yasukuni jinja

This shrine was one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in Japan!!! I really wish my dad was here, he’d get a huge kick out of it. This fascinating shrine was first created in 1869, during the Meiji era. This is about the time that the US (courtesy of Matthew Perry) landed in Japan. Up until that time, Japan had been in voluntary isolation from most of the world for quite some time. There was a big conflict during the Meiji Restoration that led to this shrine for Japanese war heroes. There are over 2,460,000 people, mostly soldiers, enshrined here as Shinto gods. This is a very controversial shrine because there are soldiers from the Russia-Japan and China-Japan wars, and WWII. There are at least 14 Class A War Criminals enshrined here, and many big political figures in Japan visit here annually. It is also widely regarded outside of Japan to be a very biased, revisionist retelling of the last 130 years of war history. There is a big right-wing presence here, but apparently they don’t really have much control over the running of the shrine. It is a privately funded religious shrine though, not a government funded one. There are usually these big black vans outside of it that blast right-wing nationalist propaganda through a loudspeaker. These vans, SUVs and buses also drive past my school on a pretty regular basis blasting fascist propaganda, sometimes it sounds like Wagner opera.. very Nazi-ish… but they are non-violent and generally regarded as nutjobs.

I got to the shrine pretty late, so I didn’t have time to survey the grounds entirely… I went into the museum, which was really interesting. In the beginning theres a lot of cool Samurai swords and uniforms, then it just gets into the more recent wars, up to WWII. Most of the captions were in Japanese, except for these time lines explaining their view of the course of these wars. The whole museum only dealt with the military events, there was only one sentence (in English at least) mentioning Pearl Harbor, and no mention of the Atomic bomb. All the captions for the various uniforms, will and testaments and artifacts are in Japanese. I don’t remember seeing very much about the Japanese actions in Okinawa during the second World War as well, other than the mention of people “valiantly” committing suicide for the cause. Definately no mentions of WWII Comfort Women either… I’m definately going back again, earlier in the day, so I can go slower and explore the whole compound. Here are some pictures though:

This is a REAL Zero Fighter (Model 52.. the second model)

By the way, these were built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the same people who make cars and electronics. Pretty odd, but history has shown that war is pretty profitable for some industries (list unnamed defense contractors and manufacturers here)

I thought this was pretty cool to see in person, there were some other planes too, but you couldnt take photos. I couldn’t imagine flying one of these, or an American plane.. They are pretty small, and seem pretty sketchy.

that tree is blocking the ominous clouds

this is a 150 year old bronze cannon

dragon fish?

yushukan museum

this is the shrine

this is a lion… someone told me that when the Buddhist Vedas were brought from India to China to Japan… no one in Japan actually knew what a lion looked like, they had just read it in the Vedas and kind of make one up. I don’t know if the lion is in the Shinto religion, or its just one of those Buddhist/Shinto mixes…

Anyways, it was very interesting to see this place, I definately want to go back… particularly when its cherry blossom season. There are tons of cherry blossoms here. I felt kind of weird about the attitude towards their wars here, but every country is going to skew the experience to make themselves look a little better.

Just to make you feel a little better, heres a picture of a baby polar bear that i didnt take