Is Change Coming to the History Taught at the Yushukan Museum?

Bronze tori gate in the park leading to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. This bronze tori is supposed to be the largest in the world.

For those that don’t know, the Yasukuni Shrine has been a source of friction between Japan and their Asian neighbors, most notably Korea and China, in recent years. Both countries regularly condemned Japan when former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi would periodically visit the shrine because the shrine honors Japanese war dead including war criminals from World War II. Yasukuni enshrines the names of approximately 2.5 million Japanese who died during the Meiji era of Japanese history. Interestingly enough, something you won’t hear too many Koreans talk about, is that over 21,000 Koreans who fought for the Japanese Imperial military during World War II are also enshrined in Yasukuni. Think of it in the spirit of the Vietnam War Memorial, but instead of a wall a Shinto shrine is used. Korea and China believe the shrine should not include Japanese war criminals from World War II and Japan thinks otherwise.

Statue of Omura Masujiro who organized the Meiji military and promoted the modernization of the military in line with western standards. He was assassinated by discontented samurai in 1869, but his movement to modernize the military lived on.

Having been to the shrine myself, I don’t find the shrine insulting to China, Korea, or anyone else for that matter. There was no banners of General Tojo and other war criminals that the media would lead you to believe that this shrine is all about. In fact the shrine was actually pretty simplistic and underwhelming. The shrine was filled with old Japanese men, some wearing their old Imperial Japanese military hats, hanging out, bowing at the shrine, and then sitting down on the benches smoking their pipes, and maybe sharing memories of their time in the military with each other. These old guys seem hardly a threat to peace and stability in northeast Asia.

The reason the Koreans and the Chinese get so worked up by the Yasukuni issue is because politicians in each of those respective countries use the Yasukuni issue to deflect attention away from their own governmental short comings. George Will in this Washington Post article probably best explains the political dynamics behind both countries’ position on the Yasukuni issue:

Between that enshrinement and 1984, three prime ministers visited Yasukuni 20 times without eliciting protests from China. But both of Japan’s most important East Asian neighbors, China and South Korea, now have national identities partly derived from their experience as victims of Japan’s 1910-45 militarism. To a significant extent, such national identities are political choices .

Leftist ideology causes South Korea’s regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA. The choice by China’s regime is more interesting. Marxism is bankrupt and causes cognitive dissonance as China pursues economic growth by markedly un-Marxist means. So China’s regime, needing a new source of legitimacy, seeks it in memories of resistance to Japanese imperialism.

Actually, most of China’s resistance was by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, Mao’s enemies. And Mao, to whom there is a sort of secular shrine in Beijing, killed millions more Chinese than even Japan’s brutal occupiers did.

Another bronze tori gate before passing through a large wooden gate leading to the Yasukuni Shrine.

However, something a lot of people don’t realize is that their is more to the shrine than the shrine itself. Near the shrine is the Yushukan Museum that is supposed to chronicle Japan’s long military history. After visiting the museum and interpreting the displays from the minimal English language signs, I can safely say that the museum is something that I can see people getting worked up over. The museum’s view of history is vastly different from what is accepted as agreed upon history in the west. If the history being exhibited by the museum was so slanted in English, I can only imagine how bad the display’s signs in Japanese must be.

Most of the museum chronicles the various samurai wars during Japan’s feudal times and then into the Tokugawa era. I would have liked to read what was displayed for the Hideyoshi invasions of Korea between 1592 and 1598 but there was no English language signs available at the time. Really the vast majority of the museum is quite interesting until you get into the post Meiji Restoration years. For one the exhibit for the Russo-Japanese War claimed that the Japanese Army liberated the Korean peninsula from foreign rule and were greeted by an enthusiastic Korean populace as liberators. This is true to an extent because there was many people in Korea happy to see the end of the corrupt Chosun dynasty, however the exhibit made no mention of the brutal Japanese occupation that would follow the end of the Russo-Japanese War. The exhibit also maintained that the Japanese brought much industry and modernization to the peninsula. Once again true to extent, but it makes no reference to the fact that the modernization of the peninsula was implemented in order to increase areas such as rice production in order to ship the majority of Korean grown rice to Japan.

The last bronze tori gate before entering the Yasukuni Shrine.

