Yasukuni Jinja
Sep. 2nd, 2007 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthI am utterly exhausted (at a rough minimum estimate I walked 7 1/2 miles today, and I was carrying heavy things for several miles of it, and I was on my feet for about 7 hours straight) so while I've done a lot of things the last few days, I'm not going to go in to detail. I didn't get the pictures up either. Once again, I'll try to do so tomorrow. However, I'm not making this post to whine. I'm making it because I wanted to talk about Yasukuni Jinja while the experience and my impressions of it are still fresh in my mind.
If any of you have an interest in the public display and public interpretation of history, I'd love to hear opinions on the below.
First, for those of you who don't know what Yasukuni is, or why I might find it important enough that it might justify it's own post even in my current condition, a little bit of history. I'm doing this from memory, so pieces might be wrong. If you want to know more, there's a decent wiki page about it.
Yasukuni Jinja was founded during the late 19th century to honor those who died during the Meiji Restoration, especially those who had been massacred in the early 1860's for holding anti-Shogunate political opinions. As the 20th century began and Japan lost citizens in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, those war dead also were enshrined at Yasukuni. The shrine is dedicated in a general sense to the Japanese war dead so I think that, in an ephemeral sense, even those who died in, say, the Sengoku Jidai (the Japanese civil wars of the 15th and 16th century, the subject of the PS2 game Samurai Warriors). None of this is the problematic part.
After World War II, the war dead of that war were also enshrined in Yasukuni. What has particularly sparked controversy since the 40's is that this includes individuals executed for war crimes. Needless to say, those who were the victims of atrocities, the Chinese and Koreans primarily, feel that Yasukuni is an affront to them. When, every year, the Prime Minister of Japan goes to Yasukuni to pray, which he always (no matter who he is) says is being done as a private citizen, Korea and China lodge formal complaints and relations get tense. The idea that those who committed atrocities during World War II and were therefore executed and yet they still get respected as Japan's honored war dead sparks a lot of hard feelings, and as a result the shrine has come to represent a great deal of bad.
For reasons that I can't fully explain, I have very much wanted to go to Yasukuni. I think this is in part to see what the big deal was all about. To a lesser extent, it was to pay my respects. I wasn't sure what to expect. In my minds eye, Yasukuni was on a bluff over looking the sea, a conglomeration of vaguely buddhist style religious buildings, windswept, full of incense and sometime creepy arcane rituals which exalt these dead to immense heights. Given that it's in central Tokyo, you an only begin to imagine how ludicrous my idea was - of course, I formed that image years ago before I realized that the shrine was actually in the city. When you study Japanese history, you end up reading a fair amount about what Yasukuni represents, but surprisingly little about Yasukuni itself. And so I was curious.
So today, I decided to walk from my apartment to Shinjuku (bad call - I knew it was a bad call when I started, and I did it anyway, because I'm an idiot) I noticed that Yasukuni was literally on the way, right next to the road I planned to take anyway.
I arrived at the shrine down the main formal approach, a walkway with two giant Tori on either end and a bronze statue of some guy in the middle. The shrine greets you as you walk west (probably laid out this way on purpose, though I don't know enough to why - maybe to face the rising sun, as the "Japan is the land of the rising sun?") Sitting outside of it was a tent with several wizened old men selling commemorative calenders for 500 yen; they are clearly veterans. Looking around, I notice a lot of elderly men and their wives wearing ribbons - veterans who survived still get respect (will they join the legions of honored war dead when they pass away from old age? If not, do they secretly regret not dying in the war, not joining their friends who did die?) as do their families, and they get in to the museum on site for free.
The shrine itself is surprisingly quiet. I visited Sensoji, a large and popular traditional shrine in Asakusa, and it was BUSTLING and full of tourists taking pictures, people lighting incense and praying, noisy and boisterous. By comparison, Yasukuni is quiet, but not in a weird way. It feels somber and peaceful. Near me, a monk does his benedictions. I'm the only white person around, and I find myself wondering what the other people there think of me. Do they wish I would go away? are they wondering what I'm thinking? Do they recent that I'm taking photographs? I did my best to be respectful, and went through an internal debate I also had the previous day - should I join into the ritual? At Sensoji, I did so, donating money, praying, and lighting incense. Here, I decide it might offend people, and I don't want to upset anyone, so I don't.
