This is the first extensive English-language study of Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial. It explores the controversial shrine’s role in waging war, promoting peace, honoring the dead, and, in particular, building Japan’s modern national identity. It traces Yasukuni’s history from its conceptualization in the final years of the Tokugawa period and Japan’s wars of imperialism to the present. Author Akiko Takenaka departs from existing scholarship on Yasukuni by considering various themes important to the study of war and its legacies through a chronological and thematic survey of the shrine, emphasizing the spatial practices that took place both at the shrine and at regional sites associated with it over the last 150 years. Rather than treat Yasukuni as a single, unchanging ideological entity, she takes into account the social and political milieu, maps out gradual transformations in both its events and rituals, and explicates the ideas that the shrine symbolizes. Takenaka illuminates the ways the shrine’s spaces were used during wartime, most notably in her reconstructions, based on primary sources, of visits by war-bereaved military families to the shrine during the Asia-Pacific War. She also traces important episodes in Yasukuni’s postwar history, including the filing of lawsuits against the shrine and recent attempts to reinvent it for the twenty-first century. Through a careful analysis of the shrine’s history over one and a half centuries, her work views the making and unmaking of a modern militaristic Japan through the lens of Yasukuni Shrine. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar is a skilled and innovative examination of modern and contemporary Japan’s engagement with the critical issues of war, empire, and memory. It will be of particular interest to readers of Japanese history and culture as well as those who follow current affairs and foreign relations in East Asia. Its discussion of spatial practices in the life of monuments and the political use of images, media, and museum exhibits will find a welcome audience among those engaged in memory, visual culture, and media studies.

Although religious fundamentalism is often thought to be confined to monotheistic “religions of the book,” this study examines the emergence of a fundamentalism rooted in the Shinto tradition and considers its role in shaping postwar Japanese nationalism and politics. Over the past half-century, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the National Association of Shrines (NAS) have been engaged in collaborative efforts to “recover” or “restore” what was destroyed by the process of imperialist secularization during the Allied Occupation of Japan. Since the disaster years of 1995 and 2011, LDP Diet members and prime ministers have increased their support for a political agenda that aims to revive patriotic education, renationalize Yasukuni Shrine, and revise the constitution. The contested nature of this agenda is evident in the critical responses of religious leaders and public intellectuals, and in their efforts to preserve the postwar gains in democratic institutions and prevent the erosion of individual rights. This timely treatment critically engages the contemporary debates surrounding secularization in light of postwar developments in Japanese religions and sheds new light on the role religion continues to play in the public sphere.

"... this research are base upon both an in depth analysis of the available literature as well as extensive interviews with diplomats from China, Korea, and Australia as well as with military officers, governmnent officials, professors of international relations from each of the countries involved, as well as with Shinto Priests, including the Vice-Chief Priest of Yasukuni Shrine" -- p. i

本书介绍了靖国神社中供奉的14名甲级战犯对中国人民和亚洲许多国家人民犯下的罪行,以使世人明了中国为什么反对日本领导人参拜靖国神社。

The problem of memory in China, Japan and Korea involves a surfeit rather than a deficit of memory, and the consequence of this excess is negative: unforgettable traumas prevent nations from coming to terms with the problems of the present. These compelling essays enrich Western scholarship by applying to it insights derived from Asian settings.

What role does the political survival of prime ministers play in Japan’s relations with China over the Yasukuni issue? Three Japanese prime ministers, including Nakasone Yasuhiro, Hashimoto Ryutaro and Abe Shinzo, complied with China’s demands and stopped visiting the controversial Shrine in 1986, 1997 and 2007, respectively. By contrast, the Yasukuni controversy intensified between 2001 and 2006 when a popular Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro was determined to pay regular homage to the Yasukuni Shrine annually. Prime Minister Abe, who previously demonstrated restraint over the issue in his first term between 2006 and 2007, visited the Yasukuni unexpectedly in 2013 but not in 2014 or 2015. To explain this variation, this book presents an alternative interpretation of Japan’s official responses toward China’s pressure over the Yasukuni issue between 1985 and 2015 by applying a political survival approach that highlights the domestic political legitimacy of the Japanese prime minister or the ruling party. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of Sino-Japanese relations, Japan’s foreign policy and international relations.