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izanami
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Joined: Jan 27, 2004
Posts: 1037
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 Posted:
May 28, 2005 - 11:37 AM |
 
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| Post subject: Much more to Yasukuni shrine than war criminals |
Much more to Yasukuni shrine than war criminals
By Andy Ho
May 28, 2005
The Straits Times
ON MONDAY, Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Yi, the most senior Chinese official to visit Japan since 2003, abruptly cancelled a meeting with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and left the following day. The rare diplomatic snub came in response to Mr Koizumi's recent statement that he will visit Yasukuni shrine again this year.
What is happening here?
Professor John Nelson, a Japan expert from the University of San Francisco, told The Straits Times: 'That was, of course, a kind of political - but not necessarily diplomatic - theatre, with both sides playing out a pre-existing script. The key point is that their performances were played for different audiences.'
On the one hand, some see Yasukuni shrine, which means 'the shrine for establishing peace in the empire', as a reminder of Japan's past militarism. After all, among the 2.46 million war dead venerated in its confines are more than 1,054 minor (Classes B and C) and 14 major (Class A) war criminals.
Others argue that it would be disproportionate for a prime minister not to pay tribute to his country's war dead just because there are 14 of the worst war criminals among them. Or, as Professor Richard Minear, a Japan expert at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said: '99.99 per cent of those enshrined there weren't war criminals but ordinary soldiers or sailors.'
This may put some perspective on Mr Koizumi's yearly visits to the shrine since taking office in 2001. Moreover, as Prof Minear pointed out: 'Which country does not honour its war dead? Politicians are forever laying wreaths at cemeteries. What country does not honour its war dead in its civil religion? In what country is that civil religion not linked with some dubious acts in the past?'
Still, when Mr Koizumi says 'I don't understand why I should stop visiting', as he said again last week, many wonder how he could utter such a remark.
Dr John Breen of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, said: 'Mr Koizumi can't be unaware of the symbolic significance of visiting the shrine - not just that there are Class A criminals involved, but also that Yasukuni is content to allow ultra-right wing groups to use its space.'
Yet to call Mr Koizumi callous would be a simplistic misreading of his words that could only feed anti-Japanese sentiments. However, to suggest that the shrine must hold a significance for him impenetrable to non-Japanese would only feed the 'inscrutable' Japanese stereotype left over from the war years, said Prof Nelson.
Perhaps there are plausible reasons for Mr Koizumi's continued shrine visits.
Here could be some of them.
Reasonable reasons
FIRST, there could be hard-to-ignore personal affiliations.
According to an August 2001 report in the Mainichi Shimbun daily, Mr Koizumi has wept openly at exhibits in war museums or memorial halls in little towns. Such exhibits include letters or poems written as final goodbyes by young kamikaze pilots. These generally declare their readiness to die for the emperor and desire to 'return to Yasukuni' or hopes to 'meet again at Yasukuni'.
Behind such apparently heartfelt emotions are less well known personal connections. For example, Mr Koizumi had a cousin who was killed as a kamikaze pilot and later enshrined at Yasukuni.
The Mainichi Shimbun report also noted that the premier's father, Junya Koizumi, a senior defence agency official, got an airport built in the main town of their prefecture of Kagoshima. From that airport, 201 young kamikaze pilots would take off for the Battle of Okinawa. None returned.
Their deaths apparently affected the older Koizumi badly. In subsequent years, he was known to have been very remorseful over such sacrifices. If he transmitted much of that grief to his son, the premier may have been sincere last week when he called his visits vows that Japan will never again wage war.
Others have their doubts. As Prof Nelson said: 'Who knows if Koizumi or any politician is ever sincere?'
A Japan expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Richard Samuels, noted that Mr Koizumi is the scion of a very conservative family. He said: 'His father was a member of the LDP faction led by Kishi, the chief bureaucrat in Manchuria in the 1930s, who later became the minister of munitions in the Hideki Tojo war Cabinet.'
Or, as Dr Breen said: 'Koizumi probably does pray for peace there like many of the veterans I have interviewed, for whom Yasukuni is indeed a place of peace. However, the shrine does not encourage reflection on the horrors of war, so his visits there authorise that amnesia.'