There isn't much else to the shrine itself, and so I wander over the museum. A sign advertises a movie, "私たちは忘れない" : "We Don't Forget." I begin to put a finger on what has had me worried: what will the spin be? Will the descriptions lie out right? What will they say about their honored war dead? Will they admit any fault, any bad decisions? And so I go through the museum, and I read the majority of the signs, at least the ones that have been translated (all the main ones) rather carefully.
My heart sank as soon as I saw the first one describing the modern era. It said something along the lines of "The Western Powers Encroach" and described the spread of Western powers during the 19th century. Nothing it said was wrong, but somehow it seemed negative. However, for the most part nothing else set me off until a sign about Korea later, which said something along the lines of "The Korean's signed a treaty which gained their independence from China, which Japan had always hoped for. Later, Russia, France and Germany joined together to pressure Japan into releasing Korea from the treaty." If Korea was independent, how could Japan release them from anything? Still, I tried to keep myself from seeing the worst in the signs.
By the time I finished World War II, I can't honestly say what I thought. I was thinking, though, a lot. First, nothing that was stated was untrue to the best of my knowledge. A few areas were skimmed over - atrocities weren't mentioned at all. The history of the lead up to the war was, entirely understandably, skewed in favor of Japan's being justified for all of their actions - but I would expect the exact same from, say, an American museum about the Vietnam War. Even places where they could have gone all sappy and pulled heart strings - descriptions of Iwo Jima or Okinawa, discussion of the Kamikaze, and, of course, the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were handled in the same politically correct, relatively dry fashion as the rest of the exhibit (dry, not uninteresting). They relied heavily on primary documents, both ones originally in English such as the Hull documents from the negotiations of 1941, and Japanese ones such as announcements made by the emperor. There wasn't really an anti-American spin, though there was DEFINITELY justification written large in all of the build up.
What fascinated me most, though, was not anything about the museum itself, but instead was an affect that it had on me. When I read about Pearl Harbor, I felt a slight sense of self-righteousness, and a lot of sadness. A little part of my brain was outraged. How DARE they work so hard to justify an unprovoked and unexpected attack? I was a little upset. Almost immediately, though, I got a hold of myself. I knew I was being unreasonable. And it was driven home not long after, when I reached the section on Hiroshima, which was handled with the exact same tonality as Pearl Harbor was. And I wasn't upset. And I SHOULD have been. I EXPECTED to be when I reached that point, and it bothered me that I wasn't. Granted, they didn't get into much detail - I think that those who died there don't count as honored war dead, because the attacks were not a major part of the museum, whereas Pearl Harbor had it's own display which included model planes making a "bombing run" over a photograph of one of the American ships burning (more tasteful than it sounds from this description, I promise!).
We are culturally trained. Even something that is as far removed from me as Pearl Harbor is - 40 years before I was born (well, almost 39 to the day), no direct effect on me or my family - I am culturally trained to think of it as an atrocity, in a way that - SOMEHOW - I am NOT trained to think of Hiroshima as one. As I wandered through the last rooms of the museum - no more text in these, just wall about wall of carefully laid out 3x3 inch photographs of black and whites of smiling young men in uniform, and a directory to find the picture you are searching for. What did this mean? It's not like I was raised with any particular awareness of Pearl Harbor, even. Yet somehow it entered into my conscience in such a way that I could get offended by seeing it REASONABLY justified. Heck, looking at it from the point of view presented, I could get it! I'm not sure - intellectually - that I agreed with a lot of the explanations, a lot was glossed in the build up to the war, but nothing they said wasn't basically true. I think I'll be spending a lot of time over the next years occasionally trying to figure out more about what I caught a brief glimpse of today.
Watching people in the room of photographs was particularly interesting. I was lucky - because it was Sunday (I think that's why, anyway) there were a LOT of veterans there. As I was leaving, a group of veterans were standing next to one of the photograph plaques - which were sorted by unit - reminiscing to their wives and looking for old friends among those there. Was that their unit, I wondered, what things did these men live through that their friends did not? Others looked through the book which listed all of the photographs, maybe wondering if those they knew were among those shown. There is not a chance that there were photographs of all of the dead up, but there were still thousands. I was reminded overwhelmingly of being at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C.
