The Yasukuni Shrine and the competing patriotic pasts of East Asia

The Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to the spirits of Japan's war dead since the late nineteenth century, has been the subject of controversy ever since the decision was taken there in 1978 to enshrine the spirits of executed "Class A" war criminals. Japanese prime ministers who have paid their respects at the shrine sometimes justify their right to do so on the grounds that Japan's commemoration of its war dead is an internal affair and that all nations have a right to commemorate their war dead "in a manner reflecting (their) own unique history and customs." (1) This justification has been criticized often, usually through appeal to Japan's constitutional separation of religion and state, but there is an assumption lying behind it which has also come under scrutiny. That assumption takes the form of an entitlement; the right of a nation to commemorate and write its past as it sees fit.

Many nations, and not just Japan, commemorate their war dead with narratives that render into public memory the events in which they lost their lives, explaining the ends they died for, the value of those ends and the consequences their sacrifice had for their own and subsequent generations. Such public memory provides meaning to the commemoration, allowing families, surviving comrades and later generations to connect their deaths with some greater, justifying purpose. Narratives like this are often, but not always, the object of a national consensus, and are just as often believed to represent integral components of a nation's identity, as the war dead embody special national virtues. In Japan since the last decade of the twentieth century, the Yasukuni Shrine has become the focus for one such narrative presented in the exhibits and literature of its museum, the Yushukan. Although the Yasukuni Shrine ceased to be a state-controlled institution following Japan's defeat in World War II, and its war narrative is far from being an object of national consensus, a number of influential politicians and intellectuals accept the Yushukan war narrative as Japan's de facto national war memory.

This narrative makes many factual claims about the past that are strongly contested in Japan and internationally by historians, political leaders, war veterans and war atrocity survivors. There is an expanding critical literature that has done much to contextualize the Yasukuni Shrine controversy in historical, political and anthropological analyses of nationalism and war remembrance. (2) Yet comparatively little critical attention has been given to the recent efforts of the Yushukan to accommodate its critics and present its patriotic war memory as a historical narrative. These efforts complicate scholarly discussions of the Yasukuni war narrative as a "construction of public memory" that suffers from "an amnesia of perpetration, of defeat ... of the horrors of war." (3) Here then is material for a philosophical analysis of the conceptual relations between the history, patriotic collective memory and individual memory of war, for which the Yushukan war narrative provides an exemplary starting point; but its conclusions may be generalized to the war narratives of other nations, including those neighboring Japan. (4) Through an exploration of these conceptual relations this essay will argue first that the Yasukuni narrative is not historical, as it aspires to be, but that it is a distinct type of patriotic narrative about the past. It will then demonstrate that, in spite of this distinct status, this narrative is answerable to--and not autonomous from--historical criticism and the dissenting memories of war survivors.

THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND TO THE YASUKUNI SHRINE

What is now known as the Yasukuni Shrine was established in 1869 under the name of the Tokyo Shokonsha, to memorialize and house the souls (kami) of the men who died fighting on behalf of the emperor in a civil war with forces of the Tokugawa Shogunate. From the beginning, as Yasukuni Shrine scholar John Nelson has pointed out, the shrine's role in the emerging Meiji state developed by means of a radical modification of native Shinto beliefs and ritual in order to further the goal of achieving national unity under the new emperor. Shinto practice had traditionally provided for propitiation and worship of the spirits of the dead and of other deities in localized, "clan-specific" circumstances throughout Japan. The creation of the Yasukuni Shrine fulfilled a new spiritual need for a new nation-state: to provide for the propitiation and worship of the spirits of men who had died not just as members of some family or regional community, but also as soldiers defending a new nation. (5)

The foundation of the Yasukuni Shrine was thus central to the transformation of Shinto from a loose grouping of regional, animistic cults into a modern state religion, with the emperor at its head. Soon after its establishment, the shrine began keeping registers of the names of men who had died in battle on the emperor's behalf, and their souls were enshrined through a special ritual through which they were transformed from ordinary human spirits (jinrei) into divine spirits (shinrei) "belonging to the shrine." (6) The Yasukuni Shrine developed daily rituals practiced to this day, in which gifts are presented to propitiate the souls of the war dead. regular propitiation is necessary in order that the emperor and the nation receive their blessings and to avert the possibility of their anger. Moreover, in another innovation for Shinto tradition, the Meiji emperor initiated a ritual in which emperors attended the shrine to pay their respects to those commoners who had died in their name. (7) Nowadays this office is performed by an imperial emissary. (8)

With the elaboration of State Shinto religion and the promulgation of a constitution during the Meiji period, the moral status of the souls of the war dead and their relationship to the emperor were formalized. under the Meiji Constitution the emperor held (nominal) secular power as constitutional head of state and as commander of the armed forces. The Imperial rescript for Soldiers and Sailors, issued in 1882, stressed the duty of Japan's servicemen to be loyal to the emperor as their commander-in-chief. The Yasukuni Shrine offered a spiritual reward for those soldiers who died fulfilling this duty: death in the emperor's name earned a soldier's spirit the status of a divine spirit, once it had undergone the Yasukuni enshrinement ceremony.

