The Yasukuni Shrine
Fly to Tokyo and take a taxi.
The shrine is highly political, a must-see for all Japanese Prime Ministers. It is also a must-see mine of disinformation and propaganda. Nowadays, movies, novels and comics all celebrate the heroism of the Japanese army during the “War of Self-Defense,” so Prime Ministers must too.
Built in 1869 as part of a nationalistic project of creating a religion around the Emperor's family, the shrine soon filled up with tributes. By the end of WWII, it commemorated the sacrifice of more than two and a half million Japanese who had laid down their lives for this great deity. Wars included those on China, Korea, Taiwan, and of course, the rival Pacific power, the United States.
And the shrine has a special revisionist educational role, as it sidesteps the fact that the Japanese committed many terrible war crimes in the process of imperialist wars on its unfortunate neighbors. Instead it features a museum, which explains the “Pacific War” as evidence of Japan's commitment to freeing countries like Korea and China from the Western powers who were (and this at least is true) then occupying and brutalizing them. One exhibit “demonstrates” how the US government engineered Pearl Harbor as a means to stimulate the US economy. That, it explains “made a complete recovery once the Americans entered the war” Another explains that the so-called “Rape of Nanjing” in which some 200,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops, was the fault of the Chinese commanders, and notes piously that, thanks to the Japanese, later “inside the city, residents were once again able to live their lives in peace.”
The shrine has no architectural or aesthetic merits, being very large, and reminiscent of a parking garage. Nor is it useful if you want to understand why Japan pays billions of dollars out in cultural and economic assistance to neighbors who despise them.
Immediately after the war, the Allies held war crime trials in Tokyo, which resulted in the execution of some Japanese warmongers, responsible not only for the war, but for massacres of civilians, slave factories and compulsory military brothels. The list included the then Prime Minister. These are all buried at the shine, and subsequent leaders come to lay wreaths in their memory.
By 1948 however, China and Russia had become the new enemy for the US, and attempts to root out war criminals were abandoned. (Even before that, however, scientists and doctors including those responsible for testing poisons on prisoners of war had been quietly poached for “research centers” in the US.)
Since people like Nobusuke Kiishi, who themselves had barely escaped hanging, were a few years later re-installed as Prime Minister, it should not be entirely surprising to visitors that those who were executed should these days be officially commemorated at the shrine as war heroes.
The Museum at Hiroshima offers a chilling portrait of events on August 6, 1945, at the peak of the morning rush hour, when, approximately 1,900 feet (600 meters) above the Shima Hospital at the center of Hiroshima the first atom bomb exploded. Within sixty seconds a giant fireball had destroyed 100,000 people.
All trips in Japan are a little dangerous due to the vast number of people living in such a confined space. This is especially true of Tokyo, which explains both why one shrine can have so many people buried in it, and why a highly cultured and sociable people every so often launch particularly nasty wars against their neighbors.
