Deep division continues on how to mourn Japan’s war dead

August 20, 2009

Deep division continues on how to mourn Japan’s war dead


Japanese have two utterly different war-related facilities to visit on Aug. 15, the anniversary of the end of the last war. They are Yasukuni Shrine, the 140-year-old Shinto shrine, and the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, both located in Tokyo’s Kudan area, just north of the Emperor’s Palace. The shrine was run by the government until 1945 when Japan surrendered to the Allied Nations. Yasukuni attracts not only World War II veterans and bereaved families but also those belonging to nationalist and right-wing groups on the war anniversary every year. Nationalists were handing out fliers and soliciting signatures for their campaigns at various places around the shrine last week. The shrine was also surrounded by dozens of large vehicles with loudspeakers mobilized by right-wing groups, and hundreds of police officers were on the alert in the area. Many media people, Japanese and foreign, were also on hand to see what should happen among people at the shrine.
The shrine, dedicated to Japan's war dead since the Meiji Era, has been the pivot of decades-long debates on how Japan should mourn those who lost their lives in the last war. The situation has become more complex since Yasukuni enshrined in the late 1970s the 14 wartime leaders, including former Premier Hideki Tojo, who were tried as class-A war criminals in the Far East Military Tribunal. Japan’s Asian neighbors, such as China, have criticized Japanese political leaders’ official visits to Yasukuni as attempts to justify Japan’s wartime acts.
One foreign journalist, accompanied by an interpreter, was having a chat with a nationalist group member, who angrily asked him, “Do you know that Taiwanese guys made a fuss at this shrine the other day, at the place where the souls of Japanese soldiers rest?”
A group of former Navy pilots was posing for pictures beside the main building of the shrine after paying homage to their dead comrades. In their 80s, they were wearing a blue shirt with an anchor-and-cherry blossom emblem for their former squadron. They were trained at the Yokaren Imperial Navy school toward the end of the war. “The war came to an end when we were waiting for an order at the Atsugi airfield (southwest of Tokyo). We had already been unable to fly,” one member told the author.
The Chidorigafuchi Cemetery, a nonreligious facility built in 1959, attracted people hoping to mourn the war dead in a calm atmosphere. The facility is dedicated to about 2.4 million unknown Japanese soldiers and civilians who lost their lives outside of Japan in the war.

When I go on the sea, I see soaked bodies floating.
When I go on the hills, I see grass-covered bodies lying.
I am ready to die before the Emperor. I will never look back.
(A personal translation)

This is a part of a long poem composed by Otomo Yakamochi, an eighth century poet who contributed to compiling Japan’s oldest waka poem anthology Manyoshu. The passage became a song with a solemn, beautiful melody written by a Tokyo Music School professor. The song was played at every occasion when Japanese soldiers were sent to the front in the Pacific war.
At Chidorigafuchi, an old man was looking at a monument along a path leading to the cemetery. “Many Japanese soldiers died on foreign soil, at battlefields far from Japan. They did not die because of fighting. They died because of the lack of supplies. Japan really went on a reckless war,” he whispered.
Political party leaders have taken to the streets for campaigns toward the Aug. 30 election of the House of Representatives. The main opposition Democratic Party of Japan stands a good chance of dislocating the Liberal Democratic Party as the ruling party. The DPJ has made clear that it will propose building a new nonreligious national facility dedicated to the victims of World War II, abiding by the constitutional division of government and religion. The use of public money by a local government for offerings to Yasukuni Shrine was ruled unconstitutional by Japan's top court in 1997. Yasukuni is also faced with requests from Buddhist and Christian bereaved families and bereaved families of "Japanese soldiers" from Korea and Taiwan as former Japanese colonies that the names of their kins be removed from the shrine. Meanwhile, there are moves in the right-wing camp to rewrite Japan’s war-related history from a nationalist point of view. Calls are also growing for Japan to review its defense-oriented military capability amid an increasing nuclear threat from North Korea.
It is far from certain if and when Japan will be able to overcome the longstanding deep rift over the remnants of the last war.