During the 1930s and 1940s a more militaristic form of State Shinto came to prominence, mobilizing Japanese society for war in Asia and the Pacific. Propagandists and educators emphasized the divinity of the emperor, suppressed secular interpretations of his sovereignty and urged absolute loyalty from his subjects. (9) Any soldier who died in his name was deemed to have died for a righteous cause, since given the emperor's divine pedigree, the notion of waging an unjust war in his name was an oxymoron. In this militaristic social environment, loyalty to and sacrifice for the sake of the emperor became the most highly prized values for Japan's civilians and servicemen, and the Yasukuni Shrine was the stronghold for these values as Japan became involved in wars with China, European powers and the united States. (10) The customary farewell of World War II kamikaze pilots to each other, "see you at the Yasukuni Shrine," represented the most extreme, and final, embodiment of this spirit.

After Japan's defeat in World War II, the united States occupation disestablished State Shinto and the Japanese emperor renounced the divine status that wartime propagandists had attributed to him. The Yasukuni Shrine was permitted to continue, so long as it either became a secular government-funded institution or a private religious institution. It took the latter option, but this occasioned little modification to its Shinto ritual. For while the emperor was no longer divine, the souls of the enshrined war dead still had to be regarded as such if the shrine was to continue its practices of propitiating them as kami. Yet this brought the shrine's priesthood and its postwar supporters amongst war-bereaved families, war veterans, politicians and intellectuals into conflict with brute postwar realities. First, there was the fact of Japan's catastrophic defeat and devastation in World War II. Second, no one could wish away the denunciations at home and abroad of Japan's twentieth-century colonial and military expansion in Asia, nor the accusations that her armed forces had committed atrocities during the Chinese and Pacific conflicts in the 1930s and '40s. Third, a number of high-ranking military officers who had waged war in the emperor's name, and in professed obedience to him, had been convicted and executed as war criminals at the Tokyo war crimes trials after the war. If the righteousness of the causes for which so many of Japan's soldiers had died was thereby nullified by these realities, so too would be the values for which they had died. Indeed, they stood to lose their divine status in the eyes of a postwar generation eager to forget prewar values and embrace a pacifist constitution.

The solutions to these problems are apparent to shrine visitors. (11) The shrine's external monuments and statuary have much in common with early-twentieth-century European nationalist shrines commemorating military sacrifice, as Ian Buruma has observed. (12) A bronze statue of the Meiji-era reformer Omura Masujiro dominates the approach to the shrine. Two giant lanterns at the entry to the shrine precincts feature bass reliefs depicting military exploits of the Meiji and early Showa periods. There are also Asia-Pacific War monuments, including a statue of a kamikaze pilot and a steam engine from the Burma railway in the Yushukan museum foyer. The shrine's precincts give little evidence of regret or contrition for the conduct of Japan's armed forces in the Asia-Pacific War.

The contents and exhibit narrative of the Yushukan reinforce this impression. The museum is dedicated to memorializing the sacrifice and feats of arms of Japan's fighting men since before the Meiji period and exhibits a large collection of uniforms, weapons, battle relics and memorabilia, though materials from the Asia-Pacific War dominate the museum space. It was originally opened in 1881 and was a significant attraction for the Yasukuni Shrine until the end of the Asia-Pacific War, when it was closed from public view until a complete refurbishment and reopening in 1985. (13) A renovation of the museum in 2002 introduced a bilingual narrative (in Japanese and English) accompanying the museum displays, explaining Japan's emergence as a modern world power and its military campaigns, from the civil war preceding the Meiji restoration through early wars with China and Russia to the Asia-Pacific War. (14) In 2007, modifications were made to this narrative under the direction of former diplomat Okazaki Hisako, who took on this role at the shrine's invitation after he had criticized the Yushukan's anti-American bias. (15)

This narrative is not sui generis. It bears important resemblances with the sort of narrative of Japan's Asia-Pacific War promoted by conservative intellectuals such as Kobori Keiichiro and Nitta Hitoshi, popular writers such as Kobayashi Yoshinori, former Air Self-defense Force Chief Tamogami Toshio, conservative politicians such as former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, and politicians' lobby groups such as the Shinto-affiliated diet Members' group for the Shinto Association of Spiritual leadership. (16) They share a common assumption: that post-1945 history education in schools created a very negative view of Japan's past, encouraging an impression amongst Japanese children that their ancestors had engaged in wrongdoing. (17) The Yushukan is one of a number of institutions and individuals that have been attempting to write Japan's war history in a more positive light over the past twenty years and to provide the base for a more patriotic education of Japanese children. Through its association with the Yasukuni Shrine, the Yushukan has become the de facto institutional center for the articulation of patriotic public memory of the Asia-Pacific War as a historical narrative.

