course, glancing around the world shows few who would pass this test, including many who point fingers of blame.
Interesting. I hadn’t heard that, but it’s true. Every war criminal sentenced during the occupation who was not executed had been released by 1955, which would certainly be a violation of Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty:
Have you read Embracing Defeat? It covers the question of the Emperor’s fate in great detail. The Emperor’s public support in the wake of World War II has been much exaggerated; the Japanese people had much more serious problems at that point. Even if they were inclined to revolt, by the time his fate was ultimately decided the occupation had been in place for months. You are correct that MacArthur and the occupation decided to spare the Emperor because they (correctly) believed that they could manipulate the imperial institution to provide legitimacy for the occupation. But that’s really just an argument for maintaining the institution, not the Emperor himself. Hirohito should have abdicated the throne after the new constitution was approved, thus creating a new era and a clean break with the past. This option was apparently quite seriously by the Emperor, his entourage, and the public; polls from the time show that the public were positive towards the idea. The possibility of abdication was squashed by SCAP for pragmatic reasons less justifiable than those they had for maintaining the institution: they didn’t want to deal with a succession and thought that abdication might contradict their messages to the peoples of America and Japan that the Emperor was innocent and thus didn’t need to be tried.
They still have a ways to go, but Japanese history textbooks are much better than they used to be… the ultra-right organization whose textbook I linked to above published their controversial book in part as an attempt to counter the current trend.
From Examining the Japanese History Textbook Controversies:
This is an area that I’m fairly interested in and would like to know more about. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find objective takes on the issue that are up-to-date.