The "Mothers of Yasukuni" and the State Appropriation of Hope in Japan at War

• In Event: Crafting Affirmation from "Negation and Despair" in Japan's Lost War

Abstract

How to mourn the death of a loved one lost in war? How can the bereaved come to terms with their pain? How can families and friends grasp for what purpose a Japanese died in a conflict that seemed without end? Such questions and myriad other doubts and regrets human beings feel in times of loss were not an individual privilege in wartime Japan, but were instead enmeshed in a massive officially constructed and managed array of death rituals, ceremonial offerings, and commemorations that established how Japanese soldiers would be treated in death and incorporated into the State's vision of its essence. Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo's Kudan district was key to State Shintō, Imperial Japan's official national religion. By the late 1930s, the "Kudan no Haha"—the mother "silently receiving the ashes of her fallen son" or on pilgrimage to speak with him beyond death— became an icon of stoic offering of life to the state. What were the truths hidden by that image, hopes for a safe return, dreams of a child's future, and parents' imagined joys of old age lived amid the next generations? Such emotions were deemed anathema, inverted and exploited through invocation of the spirits of the war dead in a cult demanding imperial subjects prepare to die in the service for the Emperor as embodiment of the State as a key element of Japan's government's control of its people. Even after the war, present controversies over "Who owns the spirits of the war dead?" continue.

Author

• Haruko Taya Cook, William Paterson University