No right-wing or militant groups spotted at the Tokyo shrine to Japan’s war dead on a pleasant Sunday afternoon
By SCOTT FOSTER
TOKYO – Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated on Friday (July 8). On Sunday, I went to Yasukuni Jinja to pay my respects and to see who else might be there. Yasukuni is the shrine founded by Emperor Meiji in 1869 to commemorate Japan’s war dead.
Among those enshrined at Yasukuni are wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo and others convicted of war crimes by the International Tribunal for the Far East after World War II.
Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who served in Tojo’s cabinet and became prime minister himself in 1957, was imprisoned for three years as a suspected war criminal, but was not put on trial. In 1960, Kishi was knifed six times by a would-be assassin but survived.
Abe visited and made offerings at Yasukuni both as prime minister and as a private citizen. He was strongly – notoriously, in the view of Koreans, Chinese and pacifists – identified with Yasukuni and with a lack of contrition for the wars and colonialism of the Japanese Empire.
The grounds were not crowded when I arrived and the visitors were ordinary people of all ages, most wearing the informal clothes they would usually wear on a summer weekend. Security – a few shrine guards and police, a police car passing now and then – was visible, but nothing out of the ordinary.
If any right-wing or militarist groups had visited, they must have done so on Saturday or at some other time when I was not there. I didn’t spot any.
I walked up from Kudanshita station on the Tokyo Metro and entered the shrine through the enormous steel torii gate at the top of the slope. A torii symbolizes the transition from the ordinary to the sacred at the entrance of a Shinto shrine. Shinto (the Way of the Gods) is the indigenous religion of Japan. This torii also creates an impression of great power.
Some distance ahead is the statue of Masajiro Omura, the student of Western medicine, military technology and tactics who became vice-minister of war under Emperor Meiji. Omura was attacked and killed by reactionary samurai who opposed the Westernization of Japan.
I walked on between walls of yellow lanterns being assembled for the Mitama Matsuri, a popular festival marking O-bon that’s scheduled to be held from July 13 to 16. O-bon honors the spirits of dead ancestors, who are believed to return to visit their relatives during the festival.
The Mitama Matsuri features 30,000 lanterns and attracted about 300,000 visitors each year before Covid. If you would like to have your name lit up on a lantern, apply in advance at the shrine office next year. Prices are currently 3,000 yen (US$22) for a small lantern and 12,000 yen for a large lantern.
On the left, under a wall of lanterns, I saw a man dressed in black. He was putting up a memorial to Abe – a photo and some flowers on a small white table with a banner behind it reading “Prime Minister of the Beautiful Country, Last Visit to Pray at Yasukuni Shrine.”
The man said his name was Taniguchi. I asked him if it was his own personal memorial. He said yes, and that Abe had been the last prime minister to visit Yasukuni, implying by his tone of voice that this was regrettable.
Abe visited Yasukuni in December 2013, causing such an outrage in Korea and China that he never did it again in an official capacity. He visited as a private citizen in September and October 2020, soon after he stepped down as prime minister, and again on August 15, 2021.
“Toward a Beautiful Country” was one of Abe’s slogans and the title of a book he wrote about his life in politics, his philosophy and his vision for society. The book was published in 2006, just before he was elected Prime Minister for the first time.
One after another, people stopped at the memorial to bow and take photos with their cell phones.
Taniguchi is a musician who plays his ocarina at Yasukuni on Sunday afternoons. He played a Japanese folk song, Furusato, and Stephen Foster’s American song Swanee River for me. He is an excellent player with a good sense of melody and a nice tone.
He asked where I was from. When I said America, he told me that he had recently been to Okinawa, where there are lots of Americans. The water there is beautiful, he said, “emerald green, cobalt blue.”
I said yes, it is, and told him that my father had also visited Okinawa, where he lost his right arm to a hand grenade; that my Japanese hosts from Keio University had brought me to Yasukuni on my first visit to Japan in 1976; that I had been very impressed; and that it has been one of my favorite places ever since.
Taniguchi said the war is still in people’s memories. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, almost 77 years ago.
I said I would come again to hear him play.
I walked on to the shrine, where people line up to pray. Walk up the steps, toss a coin in the box, bow twice, clap twice, pray silently, bow once more, then make room for the next person in line.
On my way out, I heard traditional Japanese music off to the left. Twenty or thirty people, most of them elderly, were sitting on folding chairs under an awning, watching and listening to singers accompanied by a bamboo flute player on a covered wooden stage with a painting of a pine tree on the wall behind.
When I arrived, two women were getting ready to sing Ama-no-Hara (Field of Heaven).
Asia Times