Yasukuni was founded in 1869, in the first years of the Meiji era, initially as Shokonsha, "shrine to invite the spirits," to honor those who had died fighting for the imperial cause during the Boshin War that restored the emperor to nominal power; it was renamed Yasukuni, roughly "peaceful nation," in 1879 and grew over the following decades into the central Shinto institution for venerating Japan's war dead as a group.
Under State Shinto, the framework that treated Shinto as a civic institution of the pre-war Japanese state rather than a private religion, Yasukuni held a special status among shrines, administered directly by the army and navy ministries rather than the ordinary shrine bureaucracy, and enshrinement there became a formal act of state honoring anyone who died in imperial military service, expanded across the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War. The shrine's ritual practice reflects Shinto belief that the dead become kami, divine spirits, who are then venerated collectively rather than commemorated individually as at a war cemetery; Yasukuni holds no physical remains, functioning instead as a spiritual register naming those enshrined, now numbering close to two and a half million individuals of varied rank, background and, notably, several nationalities pressed into Japanese service from occupied Korea and Taiwan, some of whose descendants have separately petitioned, without success, to have their names removed.