The World War II exhibit was also quite provocative. According to the museum, World War II is known as the Asia Co-prosperity War where the Japanese single handedly liberated one Asian country after another from foreign colonial occupation and the Asian people were all happy to be liberated. No mention of the atrocities committed by the invading Japanese troops. Additionally the museum blames the US for the attack at Pearl Harbor. Since the US implemented a trade embargo on the Japanese, the militarists felt that an attack by the Americans against Japan would only naturally come next. The museum even alleges that the United States even had a plan to attack Japan in the works and would have been executed if Japan had not pre-empted the American attack by conducting the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The American President Franklin Roosevelt was committed to an attack on Japan as a way for the US to escape the Great Depression. One theme I have picked up on at the museum is that every attack the Japanese conducted was only executed because of foreign colonizers threatening Japan and its neighbors. Japan never wanted to colonize any country, they just wanted to liberate Asians from foreigners.

An elderly couple pay their respects at the Yasukuni Shrine.

This is of course nonsense. I posted before on this, but the Japanese felt modernization of Japan and the colonization of nearby countries were the best way to expand Japanese power and to compete against western rivals. The Japanese had no altruistic reasons of freeing oppressed Asians from European colonizers; it was simply about building Japanese power and influence and the attack on Pearl Harbor was where they over reached in spreading their power and influence. The problems with the museum are to numerous to list here, but the shrine organizers now have a plan to fix it.

Statue outside the Yushukan museum honoring the kamikaze pilots of World War II.

Ampontan has a great posting on the hiring of a former Japanese diplomat, Hisahiko Okazaki, who’s job it will be to reinterpret the historical displays at the Yushukan museum. Unfortunately it appears Mr. Okazaki is just reinterpreting the history in a different way that is equally as distorted as the prior historical displays. Mr. Okazaki in his new interpretation of history has found a new way to blame the US for the Japanese involvement in World War II. Instead of President Roosevelt provoking the war in order to escape the Great Depression, there is a new boogie man, the Hull Note:

The Hull Note of 1941 was, however, meant to close negotiations, so I did not raise any objection to a new quotation from the Stimson Diary, which said that all that was left after the issuance of the note would be to wait for Japan to attack.
It is a historical fact that Roosevelt induced Japan to carry out a first strike. The indication of this fact does not cast aspersions on Yasukuni Shrine’s intellectual integrity.
In his book Diplomacy, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote, Roosevelt must have been aware that there was no possibility that Japan would accept (the Hull Note). America’s participation in the war was the great achievement made through the extraordinary efforts of a great and courageous leader.

Fortunately Ampontan shoots down this claim rather quickly:

What Okazaki fails to mention is that the Hull Note was issued on November 26, 1941, fewer than two weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese strike force had already set sail the day before (American time, but also the 26th Japanese time). They could have been recalled, but the Hull Note made it certain that they wouldn’t be.

Mr. Okazaki must have taken some notes from the anti-American Korean nationalists that use the obscure Taft-Katsura Agreement to bash the United States with. You would think a country like Japan that is so advanced in areas like democracy, human rights, technology, business, etc. would be mature enough to settle this history dispute between them, China, and Korea instead of relying on changing distorted history with revised history. Every country has history that it would rather forget about. You wouldn’t believe how many different countries I’ve been to and people have asked me if Native-Americans still live in teepees and if we have any plans of wiping the rest of them out. Or how many times self righteous foreigners preach to me about the horrors of General Custer and why the US government should condemn him as a war criminal. As annoying as these claims are, not once has someone claimed to me that the US government is trying to cover up the injustices committed against Native-Americans.

Japanese World War II Zero in the Yushukan museum.

By interpreting history the way the Yushukan museum does, it keeps alive the perception that the Imperial Japanese of World War II is still what represents Japanese policy in regards to its Asian neighbors today. This perception is what allows the political demagogues in Korea and China to use anti-Japanese sentiment to deflect attention away from their own political short comings. I just don’t see how Japan will be able to seek a position on the United Nation’s Security Council if it can’t work out an agreement to solve this distorted history issue with its neighbors. If Japan cannot work out an agreement to this issue, how will Japan ever have international creditability to deal with much larger and important issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian issue? Until these issues are solved Japan will never have the credibility and influence in the world that it’s population and economic might should render it.

A steam engine that actually operated on the infamous Thai-Burma Railway made famous by the movie, A Bridge On the River Kwai.