Following a visit to the Yushukan in the early 1990s, Ian Buruma concluded that its exhibits were "straight out wartime propaganda." (18) A more recent visitor, John Breen, has claimed that the Yushukan narrative banishes from its public memory "the sacrifices of the common man and woman," allowing only for veneration of the spirits of soldiers. Moreover, the Yushukan's exhibits are marked by the "conspicuous absence of the enemy," and the museum "obliterates from its memory of war all traces of trauma." (19) The Yushukan, he argues, remembers a war that was only ever glorious." (20) Indeed, criticisms of the Yushukan's narrative have always focused on such sins of omission: of the enemy, of suffering inflicted and of the horror of war. However, the changes in the narrative since 2007 have posed difficulties to its critics; apparently under the guidance of curators such as Okazaki Hisako, it has begun moving away from the propaganda described by Buruma and has taken on the trappings of a historical narrative. Changes to displays in the Yushukan over the past three years reveal increasing curatorial sophistication, with detailed explanations of military campaigns and battles, handsomely mounted displays containing numerous artefacts, photographs and maps, and strategic use of copies of multilingual sources (including contemporary newspaper reports, diplomatic and political correspondence) as evidential support for the arguments presented in the displays.

These arguments are, for the most part, coherent and their English translations are well written. Japan's rapid military modernization and early conflicts with China and Russia are presented as expressions of a defensive strategy, dedicated to preserving Japan's independence from initially more powerful or advanced rival nations following its "opening up" to contact with the West. The narrative also interprets Japan's later conflicts as a continuation of this defensive strategy, but omissions begin to reveal themselves as the narrative enters the twentieth century; for there is no reference to acts of aggression, colonial acquisitions and documented atrocities that would impugn the reputation of Japan's wartime servicemen or leaders. The puppet Manchukuo state in China in the early 1930s is claimed to have been founded by "five ethnic groups who hoped to create a nation of peace and righteous government." (21) The account of the "Nanjing Incident" does not mention atrocities, civilian casualties and the widely documented breakdown in Japanese troops' discipline. (22) The account of the lead-up to the Asia-Pacific War presents Japan's actions as defensive measures against great-power encroachment and competition in Asia, which threatened to deprive Japan of access to essential resources. The displays claim that increased united States intransigence over the "China Incident" and a fuel embargo imposed in retaliation to Japan's advance into Indo-China forced the hand of Japan's government, leading to the Pearl Harbor attack. (23)

The Yushukan narrative goes some way to accommodating critics such as Buruma and Breen. It does not attempt completely to glorify the war or excuse Japan's wartime military leadership. displays on individual battles admit tactical errors leading to Japanese defeats, and they describe the resulting suffering of Japanese troops. (24) Exhibits on Asia-Pacific War campaigns and battles do make reference to the enemy formations facing Japanese units. ordinary civilian participants are also mentioned: an exhibit on the battle of Okinawa discusses the school-aged male and female civilian conscripts who served and died as front-line nurses, messengers and ammunition carriers during the battle. one last gallery displaying thousands of photographs of mostly young servicemen and women and detailing their places of death does not directly express the trauma of wartime suffering and loss, but it certainly implies it. Finally, since 2007 some exhibits likely to cause offense to American and Chinese visitors have been modified. The narrative of the lead-up to the Asia-Pacific War no longer accuses President Roosevelt of deliberately provoking war with Japan as an excuse to join the war with Great Britain against Germany. The exhibit on the "Nanjing Incident" no longer states that Nanjing's citizens were able "to recover their lives in peace" after the Japanese army's occupation of that city.

Nonetheless, the narrative of past events in the Yushukan is still written in such a way as to justify convictions about the rightness of Japanese military actions in the Asia-Pacific War, and the rightness of the sacrifice of Japan's war dead in that war. A multilingual pamphlet handed to foreign visitors to the Yushukan puts it clearly: "Japan was forced to defend its independence and maintain peace in Asia by engaging in war with other nations on several occasions. ... These wars ... had to be fought to ensure Japan's independence, and its prosperity as a peaceful member of the Asian community." (25) The justification of the Asia-Pacific War is similar to that of all other wars fought in the emperor's name since the late nineteenth century. For the shrine's priesthood and supporters, this justification arises from overriding spiritual and consolatory commitments. Making factual claims that cast doubt on the rightness of any of those wars and of the sacrifices made in them offends against the spirits enshrined there and against their living relatives in the powerful Japan Society for the War bereaved (Nihon Izokukai). These commitments obviously put the Yasukuni Shrine and its supporters at odds with a majority of international Asia-Pacific War historians. (26)

We must now begin our inquiry into whether these commitments are justifiable. Is a narrative of this kind, which seeks legitimacy as the national, collective memory and as a historical narrative of past wars, merely bad or distorted history and a heavily edited and sanitized public remembrance of the past? or is it a type of narrative about the past that is somehow distinct from historical and memory-based narrative? If that is so, is it appropriate to subject it to historical and memory-based criticism? These are difficult questions, and to answer them our inquiry will first require us to think through the categorical status of narratives such as this in relation to historical inquiry and to the individually remembered past.

