Volume 33, Number 4 · March 13, 1986
Japanese Lib
By Ian Buruma
The Issue of War: States, Societies, and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941–1945
by Christopher Thorne
Oxford University Press, 364 pp., $22.95
Last August, only a month after Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg, the Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro also decided to pay tribute to the war dead. This sparked off anti-Japanese riots in several parts of China. It does not take much to provoke Chinese into making anti-Japanese gestures—these are, as it were, part of the national ethos. But this time, it seemed, Nakasone had really gone too far. He visited the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto sanctuary in Tokyo, where more than two million 'heroic souls,' including those of General Tojo Hideki and thirteen other Class-A war criminals, are enshrined. He paid his respects to these souls in his official capacity as prime minister and thereby broke a major postwar taboo. Previous prime ministers had been there too, to console the Japanese war dead by offering them sprigs from a sacred tree, but they had gone as private citizens.
Review, 4129 words
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