Yasukuni Shrine
Yasukuni Shrine has been a hot issue between Korea and Japan. Since I arrived in Japan, I was asked about the Shrine so many times from so many persons from different background, also wanting to have different answers, I tried to control the level of my remarks on Yasukuni. The only reason was that I could not see it as it was. The opportunity came when I had a meeting with JBIC personnel in December.
I used one day-off of our seminar for the visit to Yasukuni Shrine. It looks much bigger than other shrines I often see in Fukuoka. Full of self-justifications of the War, stories of mythicized war heroes and shattered prides they want to keep for the next generation. I instantly noticed that the purpose of this shrine was not for preventing the repetition of the mistakes. It would contribute to preserving the causes of the mistake they had done and might make another ground for more miserable stories. Every war memorial hall in Japan has the story of the atomic bombed cities and their victims. It is the horrendous memories to all Japan but plays a role in preventing them from being mobilized by such an evil. At the hall called Yushyukan where the war related remains were displayed in chronological order I could not find anything about the victims of atomic bombed cities in Yasukuni Shrine. It seems to me that they may not want to show the miseries of the war done by the evil to the visitors. Socrates said to Glaucon in the Republic that ''We need not say yet whether war does good or harm, but only that we have discovered its origin in desires which are the most fruitful source of evils both to individuals and to states''.
I cannot tell clearly yet whether the War the Great Empire of Japan initiated was justifiable or not, it is true that it became great evils to Japan and neighboring countries. You cannot find any notion of this in the Shrine. Then what do THEY think about when they pay homage to it?