Unfair trials?
SECONDLY, Mr Koizumi, like many of his age or older, may find it hard to consider those branded as war criminals as indeed being so.
Prof Nelson said: 'I think the Allies' 50th commemoration of the end of the war in 1995 really annoyed many Japanese and they decided to do something about it. That was also when the New Textbook initiative began, circa 1996.'
All sorts of publications have come out since, so more and more Japanese are aware of facts such as the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East being controverted. The tribunal, commonly known as the Tokyo Trials, which sat from May 1946 to November 1948 found 1,068 individuals to be war criminals.
Prof Samuels said: 'I have never heard PM Koizumi comment on the trials, but it is an article of faith among contemporary Japanese that it was a victor's justice, and many were tried unfairly.'
Dr Breen added: 'Many scholars, including liberal American ones, regard the trials as a case of victors' justice.'
One controversial aspect of the trials was the fact that five of the 11 justices submitted separate opinions on the judgment. Specifically, three separate concurring opinions were submitted by the tribunal president, William Webb, Delfin Jaranilla of the Philippines and B.V.A. Roling of the Netherlands. Dissenting opinions were filed by Henri Bernard of France and Radhabinod Pal of India.
Prof Minear's seminal 1971 book Victors' Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial found the tribunal to be unfair. He agrees that those dissenting opinions gave many reasons to distrust the trials' findings.
For example, Japan's leaders were accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes. However, Roling would later argue that no evidence was presented to show that the Japanese high command actually issued orders authorising or encouraging atrocities against civilians.
His book, The Tokyo Trial And Beyond, was published posthumously in 1989. In it, he also discussed the dissenting opinion of India's Pal, who argued that Japan's war to liberate Asia from Western domination was a legitimate one. Pal's dissenting opinion at the time amounted to a massive 1,235 pages.
Later, the San Francisco Peace Treaty - signed in September 1951 - would return sovereignty to Japan. After independence, the Japanese government was obliged under the treaty to execute those judged to be war criminals.
However, it was petitioned by millions of Japanese deeply moved by two publications especially. They included a five-volume, pocket-book series called Records Of Historical Truth: The War Trials, prepared by the prisoners themselves. These detailed various illegalities in the trials, as well as torture in jail.
Then there was Testaments For The Century, a compilation of last wills and testaments written by those sentenced to death. These focused on various shortcomings in the proceedings.
Moved by the petitions, the Japanese government renegotiated with the nations that had signed the peace treaty. In August 1953, the Diet unanimously revised the law so those executed after the trials were regarded as war casualties. Further revisions in 1954 and 1955 also saw time spent in Allied-controlled prisons as time served performing official duties.
As a result, all Class A prisoners still held were released in March 1956, while all Class B and C prisoners were freed in May 1958.
Remember, Mr Koizumi came of age in this 'halfway house' milieu, when United States machinations lodged an impotent Japan in a permanent Cold War position. For example, on the same day the peace treaty was signed, Japan also signed - or had to sign - a security treaty that permitted American military bases to remain on Okinawa.
First they were the vanquished. Then there was compensatory identification with the victor. Thus people of his age group could have a burden non-Japanese may find hard to empathise with.
Complex emotions
THIRDLY, for many of Mr Koizumi's age, memories of the period may evoke complex emotions.
Their memories of the era were not coloured much by the trials, though widely broadcast. For, however extensive their war crimes, the Japanese did not perpetrate anything on the scale of the Nazi Holocaust, so they may have that much less to remember.
More importantly, while there was still much to repent, Japan was not made to confront its war guilt squarely.
This was because the US decided, as the Cold War intensified, that Japan should become an Asian bulwark against communism.
But it would not be conducive to Japan becoming an ally in this manner if investigations and prosecutions of Japanese war crimes were ongoing. Thus the trials were not allowed to place the full record of war crimes before the people. For example, biological experiments in China, vivisection of Filipino prisoners of war, the Nanjing massacre and the comfort women issue were all excluded from the evidence.