THE PRACTICAL, HISTORICAL AND REMEMBERED PASTS

Some philosophical discussions about the experience of the past, and about the role of memory in knowledge of the past, will help to shed light on the questions raised above. Several decades ago Michael Oakeshott, the British philosopher and historian of ideas, formulated an influential understanding of historical thinking in which history represented one of a number of possible ways of "experiencing the past." Oakeshott aimed to demarcate the autonomy of history from these "other ways," as well as from the other sciences. He did so in a complicated, philosophically idealist work which presented the sciences, practical life and history as arrested modes of a singular world of experience, inadequate to represent that world by themselves, but which we conceptually muddle at our peril. (27)

For Oakeshott, history as one such mode seeks to understand the world--that is, the world of present experience--in terms of the past. In his austerely argued conception of history, the historical past is what historians experience when they investigate presently existing physical remnants, testimony and written sources and make evidence-driven inferences about the past from them. Historical fact is the product of the historian's inferential judgment, something achieved in thought rather than found, and it is "what the evidence obliges us to believe." Truth in history is the coherence of facts or ideas in the historian's experience. Finally, historical investigation properly understood is undertaken for no other purpose than for its own sake. (28)

Contrast this with what Oakeshott called the "practical" and "theological" pasts, which have some conceptual affinities with contemporary historians' notions of "collective memory." In the sort of experience Oakeshott termed practical, "the past is designed to justify, to make valid practical beliefs about the present and future, about the world in general." (29) In other words, a narrative of the past is not developed for its own sake, but in order to serve certain political, moral or religious convictions and purposes. Hence, a patriotic past is remembered--or fancied--in such a way as to foster respect and love for departed generations of our nation; and it is experienced as "our past." (30) Nevertheless, such a narrative is persuasive to us insofar as we believe that it captures what really happened. Similarly, narratives about the past are central to Christian and Jewish beliefs, and in each case rhetorical use of "the language of history gives to our beliefs the force and liveliness which belong to them." (31) but again, since such narrative is produced in order to lend legitimizing power to those beliefs, it is not history. When a practical past is written in such a way that individuals known in historical research are lionized, demonized or simply excised, we cannot say that this is tampering with or distorting history, or that it constitutes historical amnesia or forgetting. (32) The practical past is a distinct category of experience, not subject to the norms of historical inquiry.

We can see how the Yushukan's narrative would fall under Oakeshott's description of the patriotic "practical past," and I believe that it does so convincingly. Clearly, this narrative is written in order to legitimate the beliefs and rites concerning the shrine's kami. Moreover, while narratives such as this adopt the rhetorical style associated with historical inquiry, impartial respect for evidence must be subordinate to their legitimating objectives. Such subordination may not provide grounds for criticisms appealing to historical standards of respect for evidence. given the strict, categorical demarcation that Oakeshott drew between the historical and practical modes of experiencing the past, it is difficult to see how standards governing the accuracy and rigor of the former can be applied critically to the latter. In fact, Oakeshott stated his opposition to such criticism forcefully. "between the worlds of history and of practice, as specific worlds of experience, there is an impassable gulf ... the invasion by either by the other is a disaster followed on every occasion by the disintegration of both." (33) one of Oakeshott's aims in distinguishing the different modes of experience was to identify and neutralize category mistakes that result from representing one of these modes in the terms appropriate to another. We might criticize the Yushukan's narrative on ethical or political grounds. but to bring against it the charges of historical distortion or amnesia is to hold it to evaluative standards appropriate to a different mode of experience; it is not history. Oakeshott's answer to the question in my introduction--whether narratives of this kind should be subject to historical evaluation--would be an emphatic "no." We shall see later whether this answer is justified.

Now for Oakeshott the remembered past, too, is a thing apart from the historical past, except where that memory has been criticized and reshaped by historical judgment. (34) Presumably, although Oakeshott did not say so directly, the individually remembered past is also categorically distinct from the practical past. Therefore, it is in no better position to provide grounds for criticizing the practical past than the historical past is. Moreover, like his influential contemporary, the historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood, Oakeshott held that memory is something to be treated inferentially, something existing in the present from which we can construct a past in historical judgment. It does not itself constitute knowledge of the past. (35) If this view holds, neither individual memory nor history is in a position to impose constraints on the construction of a patriotic, practical past.

However, in recent years Oakeshott's and Collingwood's views on history and memory have been challenged. In his book Other Times, analytic philosopher David Cockburn defends a common-sense view of memory as (potentially) direct knowledge of "what happened." An exemplar for this view of memory as knowledge is the following: "We accept that if I observed Jones hitting Smith, and don't forget what happened, then I later know what happened." (36) given that I know this fact from observation, I do not ordinarily need to treat my memory of it as presently experienced evidence from which I reconstruct that past event. It is, Cockburn argues, a "philosophical prejudice" to insist that claims to knowledge about the past must be based upon inference from present evidence. (37) It will be worth following this argument here, for it may bring a fresh perspective to the difficult question of how individual memory relates to the writing of history and to the writing of the patriotic past in institutions like the Yasukuni Shrine.

