Yasukuni, the Numbers, and What Counts as Adherence

Yasukuni Shrine was founded in 1869 to enshrine those who died in the service of the emperor, and it is the most contested religious site in East Asia. In October 1978 its chief priest secretly enshrined fourteen men convicted as Class A war criminals. No emperor has visited since. Prime ministerial visits (Nakasone in 1985, Koizumi annually from 2001 to 2006, Abe in December 2013), have each produced protests from China and South Korea and, in the last case, from the United States as well. The adjoining museum presents an account of the war that Japanese as well as foreign historians dispute.

The adherent figures require care, because two incompatible measures circulate. The government's religious yearbook reports Shinto adherents in the order of a hundred million, because shrines report parish catchments and those catchments are geographical. Surveys asking people whether they are Shintoists return small single-digit percentages. Neither figure is wrong; they measure different things, and presenting either alone misleads. The underlying reality is that most Japanese people take part in shrine practice (the new year visit, the shrine visit for a child, the local festival), and most would not call themselves religious, and both of those statements are true at once.

That is the fact about Shinto that the vocabulary of religious adherence handles worst. It is not a body one joins, and it does not ask for belief. It asks for participation, and it gets it from people who would deny being adherents of anything.