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Popes, Bishops and War Criminals: Reflections on Catholics and Yasukuni in Post-War Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

John Breen
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Among the many groups for which the Yasukuni Shrine raises important questions is Japan's Christian population. In 1988, for example, the Japanese Supreme Court rejected the claim of Nakaya Yasuko, the Christian widow of an officer in Japan's Self Defense Force, who objected on religious grounds to her husband's enshrinement as a Shinto deity at a shrine affiliated with Yasukuni. Yet, as John Breen's survey of Catholic responses to Yasukuni indicates, relations between Christian authorities and the shrine are often complex. At one level, of course, is a basic theological question: to what extent can Catholics participate in rituals associated with non-Christian religious traditions? Interestingly, the Vatican (in a continuation of policies set down when Yasukuni was an institution of State Shinto) affirmed that Catholics may, in fact, participate in such rituals, insofar as those rites serve as expressions of patriotism. At the same time, however, Yasukuni has raised criticism from the Catholic Bishops in Japan, especially regarding the threat posed by government support of the shrine to the constitutional separation of religion and state power. Catholic politicians and intellectuals, meanwhile, run the gamut from outright apologetics for the shrine to advocacy for a more secular memorial. In his concluding comments, Breen carefully outlines the various issues at stake, and suggests that no simple solution is likely to address them all.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 11 , Special Issue S10: Course Reader No. 10. Religion in Modern Asia: Tradition, State and Society , January 2013 , pp. 231 - 248
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2013

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