Cockburn draws many conclusions from his common-sense intuition about memory, but one will be important here. our memory of something we experienced, understood as knowledge of that event, holds a different status to evidence from which we infer what happened. Memory is rather a defeasible "constraint ... on possible accounts of what happened" and to a certain extent, evidence that apparently does not fit with that memory has to be reinterpreted in order that it does. It operates, then, as an epistemic constraint upon reconstructions of the past. By this I mean, it functions to constrain the choice of beliefs that we count as knowledge of the past. knowledge of past events is possible without it, but where it is accessible it functions to limit and condition the interpretations that qualify as knowledge of past events. Moreover, for Cockburn, when we trust in the testimony others give to us of events they have experienced, we extend to it this same defeasible status as giving us direct epistemic access to what happened. (38)

Following an Oakeshott or a Collingwood, or indeed many contemporary historians who have discussed the role of testimony in historical research, we should treat reported memory critically as potential evidence, but not necessarily as knowledge for what it claims happened. We weigh it up alongside other testimony or documentary evidence and physical remains, check it for consistency and draw inferences from its omissions and inconsistencies as much as from what it actually says. We should not treat it as potentially direct knowledge of past events or as an authority to which our historical narrative must in some sense be answerable. That would involve surrender of our autonomy as historians, and (in Oakeshott's view) a forbidden crossing over the demarcation line separating the historical and remembered pasts.

Cockburn argues that this demand for critical treatment of memory in history is inconsistent. First of all, historians cannot sustain for long such an attitude of vigilance toward their own recent memories, or notes, of evidence that supports the conclusion in a paper they are now writing. If often they must uncritically trust in their own memories or past impressions of what they saw or discovered, then it is difficult to defend an attitude of consistently critical vigilance toward the notes, verbal reports and publications of colleagues and other historians, and ultimately toward long-dead "authorities." (39) Cockburn's point is that the historian is a member of an epistemic community, and uncritical trust in the testimony of others--as directly reporting "what happened"--is an ineliminable feature of this community's practices.

Cockburn is not recommending that historians maintain trust in their own or others' memory in the teeth of the evidence. A critical historian's work is distinguished by how she/he goes about trusting or not trusting her/his memory and the testimony of others based on their memories, working within an epistemic community with public criteria for evaluating whether such trust is justified in particular cases. (40) The overall point to remember, against Oakeshott or Collingwood, is that memory can speak for itself and give direct epistemic access to past events--or fail to do so. It certainly still needs to be authenticated, but the criteria by which it is authenticated are distinct from criteria for assessing its indirect, evidential relation to past events. (41)

Nevertheless, the potential epistemic privilege that Cockburn attributes to personal memory cannot be taken for granted. There are times when it must be earned, and that means that when memory claims are challenged support must be sought for, in the form of corroborating testimony, diaries or other documentary evidence. The painful fact--and this especially applies to memories of events in the distant past--is that sometimes memory may be discrepant with other testimony and evidence, while supporting evidence and testimony may not exist or may have ceased to be available with the infirmity or death of a past event's other witnesses. While its holder may emphatically believe in its truth, in publicly verifiable terms it may only be probable, improbable, inaccurate in some respect or unlikely to have happened at all.

This is the problem testifiers face when their memory is subjected to historical evaluation, and against Cockburn, there is reason to think that a critical attitude is also an ineliminable aspect of historical treatments of individual memory. For a historian confronted with a mass of individual memories, there is the well-known problem of the "Rashomon effect." Memories of the same events are necessarily perspectival and so prone to differ from one another. They may also be internally inconsistent or inaccurate due to the distorting effects of peer and later, secondary-source influence and memory attrition over time. However, it is the historian's task to create a coherent, diachronic and synoptic account of events. At some stage, evaluation for coherence between testimonies and for their individual reliability is unavoidable, and corroborating evidence will need to be called for. but if such testimonies do, on the whole, concur on what the historian finds to be vital traits of the event in question, she/he has good reason to trust in them as having a privileged epistemic status in reconstruction of that event and to expect that evidence should subsequently cohere with them, rather than the other way around. So rather than hold to Cockburn's view that memory is potentially direct knowledge of the past, we might have to edge toward a view of memory as one of the sources of knowledge of the past. It gives us direct and potentially powerful epistemic access to past events, but when it is taken up as a source in historical inquiry it also stands in need of corroboration by other sources. (42)

That much might suffice to clarify the relationship of individual memory to history, but what of the relationship of individual memory to collective memory? Here Cockburn has some interesting things to say, which have a strong bearing on the earlier discussion of the Yushukan narrative as an instance of the practical past As he sees it, the same background assumptions of trust in testimony apply to our reception of transmitted stories of the past, in which we may be separated by generations from the original memories and sources of those who composed them. We may come to doubt some of these stories, but such doubt arises against a background in which our views of the past have been shaped by trust in what others relate and transmit to us about the past. our trust, moreover, involves a trust "in the community which lies behind the one from whom I hear the story." (43)

