* Thanks to John Breen and Gerald Figal for advice and information, and especially to Laura Hein for relentless critique of an earlier draft of this article.

[1] The quotation is from the Yasukuni Shrine website.

[2] See the editorials by the Yomiuri and the Asahi about the Yasukuni Shrine on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War, which framed an important debate on the shrine. While the “conservative” Yomiuri and the “liberal” Asahi have frequently taken different positions on such war and peace issues as the dispatch of Japan's Self-Defense Forces in support of the US war in Iraq, they shared a critical perspective on the question of Prime Minister visits to the shrine. The sources cited below illustrate the depth of the Yasukuni debate within Japanese society. Yasukuni Shrine, Nationalism and Japan's International Relations. See the joint editorial by the Yomiuri and Asahi calling for a national memorial to replace Yasukuni Shrine: “Yomiuri and Asahi Editors Call for a National Memorial to Replace Yasukuni” by Wakamiya Yoshibumi and Watanabe Tsuneo. The Yomiuri also published a twenty-two part series on “War Responsibility” that remains available at their website.

It was subsequently published as a book under the title Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor, available in Japanese, English and Chinese editions. For an astute assessment of the Yomiuri project see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Who is Responsible? The Yomiuri Project and the Enduring Legacy of the Asia-Pacific War,”

[3] Korean soldiers who were conscripted into the Japanese army were and remain enshrined in Yasukuni, as are indigenous people of Taiwan. However, with the loss of Japanese citizenship in 1952, surviving Korean and Taiwanese veterans were deprived of pensions. On US treatment and classification of Koreans in occupied Japan see Mark Caprio, “Resident aliens: forging the political status of Koreans in occupied Japan,” in Mark E. Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita, eds., Democracy in Occupied Japan. The U.S. occupation and Japanese politics and society (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 178-199; see also Yoshiko Nozaki, Hiromitsu Inokuchi and Kim Tae-young, Legal Categories, Demographic Change and Japan's Korean Residents in the Long Twentieth Century.

[4] The same is true of groups that challenge state power through armed struggle in the name of democracy, national independence, revolution, eternal salvation, or other goals, often en route to the creation of new nations. The state then possesses and invokes goals and the memory of the martyred, as its own. The People's Republic of China is a particularly interesting case. The state has long highlighted Chinese Communist-led resistance to Japan, both that of the army and of local guerrillas, as the central national myth, enshrined in museums and monuments. Yet there is no Chinese national cemetery which honors the war dead. See Kirk Denton's analysis of the shift in Chinese museum representation of the Anti-Japanese resistance from the narrative of heroic resistance to one highlighting atrocities and victimization in the post-Mao years. Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating the Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums.

[5] John Breen, “The dead and the living in the land of peace: a sociology of the Yasukuni shrine,” Mortality Vol. 9, No. 1, February 2004, pp. 76-93; John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan's Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

[6] Steve Rabson, Okinawan Perspectives on Japan's Imperial Institution; Kamata Satoshi, Shattering Jewels: 110,000 Okinawans Protest Japanese State Censorship of Compulsory Group Suicides. Rabson's analysis of Okinawan perspectives on the Battle and the emperor illuminates Okinawan understanding of Yasukuni enshrinement.

[7] Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 441; casualty figures, p. 35. Wikipedia offers a useful introduction to sources on the Battle and casualties.

[8] Unless otherwise noted, this section draws on the research of Gerald Figal. “Waging Peace on Okinawa,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Islands of Discontent. Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp. 65-98 and especially his “Bones of Contention: The Geopolitics of ‘Sacred Ground’ in Postwar Okinawa,” Diplomatic History, Vol 31, No. 1, January, 2007, pp. 81-109.

[9] Okinawa Izoku Rengo Kai, Ni ju go nen no ayumi (Naha, 1977), pp. 19-20, cited in Figal, “Bones of Contention,” p. 96.

[10] Figal cites USCAR, “JGLO no. II. Letter from Hisajiro Fujita, Chief Officer JGLO to Colonel William Wensboro, Acting Civil Administrator, USCAR,” 7 February 1964. OPA reference code U81100983B. See also USCAR, “Court Ranks and Decorations Will Be Posthumously Conferred on WWII War Dead,” 18 February 1964 and USCAR “Program for Conferment of Rank and Decorations to Ryukyuan War Dead,” 24 February 1965.

