Yasukuni Shrine

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.

In October 1978, the shrine's chief priest quietly added fourteen men convicted by the postwar International Military Tribunal for the Far East as Class A war criminals, including former prime minister Hideki Tojo, to the roll of those enshrined at Yasukuni, a decision made internally without public announcement and only reported in the press the following year.

Emperor Hirohito, who had visited the shrine regularly before 1978, is reported, based on the diary of a senior court official published decades later, to have stopped visiting once he learned of the enshrinement and never returned, a fact that has itself become part of the ongoing debate over the decision's propriety. Since the enshrinement became widely known, visits to Yasukuni by sitting Japanese prime ministers, particularly Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits between 2001 and 2006, have drawn sustained formal protest from China and South Korea, both of which read any official visit as honoring convicted war criminals and minimizing Japan's wartime conduct in their countries, while some Japanese visitors and officials frame the same visits as commemorating the war dead as a whole rather than endorsing the actions of any individual among them.

The adjacent Yushukan museum, which presents the shrine's own historical account of Japan's modern wars, has drawn separate and related criticism from historians for a narrative many read as minimizing Japanese aggression and wartime atrocities, a criticism the museum's supporters dispute; the shrine and museum together remain, more than a century after their founding, one of the clearest points of friction in Japan's religious commemoration of war and its unsettled relationship with its wartime neighbors.