At this point we can move to consider the more contentious aspect of Cockburn's study, which is his attempt to make an analogy between individual and collective memory. by collective memory, Cockburn means those narratives of the past that have currency within a group, ranging from families up to a nation, that originate in the past experiences of earlier members and that are crucial to the group's conception of its collective identity. Collective memory as defined here seems to correspond in some respects with what Oakeshott described as the "practical past." There are differences, however. Cockburn accepts that there are disanalogies between collective and individual memory, but there is also a vital point of comparison. As we have seen, Cockburn's common-sense view of personal memory is that it involves (potential) direct knowledge of a past event, and hence it is not only a source of inferential knowledge of the past. Similarly, collective memory is not just a source of inferential knowledge of the past; "when a society remembers what happened, it already knows what happened, and so does not need a technique for finding out what happened." (44) If this is correct, there is a potential germ of a defense of the Yushukan narrative here: as public memory, it embodies what Japanese society remembers of the pre-1945 era, and thus also constitutes knowledge of that era. Historical and individual memory-based criticisms of that narrative then become beside the point.

There are sound reasons for not pursuing the analogy between individual and collective memory too far, arising both from what is known about the physiology of personal memory and from the properties of collective memory (which I shall treat from this point as an equivalent expression to Oakeshott's "practical past") as something that is interpersonally transmitted and publicized. one sticking point for this analogy turns on the status of war experiences in collective and individual memory, which are, in their nature, often traumatic. An important clinical finding in the psychology of memory is that traumatic personal memories are more durable and accessible than their non-traumatic counterparts and that it may be impossible to repress or erase the former. They are subject to hypermnesia rather than amnesia. (45) They are usually vivid components of long-term/explicit memory, and once encoded, can remain accessible over the whole course of life. This point needs to be made with care. There are clinical studies that claim to have found it possible through suggestion to implant false traumatic memories, although this remains a contested matter in the psychology of memory. (46) The usual strategies for coping with the emotional burden of traumatic or violent memories--where they are possible--are to interpret their significance so that they have as little bearing on present conduct as possible or (in the case of perpetrators) to interpret involvement in them so as to minimize personal responsibility. (47)

I take it that in certain permutations of collective memory or the practical past, repression or erasure of traumatic past individual memories is entirely possible, albeit by mechanisms quite different from those that some psychologists identify in repression of individual memory. For unlike individual memory, the practical past relies upon publicizing and interpersonal transmission to perpetuate itself, allowing for records of individual memories to be "edited out" during the transmission process. The Yushukan may provide an example of this, but so do the war narratives of other nations. In all these cases a national story of past events is developed, its source materials edited, sifted and transmitted, in the guiding light of certain beliefs and values that it is intended to legitimate and to exemplify. In this respect, it is a tradition, and the mechanism of traditions involves interpersonal, intergenerational transmission of valued memories, beliefs, expectations and habits.

The suppression or erasure of disvalued war memories can take more or less blatant forms. Totalitarian governments engage in physical destruction of recorded testimony or public disavowals of its existence, and in the intimidation, imprisonment, exile or killings of people who did or could "bear witness." In democratic nations more subtle, less effective means exist. There may be tacit agreements amongst politicians, intellectuals, surviving veterans, atrocity survivors and the media not to broach certain past events or not to publicize dissenting testimony, and equally tacit agreement on sanctions for those who do. Many war veterans and survivors choose to take self-incriminating or traumatic memories with them to their graves and may selectively recount in public testimony only memories that they think their compatriots or other audiences will want to hear. (48) Family members and friends may decide, prudentially, not to publicize what is disclosed in more private self-revelations.

For these reasons, the common-sense grounds we might have for granting individual memory direct epistemic access to what happened do not apply so straightforwardly to the collective remembrances of the practical past. So where disagreement, indeed contradiction, has arisen between the memories of war veterans and survivors and the collective memorializing of the events in which they participated, it is the occasion for deep, acrimonious public debate. We are caught between the intuition that individual memory has a (potentially) more authentic, direct connection to past events than does the collectively remembered past and a desire to protect our inherited, collective memory of the past from it. In cases where they are discrepant, recognition of the former's authority can compel us to revise our commitment to the latter. This consideration will have bearing upon the final discussion below.

THE HETERONOMY OF THE YUSHUKAN NARRATIVE--AND OF OTHERS LIKE IT

We have seen that, in spite of some limitations, the views of two quite different philosophies of the past can help us grapple with the Yushukan problem. our consideration of these ideas has yielded some useful concepts, including a distinction between the practical, remembered and historical pasts, and a common-sense understanding of individual memory as a source of direct knowledge of the past. Through these concepts we may have a grasp of the epistemic constraints that could be brought to bear on the construction of war narratives such as that at the Yushukan, if, as I have argued, its war narrative is an instance of what Oakeshott terms "the practical past." However, some of these ideas may also help offer a defense of the Yushukan narrative against its critics, one that appeals to the autonomy of the practical from the historical past. The defense is that this narrative is bound by a commitment to "consoling the spirits of the deceased"; in fulfilling this commitment, it must make their praiseworthy achievements its focus, but accuse neither them nor their enemies of wrongdoing, much in the manner of "prayers dedicated to the deceased at funerals." (49) Moreover, a narrative of their deeds is needed to educate the current and subsequent generations about how and why the war dead gave their lives for them and why it is important to revere their memory.