[11] Takemae, Inside GHQ, pp. 31-37; the photograph of two members of the Blood and Iron Corps, p. 34, shows boys in uniforms and boots who look barely twelve years old.

[12] John Breen observes (personal correspondence August 3, 2008) that the cenotaph, by its empty nature (emblematic of those whose remains are not there), suggests the possibility that the November 11 ceremony, celebrated since 1946 offers prayers for all the war dead of the two World Wars, and not just the British. The ceremony, however, featuring the Queen and other members of the royal family, together with representatives of the British government and military, suggests to me a strong national orientation.

[13] Breen, “The dead and the living,” pp. 83-84.

[14] See Herbert P. Bix, War Responsibility and Historical Memory: Hirohito's Apparition, Japan Focus. For an historical discussion of shrine politics and the war dead see Akiko Takenaka, Enshrinement Politics: War Dead and War Criminals at Yasukuni Shrine. The case in favor of Prime Ministerial visits to Yasukuni is forcefully argued by Nitta Hitoshi, “And Why Shouldn't the Prime Minister Worship at Yasukuni? A Personal View,” in John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan's Past, pp, 125-42. Cf. Breen's chapter in the same volume, “Yasukuni and the Loss of Historical Memory,” pp. 143-62.

[15] Kinue Tokudome, “The Bataan Death March and the 66-Year Struggle for Justice.”

[16] Herbert Bix, in a personal note of August 21, 2008, points out that in his 1975 visit, at a moment of fierce debate over state support for Yasukuni, Hirohito was greeted by protest banners. Following the collective enshrinement of war criminals, Hirohito feared being drawn into both domestic and international conflicts involving China and Korea, and perhaps the United States.

[17] Website

[18] Wakamiya Yoshibumi, “War-bereaved Families' Dilemma: thoughts on Japan's war,” Asahi Shimbun, July 8, 2005.

[19] On Chukiren's activities see David McNeill, A Foot Soldier in the War Against Forgetting Japanese Wartime Atrocities, and Linda Hoaglund, “Japanese Devils. The Perpetrators of Wartime Atrocities in China Tell Their Story in a New Film,” Persimmon, Winter 2003. On Japanese museums see Akiko Takenaka and Laura Hein, Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States.

[20] Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).

[21] Gavan McCormack, Client State. Japan in the American Embrace, espec. Chapters 5 and 6 offer useful discussion of neonationalist currents and their embrace by the Liberal Democratic Party.

[22] “The aesthetic construction of ethnic nationalism. War memorial museums in Korea and Japan,” in Gi-Wook Shin, Soon-Won Park, and Daqing Yang, eds., Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia. The Korean Experience (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 133-53.

[23] Reuters, May 4, 2008.

[24] BBC, “Protests Mount Over Koizumi's Shrine Visit,” August 14, 2001. The BBC report notes demonstrations in Hong Kong and the Philippines as well as in China and Korea.

[25] Yoshiko Nozaki and Mark Selden, “Historical Memory, International Conflict and Japanese Textbook Controversies,” in press, Contexts Vol 1 No. 1.

[26] Foundations of Cooperation: Imagining the Future of Sino-Japanese Relations, Japan Focus

[27] Client State. Japan in American Embrace (London: Verso, 2007). Laura Hein analyzes both wartime and postwar Japanese nationalism as cultural nationalism predicated on the uniqueness of the Japanese spirit—a course that led the nation to disaster in the Asia- Pacific War. “The Cultural Career of the Japanese Economy: developmental and cultural nationalisms in historical perspective,” Third World Quarterly, 29, 3 (2008), pp. 447-65.

[28] That transfer is contingent, however, on the expansion of the US Air Station at Henoko, which has been stalled by Okinawan resistance for a decade. See Koji Taira, Okinawan Environmentalists Put Robert Gates and DOD on Trial. The Dugong and the Fate of the Henoko Air Station.

[29] Vince Little, “As new equipment arrives in Tokyo, I Corps begins setting up shop at Camp Zama,” Northwest Guardian, July 3, 2008. I Corps headquarters remains at Fort Lewis, Washington.

[30] See the official US Pacific Command website for Valiant Shield.

