Doshisha Days

I spent the weekend in Tokyo and the surrounding environs, my first trip to the capital in three years. I arrived on a night bus with a few other students from my seminar, and arrived well before we were scheduled to gather at the Diet Building for a tour of the Japanese legislature. After grabbing some breakfast in Shibuya, we made our way to the Yasukuni Shrine, north of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo to see what the controversy was all about. Yasukuni represents the crux of the problem that Japan has with its neighbors in Asia, particularly China and Korea. Commemorating the souls who gave their lives in combat for the Emperor from the Boshin War prior to the Meiji Restoration of 1868 until World War II, including all the war criminals who were convicted during the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Far East - all of whom were enshrined ostensibly because they were registered as being enshrined in a seperate ceremony in 1979.
The Shrine itself is relatively nondescript, particularly when compared to the Meiji Shrine in Harajuku or the Heian Shrine in Kyoto. The steel torii at the entrance of the shrine perhaps symbolizes the shrine's ties to the undercurrent of militarism that has been an integral part of Japanese history up until 1945. The students I were with paid their respects at the shrine, although none of them seemed to be closet Ishihara Shintaro supporters. I declined to participate, citing apprehension to take a side of such a controversial issue at the time. We then entered the museum attached to the shrine, which was where things got a bit more blatant, and that will be the topic of the next entry...