In defenses such as this, reference is made to affective values such as pride, reverence or respect for past members of one's nation or sect, which constrain how their stories are told, ensuring they will be told in such a way as to exemplify respect-worthy traits like self-sacrifice or courage. by affective values, I mean emotional dispositions which also function as action-guiding public goods, to be sought after and perpetuated in community life. (50) Pride in and respect for one's forebears are not just private feelings; they are also praiseworthy, public emotions which people share with other members of their community in commemoration rituals and narratives. In ritual practices and storytelling, members of these communities aim to impart both the stories that exemplify the virtues of forebears and the feelings of pride and respect those stories are supposed to induce. For in the absence of such feelings, there are no good reasons to emulate those virtues, or even to recognize them as such. These feelings are certainly "action-guiding."

They are action-guiding with respect to both the reception of traditional narratives and the construction of new ones; and they do not sit at all well with epistemic values crucial to historical inquiry such as objectivity and factuality. "objective" and "factual" are terms of praise in historical practice, used to indicate conformity to norms of research practice expected of historians as members of a community of inquirers. These norms of historical practice are also action-guiding, inasmuch as saying that an inquiry is objective and factual is, as the American philosopher Hillary Putnam would put it, grounds for saying that its acceptance is justified. (51) Finally, objectivity and factuality are goods traditionally striven for and protectively upheld in the historical community. In these ways, they function as epistemic constraints, as procedural, evaluative standards for assessing what does or does not constitute historical knowledge. They function to limit the choice of beliefs that can constitute knowledge of the historical past.

Yet the composer of a "practical past" narrative is a member of a community that upholds and enforces affective values. These values also constrain judgments about what is or is not acceptable as trustworthy grounds for belief in the narratives of a community's past. Such constraints are just as real as constraints imposed by a scholarly commitment to objectivity and factuality. data or testimonies that, in a historian's judgment, are of little or no evidential value will be selected and accorded that status where they confirm affective-value commitments. On the other hand, data or testimonies that a historian regards as helping to justify belief that a certain event happened, and which support particular interpretations of the motivations of actors in that event, must, if their acceptance is discrepant with those values, be found in some way to be inadmissible or false.

However, given the status of history as an authoritative discourse about the past, believers in patriotic, practical past narratives will use the rhetoric of historical argument in their explication and defense. The resulting narrative is a product that professional historians will regard as riddled with confirmation bias, the sort of product they dismiss as "Whig" or "pseudo" history. In the end, a defense of the Yushukan narrative appealing to its independence from historical judgment must reckon with the Yushukan's own aspirations to historical narrative status, as well as with the dismissals this aspiration is likely to attract. Nonetheless, historically based criticisms of this type of narrative can, for their part, seem overly rationalistic. It may be that belief in these narratives delivers important moral, political or spiritual benefits, and so skeptics should hold back their criticisms.

Every nation does indeed require its heroes and heroines, its founding and epoch-making stories, so I do not want to argue that the practical past should be assimilated to the historical past. Now as we have seen, Oakeshott thought critical dialogue between the two is impossible in any case, for each is a sovereign world of experience, incompatible with the other, and each is unassailable so long as it sticks to its own business. But he also asserted that since each such world does (mistakenly) believe itself to be a complete world of experience, in order to be "concrete reality," competition with other modes and with the "concrete totality of experience" is inevitable. (52) In the long run, none of these worlds can stick to their own business.

It is one thing to admit this inconsistency as a consequence of accepting Oakeshott's philosophical architectonic. It is another to observe the real-world consequences of practical pasts asserted in modern nationalism. What Oakeshott would recognize as practical conceptions of the past have colonized history in a number of nations anyway, appropriating its rhetoric and making history education a tool for the inculcation of national and ethnic pride in the young. It would seem that historical criticism of such conceptions of the past is vital, in spite of Oakeshott's interdict--vital to the protection of the integrity of historical inquiry. A more lethal consequence of this colonization arises from clashes between radically incompatible conceptions of the practical past, which are at the heart of some of today's most long-term, intractable armed conflicts. (53)

The present diplomatic strains between Japan and its neighbors over the Yasukuni Shrine and their respective patriotic practical pasts, their collective war memories, are nowhere near this sort of conflict. but the political and economic ramifications these strains are having might help to concentrate people's minds on the question of whether such narratives should be autonomous from historical criticism. Here I will provide one prudential reason why they should not be insulated from this criticism.

