Understanding Yasukuni

December 26th, 2013, a date that lives in infamy. No, not because it was the day you returned that NASCAR sweater your Grandma got you for Christmas—it was the day Shinzō Abe became the first Japanese Prime Minister in seven years to visit the infamous Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.

What’s so important about someone visiting a shrine on the other side of the world, you ask? Well…that depends on who you ask.

[INTRO JINGLE & CLIP]

Good morning guys,

Jason in Japan here. Today I want to talk to you about something rather controversial here in the eastern edge of Asia: the [PIC] Yasukuni Shrine. There are lots of strong feelings here about this place, and I think it merits a more substantial discussion than I’ve been seeing on news outlets.

So: Yasukuni. Does that word ring a bell? Yasukuni is a large shrine in the [ON SCREEN: MAP w/ ARROW] Chiyoda district of Tokyo. It was founded by the [PIC] Emperor Meiji in 1869 and is dedicated to men, women, and children who lost their lives while serving the Empire of Japan, the country that existed from around the time of The Last Samurai until the end of World War II in 1945. Yasukuni is like the Japanese version of Arlington Cemetery, but five times bigger and roughly a bajillion times more complicated.

Now I, like probably most Americans, like you perhaps, never received any formal education in modern East Asian history or politics, and only started delving into the subject after I moved to Japan in 2007. And [SIFT HOPELESSLY THROUGH STACKS OF BOOKS & PAPERS] …wow. Apparently a lot of things happen in Asia.

So, what is the controversy surrounding this shrine? Well, to cut an exceedingly complicated and long story short: over 1000 of the souls interred at Yasukuni were indicted as war criminals at the Tribunal in the years following the end of World War II—and 14 of those were indicted as Class A war criminals. These were high-ranking officials who made decisions regarding the planning of the wars from 1937-45 which resulted in the deaths of over 30,000,000 people. As you can imagine, many of the descendants of those affected by the war, especially in Korea and China, are…not happy that those kinds of people are being posthumously honored.

Thus the controversy! But it’s been getting thicker recently.

[TEXT: 2013年12月26日] December 26, 2013: [PIC] Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe makes a visit as a, quote, “private citizen” to Yasukuni Shrine. [PIC] China and South Korea express their outrage, and even America releases an official statement expressing disappointment. I was in China at the time, and this story was running on every news station, every hour, for the next week and a half that I was in the country. Actually, I had dinner with a government official during my trip and…he was a nice guy at first, but, well, let’s just say that when he got started on Japan, he couldn’t stop. Tempers run high and wild in the PRC over Japan, and they spiked again in the wake of Abe’s visit to Yasukuni.

Now, it’s not only because of Abe’s position as the highest-ranking elected official in Japan that makes people angry about his visit, but also because of past statements he’s made. There are many who consider Prime Minister Abe to be a far right-wing leader, and one who takes a revisionist stance on the root causes of Japanese involvement in the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.

Many people, not only in China and Korea but also Japan, are also wary of Abe’s recent visits to the shrine, given his repeated and recently successful attempts to reinterpret Article 9 of Japan’s constitution, which prohibits Japan from engaging in military action of almost any kind.

Are you still with me? I’m getting a little bit away from the shrine thing, I know, but like I said—complicated! The last major thing that people are aware of in this region when they see a story like this on the news are the territorial disputes in which Japan, China, and the Koreas are currently engaged. The Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, which Japan is currently disputing with China, and the Liancourt Rocks that Japan and Korea both claim, have been interpreted as nationalistic issues by the participant countries’ respective media—issues which dredge up memories of colonialism and war, not unlike the kind of feelings dredged up when images of Yasukuni Shrine flood the airwaves. In many people’s minds it’s not too far of a stretch to think that Japan, South Korea, and China are using Yasukuni as a fulcrum to pivot popular opinion in their respective favors, in this case by galvanizing equal but separate points of view against one another.