No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
While the role of Yasukuni Shrine in both commemorating and eulogizing Japan's wartime aggression is well known (and controversial), little to no attention has been paid to a similar role played by a number of Buddhist temples in contemporary Japan. For example, Kōa Kannon (Kannon for a Prosperous Asia) temple (興亜観音寺) located in Atami, a hot-springs resort south of Tokyo, is one such war-eulogizing Buddhist temple. This temple was initially established in the late 1930s at the initiative of Imperial Army General Matsui Iwane, supreme commander of the Japanese attack on Nanjing in December 1937, better known as the “Rape of Nanjing.”
In the postwar era, Kannon Bodhisattva, the Buddhist personification of compassion enshrined at Kōa Kannon, has gone on to become one of the main Buddhist figures employed throughout the country to comfort the “heroic spirits” (eirei) of all Japanese soldiers who died in the war while, at the same time, valorizing and eulogizing the war they fought in. In addition to Kannon-centric temples, the major Shingon sect-affiliated monastic complex on Mt. Kōya now plays a major role in the remembrance of the war dead, including an effort to transform convicted “war criminals” into national “martyrs” (junnan-sha), an effort backed by the current Japanese government.
1 For details, see Victoria, Zen at War.
2 Quoted in Victoria, Zen War Stories, pp. 186-7.
3 Quoted in Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity, p. 170.
4 Although forming a part of the Lotus Sutra, in Japan theKannon-gyō was treated as an independent text as early as the 8th century.
5 Hanayama Shinshō, Eien e no Michi - Waga Hachijū-nen no Shōgai, p. 310.
6 James Hartfield, Unpatriotic History of the Second World War, p. 392.
7 Quoted in Victoria, Zen War Stories, p. 188.
8 In Mahāyāna Buddhism a bodhisattva is a person who is able, or gualified, to enter Nirvana but delays doing in order to compassionately reach out to all suffering beings.
9 Ibid., p. 188.
10 The Threefold Lotus Sutra, trans. Kato Bunno. Chapter 25: “The All-Sidedness of the Bodhisattva Regarder of the Cries of the World.” (accessed 12 February 2015).
11 Quoted in Victoria, Zen War Stories, pp. 188-89.
12 It is interesting to note that just as in the case of Osama Bin Laden many year later, the US was concerned that the cremated remains of these executed war criminals might become a pilgrimage site for those Japanese who continued to believe in the justice of the war. Thus, nearly all of the cremated remains were dumped in the sea except for a small portion that had accidentally fallen out of their containers at the crematorium. It was this small portion that was enshrined at the Kōa Kannon temple.
13 Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, p. 611.
14 Available on the Web here (accessed 15, February 2015).
15 English text available here (accessed 9 June 2015).
16 Tanaka, “Reflections on the Commemoration of the Kamikaze Pilots in Pearl Harbor and Chiran,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 22, No. 2, June 8, 2015.
17 These numbers are taken from the temple's website (accessed 23 July 2015). The Imperial Army and Navy are known to have been fierce rivals. This may explain why even in death the kamikaze pilots from the two branches of the military had to have their own separate Kannon statues. In any event, two Kannon statues, side by side, make for an unusual configuration.
18 John Nelson, “From Battlefield to Atomic Bomb to the Pure Land of Paradise: Employing the Bodhisattva of Compassion to Calm Japan's Spirits of the Dead,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 1, no. 2, 2002, pp. 160-61. Quotations available on the Web at: http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/kannon.shtml#six
19 Chün-fang Yü, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara, p. 6.
20 Mark Mullins, “The Many Forms and Functions of Kannon in Japanese Religion” in Dharma World (April-June 2008) (accessed 17 June 2015).
21 See Alexander Studholme, The Origins of Om Manipadme Hum, pp. 52-54, 57.
22 See the “Bodaisatta-Shishō-bō” (Four Practices by which Bodhisattvas Urge Sentient Beings to Proceed toward the Buddha Way) chapter of the Shōbōgenzō.
23 The total number of Chinese victims at Nanjing remains highly contentious. The most reliable and widely agreed upon figures currently place the total within the broad range of 40,000 to 200,000 victims in the entire Nanjing Special Administrative District. See Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “Leftover Problems,” in The Nanjing Atrocity, 1937-38: Complicating the Picture, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 377-384. See also: James Leibold, “Picking at the Wound: Nanjing, 1937-38.” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies (November 2008) (accessed 15 February 2015).
You have
Access
Open access