This is probably why the national soul-searching that similar trials induced in West Germany did not occur in Japan. In 1949, General Douglas MacArthur, who effectively ruled the country as supreme commander of the Allied powers in Japan, called a halt to the prosecutions.
However, as Prof Minear pointed out, most of this has been remedied since the trials, especially with the output of books and media coverage in the wake of the history textbook controversy. Many such reports have focused on these obvious crimes.
Still, as far as the shrine is concerned, 'the trouble is that no critical reflection is encouraged there. In fact, everyone enshrined at Yasukuni is a hero who died a glorious death', added Dr Breen.
Religious significance
FINALLY, many Japanese mid-lifers like Mr Koizumi came of age with the Yasukuni shrine maintaining its central place in the Shinto religion. The religion continues to have a prominent place in their lives.
Shinto is a religion with a lower-case 'R'. With no scriptures, no proselytising, and no preaching about how to live your life, it consists of a belief that spirits exist in all things - including trees and rocks.
It is in this sense that the spirits of people who die in battle are deified and worshipped at Yasukuni. Most Japanese do not view Shinto as a religion in the same sense as Buddhism, say. They see it as a folk custom that originated before there was a 'Japan' - much like the folk religion of the Chinese worldwide.
Yasukuni itself, however, was created for a political purpose.
Established in 1869, it was later given its name by Emperor Hirohito's grandfather, Emperor Meiji. It was chosen after the Satsuma rebellion had been put down in 1877 to become the nexus of unity for the whole country. Thus, everyone was required to gather at Yasukuni (or one of its local branches) to celebrate the spring and autumn festivals, when people worshipped those who had died for the emperor.
In this manner, Yasukuni was made the core institution of the official state cult called 'state Shinto' with the chief shaman-priest the emperor himself. The state funded the priests who performed rituals for the dead, to foster patriotism through the promise of divinity in return for self-sacrifice and loyalty to the emperor.
The shrine took on an ever more martial character with the full-scale foreign wars on China in 1894 and Russia in 1904. The numbers of war dead rose precipitously, making Yasukuni ever more important. This state cult, with Yasukuni as its central institution, also sustained Japanese aggression overseas in the 1930s and 1940s. At the start of the war with China in 1937, a retired major-general, Suzuki Takao, was even made the shrine's chief priest.
Yes, the US occupation dismantled 'state Shinto', and redefined Yasukuni as an independent religious corporation. True, it also put in place constitutional provisions for the separation of state and religion.
But the crucial link - the notion of the nation as one family - kokotai - centred on the imperial institution - was not severed because the foreign occupiers could not do so. As the emperor was considered divine and thus infallible, holding him responsible for war crimes would have been to deny that divinity. This meant the people who worshipped him and failed to question his fallible decisions were themselves also responsible.
Thus, to criticise the emperor would be to criticise everyone's fundamental beliefs and self-identity. MacArthur feared doing so might provoke mass resistance to the occupation. The people had supported the emperor and the emperor had supported a war of aggression that involved war crimes. Excluding the emperor from liability would, however, also exclude the Japanese people from responsibility.
A decision was made to exclude Hirohito from prosecution. Instead, blame was attributed exclusively to Japan's military leaders - not the people or the emperor they revered - a view that came to be widely accepted by the populace. In fact, Hirohito was made out to be a pacifist monarch coerced by 'militarists' to support the war who, in the end, heroically acted by himself to end it all. (After his death, however, research has shown conclusively that Hirohito was very much involved in Japan's war decisions.)
Now when Japanese recall the war years, what they remember is their own powerlessness before the state. Thus they are victims, 'embroiled' in the war by militarist leaders. They may well recall the war, but not their own participation in a system that gave rise to it.
The people were spared self-examination - and the throne was spared as well.
What has this to do with the shrine problem today?
Everything.
While the pre-war Constitution called the emperor the head of state, the post-war one did not define who the head of state was, so the prime minister became one by default. This meant continued imperial patronage of the shrine would remain unproblematic.
