The Problem with Yasukuni

[Update: Some of this post’s links to the pictures of the displays and plaques at Yasukuni have gone dead. That’s unfortunate. This and this should give you some of the flavor.]

You may be one of those who wonder what the big deal is all about. So was I, once. Japan, after all, has become a good citizen in Asia, so why dwell on the past? Why the fury, even today? Then I visited the place myself, tacking on some leave after a hard-fought case at Camp Zama (or maybe it was the first one in Okinawa, but definitely not the one in Kure).

The problem, in a word, is distortion. It is immediately obvious to the visitor that yasukuni is Japanese for “we’ll win next time.” Just beneath the surface of Japanese society lurks a deep sense of victimhood that remembers its own not inconsiderable suffering, mostly from U.S. bombing, but really has no idea what suffering it inflicted on other countries, or why those bombers ended up over their cities. In Japan, one commonly sees manga devoted to alternate-reality stories of Japan winning the war, if only . . . . Contrast this with Germany, where the location of every evil deed seems to be marked with a plaque or memorial. At a time when Japan has legitimate defense reasons to rearm, what the world fears is that a rearmed Japan doesn’t have the sense of its own culpability to have learned its moral lessons.

Being the stingy type, I didn’t have a digital camera, but this superb photoblog of Japan contains many of the exhibits that leave a deep impression, to say the least. You can see some the plaques relating the history of the “Greater East Asia War” from the Yasukuni perspective here, here, and here.

The pictures here, here, here, here, and here could fairly be described as glorifying Japanese militarism, particularly in the context of the text on the plaques. The photoblogger, a German, posted this insightful caption for the picture at lower right: “I’m imagining a bronze statue of a Wehrmacht-soldier on the Russian front at a museum in Berlin.”

It’s entirely possible to remember people who died for their country without injecting ideology into the remembrance. Yasukuni makes no such effort. It brazenly hawks the statist ideology and glorification of martyrdom that shoveled them into the furnace, along with millions of innocents. There isn’t a smidgen of introspection to be seen.

But isn’t Yasukuni an exceptional case, being the right-wing bastion that it is? I wish it was. Japanese nationalist victimhood also comes in a lefty flavor, which you can find at the Peace Museum at Hiroshima (pictures here). The mayor of Hiroshima commemorates the anniversary of the a-bombing annually by sending out a sanctimonious letter of protest to the POTUS (among others) demanding immediate unilateral nuclear disarmament. For the record, I do not denigrate the suffering of Japanese civilians who died in the war, and I certainly have questions of my own about whether it was necessary, even in those days of imprecise bombing, to deliberately target civilian populations.

My point is merely this–if you’re going to call the place a “peace museum” and use historical displays to promote peace through education, then by all means tell the complete truth about the history. An important part of that is giving your visitors some historical perspective about how the peace was disturbed in the first place. Among the things that I did not see discussed at the Peace Museum during either of my visits there: Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, the “comfort women,” the Bataan Death March, or the widespread Japanese use of Korean slave labor. One could easily leave the Hiroshima Peace Museum believing that the war began on the morning of August 6, 1945.

The problem with Yasukuni–and with broader Japanese society–goes much further that who is buried there; it’s also about the history that it has deliberately tried to bury.