I'm very glad I went to Yasukuni. First, it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to believe. It was obvious that effort had been made not to cross lines. I could see how someone who was inclined to be offended could be - the one thing (other than Pearl Harbor - that truly pushed my buttons was the selection of books in English - there were about 6 total, 3 were about sumo and Karate, and the other 3 were (this REALLY pissed me off, though it also left me kind of curious) explanations of why there was no Rape of Nanking. They were systematic refutations of the evidence suggesting there was any wrong done. However, over all, I thought they the museum was surprisingly restrained and appropriate...all things considered. The shrine itself was utterly inoffensive, at least to me. To me, the individual men who died are (for the most part) not those responsible for ill deeds; I would no more begrudge them a place enshrined as I would deny any soldier whose name stands on the Vietnam War memorial. It doesn't - to me - MATTER if the war was inappropriate, they still sacrificed their lives. All in all, though, I was left mostly with a lot to reflect on. How do we remember the past? How do our societies shape that? Why do we remember things the way we do? Why do we choose to portray certain aspects as part of the public memory, and why do we ignore other parts? Are there hidden agendas, what are they, who benefits from them, who do they hurt? I was already wary of similar "shrines" in America, and now I'm even more so. Lastly, I was left with the feeling that sometimes we create the phantoms we fear. Yasukuni - to me, lacking the social background that would presumably lend it much more meaning - is not the horror of conservative thought, the bastion of nationalism that I feared it would be. I can certainly see how, in some ways, it is, yet I can't escape the feeling that there is a cycle of reaction that is serving to reinforce that image of Yasukuni even as in other ways the caretakers of the shrine try to take it past that to what it should be: a somber honoring of the millions of Japanese who have died in battle since time immemorial (okay, at least in the last 2000 years :) )
I feel like I have a lot more to say on this (even though I've already written so much!) but my thoughts have run out of coherency, so I'm gonna stop. I just really felt the need to ramble a bit, because it was a very sobering place to visit. I think I might have learned some important things in several areas.
If you feel like reading it all, I'd love to discuss - preferably intellectually.
If any of you have an interest in the public display and public interpretation of history, I'd love to hear opinions on the below.
First, for those of you who don't know what Yasukuni is, or why I might find it important enough that it might justify it's own post even in my current condition, a little bit of history. I'm doing this from memory, so pieces might be wrong. If you want to know more, there's a decent wiki page about it.
Yasukuni Jinja was founded during the late 19th century to honor those who died during the Meiji Restoration, especially those who had been massacred in the early 1860's for holding anti-Shogunate political opinions. As the 20th century began and Japan lost citizens in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, those war dead also were enshrined at Yasukuni. The shrine is dedicated in a general sense to the Japanese war dead so I think that, in an ephemeral sense, even those who died in, say, the Sengoku Jidai (the Japanese civil wars of the 15th and 16th century, the subject of the PS2 game Samurai Warriors). None of this is the problematic part.
After World War II, the war dead of that war were also enshrined in Yasukuni. What has particularly sparked controversy since the 40's is that this includes individuals executed for war crimes. Needless to say, those who were the victims of atrocities, the Chinese and Koreans primarily, feel that Yasukuni is an affront to them. When, every year, the Prime Minister of Japan goes to Yasukuni to pray, which he always (no matter who he is) says is being done as a private citizen, Korea and China lodge formal complaints and relations get tense. The idea that those who committed atrocities during World War II and were therefore executed and yet they still get respected as Japan's honored war dead sparks a lot of hard feelings, and as a result the shrine has come to represent a great deal of bad.
