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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar (http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9456-978082 4846787.aspx) (University of Hawaii Press and Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 2015) examines key moments in the one-and-a-half-century history of Yasukuni Shrine, beginning with its conceptualization in the late Tokugawa years and culminating in the political turmoil of the twenty-first century. I decided to write a book on the history of the Shrine for a seemingly counter-intuitive reason: there is too much attention on this monument-political attention, that is.
1 Kido Takayoshi, The Diary of Kido Takayoshi, vol. 1. (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1983), 184-5.
2 Ikeda Ryōhachi, “Yasukuni Jinja no sōsetsu.” Shinto shi kenkyū 15 (1967): 50-70. Archival documents associated with the construction of Tokyo Shōkonsha are available in Yasukuni Jinja hyakunenshi. Vol 1. (Tokyo: Yasukuni Jinja, 1983).
3 Recollection of Kamo Mizuho, the second head priest of Yasukuni Shrine. Cited in Murata Minejirō, Ōmura Masujirō sensei jiseki (Tokyo, 1919).
4 Diary entry dated June 26, 1869. Kido, 248-249.
5 Details of this first festival are included in Ikeda, 56-58.
6 Yūbin hōchi shinbun (monthly), June 1872, italics added. The event that took place in May was reported in June since this was the newspaper's first edition.
7 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
8 Ibid., 5-7.
9 Ibid., 70-73.
10 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
11 Representative scholarship on Yasukuni Shrine that includes a summary of its early history includes Murakami Shigeyoshi, Irei to shōkon: Yasukuni no shisō. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1974), Ōe Shinobu, Yasukuni Jinja. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984), and Akazawa Shirō, Yasukuni Jinja: Semegi au “senbotsusha tsuitō” no yukue (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005). A summary in English is available in Breen, “Introduction,” in John Breen ed. Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan's Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 1-21. Most recent works draw upon Murakami and Ōe for the shrine's early history.
12 Namihira Emiko, Nihonjin no shi no katachi: Dentō girei kara Yasukuni made (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 2004), 77-9.
13 Nishimura Akira, Sengo Nihon to sensō shisha irei: Shizume to furui no dainamizumu (Tokyo: Yūshisha, 2006), 56-7.
14 Tsuda Tsutomu, “Bakumatsu Chōshū han ni okeru shōkonsha no hassei,” Jinja Honchō Kyōgaku Kenkyūjo kiyō 7 (2002): 127-169.
15 Ōe, 120-122. See, also, Murakami.
16 Ōe references a work by ethnographer Sakurai Tokutarō, Reikon kan no keifu to make this point. Oe, 119-21.
17 For studies on the political use of the dead outside Japan, see for example, Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of PostCommunism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), and Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Border of the Balkans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Heonik Kwon, “The Korean Mass Graves,” The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, posted on August 1, 2008.
18 Nihon Shiseki Kyōkai, ed., Kōhon mori no shigeri. 2 vols. Reprint. (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku shuppankai, 1916, 1981).
19 Ichisaka Tarō, Bakumatsu eiketsu tachi no hīrō: Yasukuni zenshi (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2008), 59.
20 For a close analysis of the text, see Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Harry Harootunian, Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).
21 Kobayashi Kenzō, and Terunuma Yoshifumi, Shōkonsha seiritsu no kenkyū. Tokyo: Kinseisha, 1969), 40-43.
22 Ibid., 45-47.
23 Ibid., 48.
24 An excerpt of the relevant section of this imperial order is available in Kobayashi and Terunuma, 30-31.
25 Reimeisha was a shrine founded in 1823 for the purpose of funerals (Kobayashi and Terunuma, 55-6). For a detailed account of this memorial service, including names of attendees and the prayer offered during the ritual, see Katō Takahisa, “Shōkonsha no genryū,” Shintō- shi kenkyū 15 (1967), 9-27.
26 The men were later enshrined at Yasukuni around 1889. Kobayashi and Terunuma, 31.
27 Tsuda.
28 Shūtei bōchō kaitenshi 7. Cited in Ichisaka, 128-9.
29 Ōkawa Ichirō, “Yasukuni mondai no shin dōkō,” Rekishi hyōron 358 (1980), 77-84.
30 Tsuda, 144.
31 Murakami, 19-22.
32 Hata Ikuhiko, Yasukuni Jinja no saishin tachi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2010), 25.
33 For example, family members of medical students killed by the atomic bomb while studying at Nagasaki Medical University requested the enshrinement of their sons. Nishimura Akira, “Shi shite nao dōinchū no gakuto tachi: Hibaku Nagasaki Ikadai-sei no irei to Yasukui gōshi,” Nishi Nihon shūkyōgaku zasshi 25 (2003), 1-12. In the book, I also discuss the case of Okinawans, Koreans, and Taiwanese, who have demanded enshrinement.
34 I detail this process in chapter 5 of my book.
35 Hata.
36 Kobayashi and Terunuma, 34.
37 The designation Special Government Shrine was an early Meiji invention, elevating the status of shrines dedicated to persons who loyally served the emperor in one way or another.
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