Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Who Cares about the Yasukuni Shrine? Reflections on Tolerance Issues and System Vulnerability in Modern Japan

Japan has a very long tradition of religious tolerance, freedom and creativity, but also a modern history spotted by religious persecutions, proscriptions, and by policies forcing nationalistic and illiberal principles on religious institutions and traditions. The constitution imposed by the Allied Occupation Authority at the end of the Second World War grants religious freedom, and asserts the division between state and religion, but many shadow areas remains in the Japanese system, and they concern both tolerance and vulnerability. A fact which is regularly discussed on newspapers and in academic literature are the visits of Japanese prime ministers to the Yasukuni shrine, where war criminals are buried, which recurrently results in strong protests from neighbouring countries and tensions between Japan and its former colonies. This fact, together with other specificities of Japanese modern history which will be treated in the paper, such as for example the terrorist attacks that a religious sect conducted in Tokyo metro with chemical bombs, questions the definition of the limits of tolerance and of a systems vulnerability. The shadow areas of the Japanese system have a high epistemic value in the theoretical discussion of tolerance and vulnerability, since they give an insight on the causes of conservative policies in the only rich, post-modern, non-western country.

The present paper will proceed through the analysis of modern Japanese political and religious systems, giving a brief historical introduction, and mainly focusing on the triangular relationship between religious activities, policies and identity issues. As a starting point for the discussion, the paper will present the preceding researches on the subject, which show that in the Japanese case, identity definitions, and internal political issues, are among the main causes of religious violence, while intellectual and political elites can be identified as main responsible for actively engaging in the promotion of religious violence and intolerance policies.

Finally, the paper wishes to inspire future comparative analysis which will not be conducted in the present paper on related matters such as the relationship between tolerance, vulnerability, policies and cultural specificities in the developed countries, or American policies in post-war Japan and contemporary policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Paolo Barbaro is a researcher at Mie University,

Japan, and a PhD candidate at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) in Paris. He graduated in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of Venice (Italy) and completed a Master in Religious Studies at the EPHE. His researches and publications focus on various aspects of Japanese religion, and are mainly based on anthropological and epistemological approaches.

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