the war dead

Yesterday was Veterans' Day in the United States. On that day we honor those who have fought in the many wars in which our country has engaged. I'm not sure if there is a corresponding holiday in Japan, but thinking about soldiers made me think about the war dead, and consequently Yasukuni Shrine.

Yasukuni Shrine is a very controversial shrine in Tokyo which is dedicated to and enshrines the war dead of Japan. Amongst those enshrined are a few leaders who have been posthumously convicted of war crimes. Their inclusion has sparked heated animosity from China and Korea, most notably when the Prime Minister visits the shrine. The former Prime Minister, Koizumi, went every year to pay his respects all the while saying that it was the visit of a private citizen. As we all know, however, political figures are not only private citizens, and his visits caused years of bad relations between China and Japan.

Many unfamiliar with Japanese religious attitudes toward the dead may wonder why the war dead would need to be enshrined in the first place. While Japan's primary religion of choice at death is Buddhism, there is still a long-standing belief with ties to what is now called Shinto about the possibility of a dead soul becoming vengeful upon an untimely death. My research deals with the first instances of this in the early 700s, which mostly had to do with political victims. By the 1100s, however, warriors were the most common vengeful spirits about which people were worried. If their souls were not pacified with rites, odes, or deification, they might cause plague, drought, or other disasters to befall the population.

Yasukuni Shrine is a modern instance of the pacification of warrior spirits. By enshrining them as gods of sorts and remembering them with visits and rites, their souls are at rest and bring about benefit rather than disaster. The difficultly with Korea and China has to do with the fact that they see the deification of those charged with war crimes as a veneration of those mens' actions. In reality, if you look at the history of pacification by deification, the character and action of the warrior had little to do with it. Those men were deified next to their more innocent compatriots not because of their deeds, but because they all died untimely deaths in war.

Therefore, when Koizumi visited Yasukuni it should not matter whether he did it as a citizen or a representative of the state, he did it in the tradition of his forefathers in order to keep his family and his country safe from the repercussions of vengeful spirits. And if that sounds too weird for a modern nation, you may also safely assume that he wasn't really thinking about all that history and tradition when he did it. Most Japanese people don't.

*Photo: Ise Shrine Complex, Outer Shrine, 2003.