In June 1869, Japan was undergoing a significant transition: the Boshin War had come to an end, the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown, and the Meiji Restoration was complete. In order to commemorate those who died fighting for the Emperor, Emperor Meiji established the Tōkyō Shōkonsha (“shrine to summon the souls”). Renamed the Yasukuni Jinja in 1879, the shrine came to honor not just those who died fighting for the Emperor in the Boshin War, but all Japanese who died fighting for the Emperor in the entire Meiji and Taisho periods and part of the Showa period.
The names, origins, birthdates, and places of death of 2,466,532 men, women, and children are included in the shrine. The wars they fought in include but are not limited to the Boshin War, First and Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and Japanese volunteers in the First Indochina War. Those enshrined weren’t just mainland Japanese - Okinawans, Ainu, Koreans, and Taiwanese who fought and died for the Emperor are also commemorated in the shrine.
The Yasukuni Shrine has been the center of serious controversy and sparked geopolitical tensions, however. At the source of this are the enshrinement of 1,068 convicted war criminals, including 14 Class-A war criminals (defined by involvement in the planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of war) convicted in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East after World War II. These war crimes remain extremely sensitive issues across East and Southeast Asia, with a widely perceived lack of Japanese acknowledgement of these war crimes inciting geopolitical tensions with China and the Koreas.
Given the formal separation of church and state in Japan, the shrine’s priesthood has autonomy over whom to enshrine and how that enshrinement would occur. According to Shinto beliefs, the Yasukuni shrine permanently houses the actual souls of the war dead as kami, and there is nothing the current clergy could do to reverse this.
With a major autumn festival at the shrine set for October 17-20, there are rising concerns that conservative ministers from Shinzo Abe’s cabinet may visit the shrine for the first time in more than two years. Abe himself visited the shrine in 2013 after his return to the PMship in 2012, and the last Cabinet minister to visit the shrine, Sanae Takaichi, did so in spring 2017. Each of these visits is often perceived as an insult to Korea and China and a harsh reminder of widespread denial of Japanese war crimes within the government itself.
With leaders and senior officials from many countries including China and South Korea scheduled to come to the Emperor’s enthronement ceremony on October 22, opposition leaders within the Japanese government are calling for restraint from its more conservative members, amid fears that it could severely impact relations with those countries at a key time.
Source:
- Arjun Kumar
No comments:
Post a Comment