For reasons that I can't fully explain, I have very much wanted to go to Yasukuni. I think this is in part to see what the big deal was all about. To a lesser extent, it was to pay my respects. I wasn't sure what to expect. In my minds eye, Yasukuni was on a bluff over looking the sea, a conglomeration of vaguely buddhist style religious buildings, windswept, full of incense and sometime creepy arcane rituals which exalt these dead to immense heights. Given that it's in central Tokyo, you an only begin to imagine how ludicrous my idea was - of course, I formed that image years ago before I realized that the shrine was actually in the city. When you study Japanese history, you end up reading a fair amount about what Yasukuni represents, but surprisingly little about Yasukuni itself. And so I was curious.
So today, I decided to walk from my apartment to Shinjuku (bad call - I knew it was a bad call when I started, and I did it anyway, because I'm an idiot) I noticed that Yasukuni was literally on the way, right next to the road I planned to take anyway.
I arrived at the shrine down the main formal approach, a walkway with two giant Tori on either end and a bronze statue of some guy in the middle. The shrine greets you as you walk west (probably laid out this way on purpose, though I don't know enough to why - maybe to face the rising sun, as the "Japan is the land of the rising sun?") Sitting outside of it was a tent with several wizened old men selling commemorative calenders for 500 yen; they are clearly veterans. Looking around, I notice a lot of elderly men and their wives wearing ribbons - veterans who survived still get respect (will they join the legions of honored war dead when they pass away from old age? If not, do they secretly regret not dying in the war, not joining their friends who did die?) as do their families, and they get in to the museum on site for free.
The shrine itself is surprisingly quiet. I visited Sensoji, a large and popular traditional shrine in Asakusa, and it was BUSTLING and full of tourists taking pictures, people lighting incense and praying, noisy and boisterous. By comparison, Yasukuni is quiet, but not in a weird way. It feels somber and peaceful. Near me, a monk does his benedictions. I'm the only white person around, and I find myself wondering what the other people there think of me. Do they wish I would go away? are they wondering what I'm thinking? Do they recent that I'm taking photographs? I did my best to be respectful, and went through an internal debate I also had the previous day - should I join into the ritual? At Sensoji, I did so, donating money, praying, and lighting incense. Here, I decide it might offend people, and I don't want to upset anyone, so I don't.
There isn't much else to the shrine itself, and so I wander over the museum. A sign advertises a movie, "私たちは忘れない" : "We Don't Forget." I begin to put a finger on what has had me worried: what will the spin be? Will the descriptions lie out right? What will they say about their honored war dead? Will they admit any fault, any bad decisions? And so I go through the museum, and I read the majority of the signs, at least the ones that have been translated (all the main ones) rather carefully.
My heart sank as soon as I saw the first one describing the modern era. It said something along the lines of "The Western Powers Encroach" and described the spread of Western powers during the 19th century. Nothing it said was wrong, but somehow it seemed negative. However, for the most part nothing else set me off until a sign about Korea later, which said something along the lines of "The Korean's signed a treaty which gained their independence from China, which Japan had always hoped for. Later, Russia, France and Germany joined together to pressure Japan into releasing Korea from the treaty." If Korea was independent, how could Japan release them from anything? Still, I tried to keep myself from seeing the worst in the signs.
By the time I finished World War II, I can't honestly say what I thought. I was thinking, though, a lot. First, nothing that was stated was untrue to the best of my knowledge. A few areas were skimmed over - atrocities weren't mentioned at all. The history of the lead up to the war was, entirely understandably, skewed in favor of Japan's being justified for all of their actions - but I would expect the exact same from, say, an American museum about the Vietnam War. Even places where they could have gone all sappy and pulled heart strings - descriptions of Iwo Jima or Okinawa, discussion of the Kamikaze, and, of course, the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were handled in the same politically correct, relatively dry fashion as the rest of the exhibit (dry, not uninteresting). They relied heavily on primary documents, both ones originally in English such as the Hull documents from the negotiations of 1941, and Japanese ones such as announcements made by the emperor. There wasn't really an anti-American spin, though there was DEFINITELY justification written large in all of the build up.
