Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. ix, 278 pp. (Illustrations.) US$57.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-4678-7.
In present day East Asia, there are few issues as contentious as the past, and there are few places that are the subject of as much controversy as the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. In this masterful and empirically rich study, Akiko Takenaka performs an invaluable service in providing an almost panoramic history of the origins of the Yasukuni Shrine and its evolution since its founding in 1869.
The book begins by tracing the origins of the shrine to medieval Japanese beliefs in the need to appease the spirits of the dead (goryō shinkō) by creating special shrines (Shōkonsha) and conducting placatory rituals. Originally created to commemorate the spirits of the soldiers who fell in the Boshin War at the start of the Meiji Restoration, Yasukuni quickly became a central site where the Japanese state sought to shape the official historical narrative and instill the spirit of patriotic sacrifice in the broader citizenry. Takenaka calls this exercise in transcendental authoritarianism “mobilizing death” in the service of the state.
The Shrine also became one of Tokyo’s main entertainment districts, replete with shops, curio shows, and regular festivals and horse races on temple grounds. Later, these more traditional forms of diversion were expanded with the construction of a war museum that included full-scale battlefield dioramas that allowed eager visitors to vicariously experience the thrill of the Empire’s victories overseas. In this way, emotions of joy and excitement, as well as grief and sorrow, were molded by the state to serve national interests.
Takenaka gives an informative description of how after 1945 the Shrine continued to work closely with the government in the postwar era even after it became a privately run entity. She chronicles how, together with the Ministry of Health and Welfare, as well as the immensely influential Japan Association for the Bereaved Families of the War Dead (the Nihon Izokukai), the Shrine officials continued to draw up lists of who would be commemorated at the shrine and who would not. In the process, the Shrine became the center of a complex battle over how to remember modern Japanese history. In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Takenaka argues that the political saliency of the Shrine increased in the 1970s and 80s not only because of the changing international political environment, but because for the generations of Japanese who had no direct experience of the war the Shrine became a potential resource for coming to terms with the inherited trauma of the war (167).
Takenaka demonstrates that while the state has tremendous resources in shaping memory, even during the war its control was far from absolute and its version of history often contested. She movingly describes wartime scenes of grieving parents challenging the authority of the state, screaming at military officers during enshrinement ceremonies to give them their sons back and accusing them of being murderers. These counter narratives surrounding the shrine intensified in the post-war period, triggering fierce legal and political battles. To her credit, Takenaka resists a simplistic left-wing interpretation of the Shrine as simply a tool of state propaganda. Even while she clearly is on the progressive (i.e., critical) side of the debate over the Shrine, Takenaka also recognizes that for many ordinary Japanese the Shrine serves a genuine, intensely felt need for mourning and honoring departed friends and family members.
For all its virtues, the volume does suffer from some shortcomings. Those looking for a comprehensive analysis of the politics surrounding the shrine will be left disappointed. For instance, there is virtually no mention of how the issue of defense and national security became intertwined with the debate over religion and the Yasukuni Shrine in postwar Japan. Likewise, although she draws heavily on secondary literature on the Shrine, Takenaka does not provide a history of the intellectual debate over the Shrine. Instead, this is first and last, a social history of the Shrine. The book does an excellent job of providing insight on the personal experiences of ordinary Japanese as they try to come to terms with the mute reality of the death of loved ones, but Takenaka tends to overemphasize the role of cultural forces in shaping Japanese memory of the past. It may well be that by honoring the war dead as eirei—the spirits of the heroic dead—many in Japan evade the troubling question of how those same soldiers may have been perpetrators as well as victims. And by leaving the political and intellectual contexts largely unexamined, Takenaka skips over the underlying motives for why such a historical narrative is propagated in the first place.
The volume also suffers from occasional lapses into academic jargon, with Adorno, Halbwachs, and La Capra being invoked without much value added to the analysis. While in some cases—as when she draws on the literatures on trauma and Holocaust studies—these excurses offer new insights, in other cases they wind up producing tangles of tortured prose that obscure more than they illuminate.
These quibbles aside, Akiko Takenaka has produced an extremely useful volume that joins the ranks of a growing body of high-quality literature on the politics of memory in postwar Japan. It represents a welcome addition to such landmark studies as Franziska Seraphim’s War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Harvard, 2005), Yoshikuni Igarashi’s Bodies of Memory (Princeton, 2000), James J. Orr’s The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), as well as James Breen’s edited volume Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (Oxford, 2008). It will be of considerable value, not only to course instructors looking for a comprehensive history of the Shrine, but also to experts in the field.
Thomas U. Berger
Boston University, Boston, USA
pp. 591-593