[31] Eric Watkins, China, Japan agree on East China Sea E&P projects, Oil and Gas Journal, June 20, 2008; Andre Fesyun, “China, Japan agree on East China Sea gas deposits.”

[32] John Breen emphasizes important differences between Yasukuni Shrine and Britain's Cenotaph, France's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Arlington Cemetery: “Yasukuni alone is a religious institution, a sacred site with its own priesthood who perform rites for the dead, propitiating them as kami… The Western sites are relatively ‘unencumbered’ as sites of tribute, mourning and memory… Yasukuni venerates the dead as kami and in the ritual process of so doing it tends to the glorification of self-sacrifice and the idealization of Japan's imperial past.” “The dead and the living,” pp. 90-91. There are indeed distinctive differences in the ritual practice of Yasukuni, in the spiritual weight of the bonds linking shrine, emperor, the military and the nation. In the discussion that follows, I nevertheless emphasize common features in sites that link war, the sacrifice of dead soldiers, the state, and the national purpose, as well as the role of the priesthood in paying tribute to the fallen heroes of each nation. In 1959 the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery was established to commemorate the unknown war dead. Despite various proposals, attempts to shift some or all official memorialization of the military dead—including in some instances the military dead of all countries—from Yasukuni to Chidorigafuchi have failed.

[33] Andrew M. McGreevy, Arlington National Cemetery and Yasukuni Jinja: History, Memory, and the Sacred, Japan Focus. The shrine authorities have brushed aside demands by Korean, Taiwanese and Okinawan families to disenshrine their family members, insisting that Yasukuni alone decides who is to be enshrined. Taiwanese and Koreans were drafted in the final years of the war; Okinawan youth were mobilized for “volunteer corps” as nurses or fighters to support Japanese forces during the battle.

[34] “Japanese Racism, War, and the POW Experience,” in Mark Selden and Alvin So eds., War and State Terrorism. The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) pp. 119-42. David McNeill, Magnificent Obsession: Japan's Bone Man and the World War II Dead in the Pacific, Japan Focus. The British and the Americans chose different routes to honoring the dead in World War I, the British maintaining cemeteries in France which consecrated more than one million Britons who died in the war (approximately half of whom were unidentified or whose bodies had vanished). As a result, the Cenotaph in London became the primary British memorial. The American government, too, made efforts to keep the dead in cemeteries in France, Belgium and England, In the end, however, more than 70 percent were repatriated, with Congress financing round-trip tickets to Europe to visit the cemeteries for mothers of the deceased. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” and G. Kurt Piehler, “The War Dead and the Gold Star: American Commemoration of the First World War,” in John R. Gillis, ed., The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 150-67, 168-85.

[35] Japanese progressive scholars, who have written extensively and insightfully about the Yasukuni problem, rarely write comparatively about Japan's war nationalism, atrocities, or other aspects of US and Japanese wars. An important exception is Tanaka Toshiyuki, Sora no sensoshi (History of Air War) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2008); see also his Hidden Horrors. Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder: Westview, 1996).

[36] “The Goodness of Nations,” in the Spectre of Comparisons. Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (Verso: London, 1998), p. 368.

[37] We have noted one important difference in Okinawa's Cornerstone of Peace from other memorials: its commemoration of victims of all nations. There is another important difference. Exhibits in the Okinawan Prefectual Museum at Mabumi contain extensive information which reveals Japanese treatment of Okinawan civilians such as the military's impositin of compulsory mass suicide (shudan jiketsu). The contrast to both the Yushukan and the Smithsonian Museum's Enola Gay exhibit on the fiftieth Anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not be starker. See Gerald Figal, “Waging Peace on Okinawa,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Islands of Discontent. Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp. 65-98; Laura Hein and Mark Selden, “Commemoration and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living With the bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), pp.3-36.

[38] The US does prosecute a small fraction of its own war crimes, in each case singling out a soldier or soldiers who committed specific atrocities without examining the pattern of warfare of which it was a part, or pursuing the issue up the chain of command as required by the Nuremberg principles.

[39] Mark Selden, Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory and Reconciliation: World War II to Today.

[40] Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire. Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004) is the classic study of the US empire of bases. See especially pp. 151-86.

[41] On the historical periodization of East Asian region formation, see Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003) and Takeshi Hamashita, China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives (Linda Grove and Mark Selden, eds.) (Routledge: London, 2008).

[42] Peter J. Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).