What fascinated me most, though, was not anything about the museum itself, but instead was an affect that it had on me. When I read about Pearl Harbor, I felt a slight sense of self-righteousness, and a lot of sadness. A little part of my brain was outraged. How DARE they work so hard to justify an unprovoked and unexpected attack? I was a little upset. Almost immediately, though, I got a hold of myself. I knew I was being unreasonable. And it was driven home not long after, when I reached the section on Hiroshima, which was handled with the exact same tonality as Pearl Harbor was. And I wasn't upset. And I SHOULD have been. I EXPECTED to be when I reached that point, and it bothered me that I wasn't. Granted, they didn't get into much detail - I think that those who died there don't count as honored war dead, because the attacks were not a major part of the museum, whereas Pearl Harbor had it's own display which included model planes making a "bombing run" over a photograph of one of the American ships burning (more tasteful than it sounds from this description, I promise!).
We are culturally trained. Even something that is as far removed from me as Pearl Harbor is - 40 years before I was born (well, almost 39 to the day), no direct effect on me or my family - I am culturally trained to think of it as an atrocity, in a way that - SOMEHOW - I am NOT trained to think of Hiroshima as one. As I wandered through the last rooms of the museum - no more text in these, just wall about wall of carefully laid out 3x3 inch photographs of black and whites of smiling young men in uniform, and a directory to find the picture you are searching for. What did this mean? It's not like I was raised with any particular awareness of Pearl Harbor, even. Yet somehow it entered into my conscience in such a way that I could get offended by seeing it REASONABLY justified. Heck, looking at it from the point of view presented, I could get it! I'm not sure - intellectually - that I agreed with a lot of the explanations, a lot was glossed in the build up to the war, but nothing they said wasn't basically true. I think I'll be spending a lot of time over the next years occasionally trying to figure out more about what I caught a brief glimpse of today.
Watching people in the room of photographs was particularly interesting. I was lucky - because it was Sunday (I think that's why, anyway) there were a LOT of veterans there. As I was leaving, a group of veterans were standing next to one of the photograph plaques - which were sorted by unit - reminiscing to their wives and looking for old friends among those there. Was that their unit, I wondered, what things did these men live through that their friends did not? Others looked through the book which listed all of the photographs, maybe wondering if those they knew were among those shown. There is not a chance that there were photographs of all of the dead up, but there were still thousands. I was reminded overwhelmingly of being at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C.
I'm very glad I went to Yasukuni. First, it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to believe. It was obvious that effort had been made not to cross lines. I could see how someone who was inclined to be offended could be - the one thing (other than Pearl Harbor - that truly pushed my buttons was the selection of books in English - there were about 6 total, 3 were about sumo and Karate, and the other 3 were (this REALLY pissed me off, though it also left me kind of curious) explanations of why there was no Rape of Nanking. They were systematic refutations of the evidence suggesting there was any wrong done. However, over all, I thought they the museum was surprisingly restrained and appropriate...all things considered. The shrine itself was utterly inoffensive, at least to me. To me, the individual men who died are (for the most part) not those responsible for ill deeds; I would no more begrudge them a place enshrined as I would deny any soldier whose name stands on the Vietnam War memorial. It doesn't - to me - MATTER if the war was inappropriate, they still sacrificed their lives. All in all, though, I was left mostly with a lot to reflect on. How do we remember the past? How do our societies shape that? Why do we remember things the way we do? Why do we choose to portray certain aspects as part of the public memory, and why do we ignore other parts? Are there hidden agendas, what are they, who benefits from them, who do they hurt? I was already wary of similar "shrines" in America, and now I'm even more so. Lastly, I was left with the feeling that sometimes we create the phantoms we fear. Yasukuni - to me, lacking the social background that would presumably lend it much more meaning - is not the horror of conservative thought, the bastion of nationalism that I feared it would be. I can certainly see how, in some ways, it is, yet I can't escape the feeling that there is a cycle of reaction that is serving to reinforce that image of Yasukuni even as in other ways the caretakers of the shrine try to take it past that to what it should be: a somber honoring of the millions of Japanese who have died in battle since time immemorial (okay, at least in the last 2000 years :) )
I feel like I have a lot more to say on this (even though I've already written so much!) but my thoughts have run out of coherency, so I'm gonna stop. I just really felt the need to ramble a bit, because it was a very sobering place to visit. I think I might have learned some important things in several areas.
If you feel like reading it all, I'd love to discuss - preferably intellectually.
