Yasukuni Shrine

I went to the Yasukuni Shrine today. It’s a shrine that was built about 140 years ago to honour the memory of soldiers that died in war. It’s a rather controversial site, as it includes those soldiers that were convicted of war crimes and it retains a nationalistic sentiment and a touch of bitterness that is not found in Hiroshima for example.

 For this reason, it’s become something of an attraction for the Japanese right-wing. Although they weren’t there when I visited, I’m told that there are often protestors there decrying the loss of Japanese culture.

Yasukuni Shrine is probably the least gaijin-friendly place that I have visited in Tokyo. I don’t mean that it’s overtly unfriendly, just that it’s not as welcoming to foreigners as most places. For example, there is very little signage in English.

It was pouring with rain and that made everything a little more tricky still - not so many photographs - but just to give you a flavour of Yasukuni, one English language flyer that I could obtain was a tribute to Dr Radha binod Pal, an Indian judge that sat on the Tokyo War Trials in 1946.

The war crimes tribunal was made up of eleven judges from various parts of the world. Dr Pal dissented with many of the decisions made during the trials and considered that the trials were more a matter of vengeance than justice. The flyer says in part, that the tribunal was “formalized vengeance sought with arrogance by the victorious Allied Powers”.

There is a memorial to Dr Pal at the shrine with the inscription “When Time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation, then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.”