A recent NHK documentary, Yasukuni Shrine: Secret Records — The Blank Postwar History, has drawn widespread attention. It has pried open the "black box" concerning the enshrinement of Class-A WWII war criminals at Yasukuni Shrine and torn off its ugly mask.
Despite the shrine's controversial history, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi once again made offerings and contributed ritual funds to Yasukuni Shrine during its Autumn Grand Festival, while multiple senior Liberal Democratic Party officials, cabinet members, and parliamentarians openly visited the shrine.
What unsavory dealings lie hidden inside this historical black box?
Founded in 1869, Yasukuni Shrine was originally named Tokyo Shokonsha — meaning a shrine to summon ghosts. It mainly enshrined soldiers killed in the civil wars during the Meiji Restoration who swore allegiance to the Emperor, and fallen troops in Japan's modern wars of aggression. Long under state administration, the shrine served as a propaganda tool and spiritual symbol through which the Japanese government instilled a militarist ideology into its society.
After Japan's defeat in WWII, Yasukuni Shrine was stripped of its political status of "state patronage" and ostensibly reclassified as a religious corporation. In reality, however, it never fully shed its symbolic role as a core institution of State Shinto — the indigenous religion of Japan — and was covertly steered by Japan's ministry of welfare.
As the NHK program revealed, a 1956 document on the enshrinement of war criminals proposed "reorganizing the enshrinement system in line with the standards applied before the end of the war".
The document set up a workflow in which local governments investigated candidates for enshrinement, the ministry of welfare drafted the enshrinement roster, and Yasukuni Shrine made the final decision. This has, in effect, restored the enshrinement framework of the militarist era. In other words, Yasukuni Shrine has remained under the control of the Japanese government, and this has formed the institutional foundation for the enshrinement of war criminals.
On that basis, the Japanese government and Yasukuni Shrine set in motion the process of enshrining Class-A war criminals.
In 1959, 346 Class-B and Class-C WWII war criminals were designated for enshrinement. In 1966, the ministry of welfare submitted a roster of Class-A war criminals to Yasukuni Shrine and asked it to rule on enshrinement. Constrained by fierce opposition from pacifist forces and public pressure, the shrine hesitated and did not make a decision.
In 1970, Kazuo Aoki, a senator who had served as minister of the "Greater East Asia" in the cabinet of Hideki Tojo — Japan's prime minister during WWII and himself a Class-A war criminal — argued to the shrine that to exclude only Class-A war criminals would amount to recognizing the verdicts of the Tokyo Trials.
Should the shrine refuse enshrinement under such circumstances, it would be held accountable. Right-wing groups, for their part, campaigned vigorously for legislation to restore Yasukuni Shrine's "state patronage" status. Against this backdrop, the shrine resolved that same year to enshrine Class-A war criminals, while saying it would "carefully consider the timing".
In 1978, Nagayoshi Matsudaira, a former Imperial Japanese Navy officer who strongly rejected the Tokyo Trial, became the chief priest of Yasukuni Shrine and pushed hard for the enshrinement of Class-A war criminals.
Tadashi Itagaki, the son of Class-A war criminal Seishiro Itagaki, rallied some bereaved families to fuel the drive. Manipulated by these right-wing forces, the shrine secretly enshrined 14 Class-A war criminals in October 1978, with the outside world only learning of it in 1979.
"We have resolved to enshrine Class-A war criminals including General Seishiro Itagaki and General Hideki Tojo," Matsudaira said when announcing the decision, according to leaked internal audio recordings. "Tojo will be enshrined in his capacity as Prime Minister. If the newspapers stir this up, the plan will fall through. Absolute secrecy must be maintained before disclosure."
The sequence of events makes plain that the Japanese government and Yasukuni Shrine colluded to push through the enshrinement of Class-A war criminals. They kept the decision concealed and covered up the act — indicating that they knew what they were doing was shameful.
At a deeper level, the enshrinement of Class-A war criminals has epitomized the long-running campaign by right-wing forces to distort and deny Japan's history of aggression, clear war criminals of culpability, and poison public understanding of history at home and abroad.
Japan has never fundamentally repudiated its militarist ideology, even though it layed low after WWII. It only minimally accepted the verdicts of the Tokyo Trial and signed a number of international instruments so it could return to the international community.
Right-wing factions actively peddle historical revisionism and reject Japan's history as a war perpetrator. They seek to rehabilitate and exonerate Class-A war criminals through enshrinement, and thereby pave the way for the outright denial of Japan's crimes of aggression.
The pain of the victims does not fade with time, nor do the perpetrators' crimes vanish through denial. The secret archives of Yasukuni Shrine stand as an indictment of Japanese militarism's falsification of wartime history and as a warning to the international community.
Whitewashing history, worshiping war criminals, and summoning the ghosts of the past amount to nothing but a self-deceptive delusion. Facing history squarely and offering sincere remorse is Japan's only path to regain trust among the nations of the world.
The author is an observer of international affairs.
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