To this day, through an emissary, the emperor worships there annually at the autumn and spring rites dedicated to the sun goddess from whom he is supposedly descended. In fact, after the war, Emperor Hirohito visited Yasukuni seven times. It was only after an official visit by then-prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone on Aug 15, 1985, the anniversary of Japan's surrender, caused an international ruckus, that the his visits have been made by an imperial emissary.
Today, the emperor's continuing act of veneration of the war dead celebrates not just the virtues of loyalty and sacrifice but also a time when he was openly the centre of the social order. The Yasukuni priests are thus more than mere guardians of the dead. Rather, they preserve a special past.
As Dr Breen explained, their rituals serve to 'collapse' time so Japan is once again a glorious empire, united around the imperial throne in a spirit of loyalty and self-sacrifice.
By reconstructing in the present the glories of Japan's past, Yasukuni rites today perform the same ideological function they did before 1945.
Mr Koizumi is a creature of this past and this present.
Natural attrition?
OF COURSE, all this is not to downplay the considerable pressure on politicians to visit Yasukuni as proof of allegiance to the conservative goals of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Mr Koizumi had indeed promised various groups in the LDP in 2001 that he would make official visits every year if he became prime minister.
As Prof Nelson noted, there are powerful political alliances that Mr Koizumi has to take into consideration: 'Without the coalition of factions supporting him, Koizumi would not have stayed in power as long as he has.'
Still, all this says the shrine problem cannot be reduced to a one-dimensional right-versus-left polemic. It is a nuanced history of mixed emotions and contradictory ideas that must colour Mr Koizumi's world view.
If so, perhaps the Chinese are taking too narrow a view of the visits?
Dr Breen noted: 'Interestingly enough, the Chinese knew about the enshrinement of the 14 Class A war criminals in 1978, but said nothing at all until then-PM Nakasone's official visit in 1985, which was only when they kicked up a fuss.'
Maybe it is just a case of the resurgent Dragon flexing its muscles. Still, as the 2008 Beijing Olympics come closer, China is likely to tone down its criticism.
But there may be a better way forward - natural attrition.
In 1997, Japan's Supreme Court ruled it illegal for the shrine to receive state funding because it was, the justices determined, a religious institution. The mainstay of its financial support is veterans and families of the war dead. But 60 years after the end of the war, fewer and fewer of them remain alive.
The shrine now also relies on donations from ordinary visitors who come not to venerate the war dead, but to pray for good fortune and health. It has even resorted to an advertising campaign to get the young to visit. This may well be a harbinger that, in another generation, Yasukuni may be just another footnote in history.
Or, as Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong remarked in Tokyo this week, the shrine problem may be 'difficult to resolve overnight because deep emotions are involved... in 10 to 20 years' time, you'll have a new generation with different attitudes'. Then, he said, it will be possible to see things in their proper perspective.
Others, however, are less sanguine.
For example, Prof Minear took a longer view: 'Such issues tend to be very slow going away. Witness how the US is still torn over the Civil War, with differing monuments and memories in different areas of the country about 150 years later.'
Or as Prof Nelson added: 'As long as the Chinese leaders see political capital to be gained on the domestic front, they will react harshly to shrine visits.
'Ironically, opinion polls in Japan recently show that Chinese reactions are serving to heighten nationalism in Japan - which isn't in China's long-term interests.'
Then there is an an even longer view.
As Prof Samuels said: 'I don't think Yasukuni will ever disappear as a political hot potato. So long there is a nationalist right wing, Yasukuni will be its sacred ground.' |
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Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.-- Brillat-Savarin |
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ShanghaiUnderground
StreetBeater
Joined: July 15, 2004
Posts: 2413
Location: Shanghai
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| Posted:
May 28, 2005 - 04:10 PM |
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Good article. |
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"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." |
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Henry_Chinaski
Board Lord
Joined: Aug 16, 2003
Posts: 5025
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| Posted:
May 28, 2005 - 06:10 PM |
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Yeah.
Interesting to see the reason why Harbin 713, Nanjing, etc., where left out of the trials isn't it.
Sigh. Our american friends are like a toddler that stepped on shiat running through the house with his dirty shoes: leaving foodsteps everywhere. |
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