For most of the year, the loudest sound in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine is the shuffle of footsteps to the hushed main hall. This week, however, as Japan marked a string of painful dates climaxing with the 70th anniversary of its surrender in the Second World War, it will erupt into a noisy demonstration of bruised national pride.
Yasukuni venerates Japan’s wartime leaders as well as over two million soldiers, and has long been one of Asia’s political lightning rods. Millions of people consider it a monument to Japan’s undigested militarism. But for Japanese nationalists, it is holy ground and a place to vent unrepentant views of the war.
Activists demand that Japan stop apologising for its war crimes. Politicians give speeches on why the status of the Emperor, reduced to a symbol after the war, must “be restored”. An adjacent museum says that far from brutalising much of Asia, Japan’s army was on a noble mission to liberate it from Western colonialism.
Such views are deeply at odds with those outside Japan, but they hold sway among a large number of Japan’s politicians. About a third of the Diet [parliament] and over half the 19-member cabinet of Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister, support them. All are members of the parliamentary league of Nippon Kaigi, Japan’s most powerful nationalist lobby. Mr Abe is its “special adviser”.
Men dressed in World War II Japanese military uniform at the Yasukuni Shrine during last year's 69th anniversary commemoration (Getty)
Nippon Kaigi has a shopping list of revisionist causes: applaud Japan’s wartime campaign, rebuild the armed forces, instil patriotism among students brainwashed by “left-wing” teachers, and revere the Emperor as he was worshipped in the good old days.
“They have trouble accepting the reality that Japan lost the war,” says Setsu Kobayashi, a leading constitutional scholar and former member of the group. Mr Kobayashi says Nippon Kaigi is run by people who want to bring back much of Japan’s pre-war constitution, before it was rewritten during the American occupation of 1945-52. Nippon Kaigi’s supporters say the liberal constitution has emasculated Japan. Many despise the pacifist clause that neutered Japan’s armed forces.
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The group has been compared to the American Tea Party movement in its back-room clout and attempt to restore lost national values. It is arguably more important. It has over 230 local chapters, 38,000 fee-paying members and a network that reaches deep into Japan’s government. Its last chairman was once chief justice of Japan’s Supreme Court.
A decade ago it collected 3.6 million signatures demanding it be made compulsory to teach children patriotism. Its members have consistently campaigned against anything that shows Japan’s wartime behaviour in a bad light.
In Mr Abe, they have a Prime Minister who is considered on of their own, says Tomomi Yamaguchi, an anthropologist at Montana State University. They want Mr Abe to visit Yasukuni shrine, though Mr Abe triggered a major diplomatic row when he last went in 2012.
Nippon Kaigi’s members also reject what they call Japan’s apology diplomacy and say the historical account of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre are exaggerated. Many of its supporters are involved in attempts to reverse admissions of war guilt.
Along with the Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership, another nationalist lobby group, Nippon Kaigi has notched up important victories in its quest to restore much of Japan’s pre-war political and social architecture. In 2007 the lobbyists won a national holiday, 29 April, for Japan’s controversial war-time monarch, Hirohito. Even opponents are impressed at how radical conservatives have transformed the landscape of Japanese politics. Nippon Kaigi members, however, are frustrated with the slow pace of change. One of their declared aims is to “build friendship with other nations”. One of the contradictions of their success is that they might achieve exactly the opposite.
