Yasukuni Shrine, a former national war memorial in which spirits of all Japanese military dead are commemorated, currently serves as the lightening rod for debates surrounding Japan’s legacies of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar offers a departure from the existing scholarship that treat the shrine as a political problem by offering a study of Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial. It examines the shrine’s role in waging war, promoting peace, honoring the dead, and especially in building a modern national identity. Through a careful ana ... More

Yasukuni Shrine, a former national war memorial in which spirits of all Japanese military dead are commemorated, currently serves as the lightening rod for debates surrounding Japan’s legacies of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar offers a departure from the existing scholarship that treat the shrine as a political problem by offering a study of Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial. It examines the shrine’s role in waging war, promoting peace, honoring the dead, and especially in building a modern national identity. Through a careful analysis of the shrine’s history from the inception of the idea of a collective war memorial in the mid-nineteenth century and through Japan’s wars of imperialism to the ongoing political problems in the present, this study examines the making and unmaking of a modern militaristic Japan through the lens of Yasukuni Shrine. It also considers the shrine within the context of memory studies—that is, in terms of the varying ways that contemporary Japanese remember the Asia-Pacific War. It is the first book-length scholarly analysis of Yasukuni Shrine in English.