Recall our earlier description of the practical past: it is conceived within the frame of affective values such as respect for and pride in past generations and "what is characteristic of it is that it is known as our past." (54) As I have said, when discussion of the past takes place within this type of discourse, affective values function as constraints on belief formation and change. Inquiry conceived in this way will not meet the demands imposed by epistemic values such as objectivity--that it identify and minimize as much as possible the effects on inquiry of personal biases; and that it formulate problems, collect and interpret data and sources and arrive at evidence-driven judgments irrespective of the consequences for national pride or respect for past generations.

Now when believers in a patriotic narrative do encounter claims made from within a different nation's patriotic past, the acceptance of which would put pride and respect for our past, indeed our very sense of national identity in jeopardy, appeals to status-conferring values of factuality and objectivity in defense of our past and in criticism of theirs can be irresistible. In typical argumentation over the past between representatives of rival practical pasts, both sets of protagonists proceed from an unquestioned commitment to affective values, but neither can avail themselves of the epistemic values which they invoke and which they expect each other to uphold.

This is all suggestive of a relativistic impasse, but in the inconsistency hinted at above there is a key to a non-relativistic understanding of the interaction between these two sets of values. In criticizing the lack of objectivity and factuality in a rival practical past and in upholding their own practical past's adherence to these criteria, such protagonists are presupposing the universal application of these values. Yet they cannot fault proponents of a rival theory for failing to be objective and factual, fail to be so in defense of their own, affective-value-laden theory and then expect a rational resolution of the dispute by appeal to those epistemic values. A genuine commitment to epistemic values requires understanding the consequences of that commitment (namely, the redundancy of affective values) and consistency in their observation. I take it that these protagonists fail this commitment on both counts.

It could be said that the protagonists in such disputes are simply adapting and changing terms like objectivity for use in a different mode, or discourse, or language game, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with their doing so. but the point is that, insofar as they are convinced of the truth of their statements, they are employing these terms with the intended, perlocutionary force of their original meanings, and expect to be understood as doing this. The affective-value-laden character of their dispute prevents such intended force from taking effect outside of their respective political constituencies and ensures that they will not be understood as meaning what they intend to mean. In this we can see protagonists stuck in an impasse, and, to use a Wittgensteinian idiom, mutually entangled in the rules of their language game.

The consequences of such an impasse can be extremely serious. Some such protagonists do create or defend what they know are "mythic" practical pasts, as a means for shoring up the legitimacy of political or religious authority, and make opportunistic appeals to both affective and epistemic values in order to do so. other protagonists can be genuinely committed to belief in such a past; given the overriding importance of national pride and respect for their national past, a narrative legitimating those values, in their view, cannot be anything but factual and objective. Whether the resulting mutual tenacity arises from conscious fabrications by political elites or from genuine, popularly generated conviction, practical as opposed to argumentative means for resolving the dispute become tempting as the confrontation drags on. It is at this point, in tense diplomatic confrontations, that the much-vaunted right of nations to write their past as they see fit comes to grief. This understanding goes some way to explaining the interminable nature and diplomatic repercussions of the war history debates between Japan, North and South Korea and China. (55)

A striking feature of this debate has been the constant invocation of historical fact on all sides of the rhetoric. Korean and Chinese politicians have accused the Yasukuni Shrine of what they see as its militarism and historical denialism, and school history textbooks of distorting or omitting historical facts. Japanese political leaders have countered that key allegations in Chinese and Korean narratives of wartime victimization, including the 300,000 death toll in the Nanjing Massacre or the impressment of Korean women into sexual slavery are "not based on objective facts." (56) In each case political leaders rely upon an established patriotic narrative of their own nation's past in criticizing conceptions of the past current in their neighbors' narratives.

There are a number of reasons for the strong influence these narratives exercise in the sometimes troubled relations between East Asian nations. The Chinese government remains authoritarian in character, the North Korean government is markedly so, and the government in South Korea was until twenty years ago. All these countries share twentieth-century experiences of Japanese annexation, colonialism and military occupation. under authoritarian governments, three functions of history education and of national representations of the past are to foster national unity, to channel inevitable social discontents in the direction of particular internal and external foes and to legitimate the current political regime, asserting its connection with foundational national events. Japan's past aggressions provide an excellent rallying point; what Zheng Wang calls "victim and victor narratives" of past oppression and of courageous resistance by forerunners of the current regime meet all functions admirably. (57) Collective memory of Japanese aggression, alongside signs of historical revisionism by modern Japanese politicians, has also provided raw material for a reactive form of nationalism, with popular (and not necessarily government-imposed) national self-definition solidified by reference to the oppression of a former invader or colonial power. (58) This nationalism persisted and perhaps even strengthened in South Korea as it democratized, and continues to influence its history education syllabuses in schools. (59)

Japan presents a more complicated case, and not only because it has not been an authoritarian state for over sixty years. Patriotic war narratives like that of the Yushukan are not the subjects of national consensus. Nevertheless, a desire to rehabilitate Japan's wartime past, to rebuild national pride and to foster a more assertive international standing are at the heart of defenses of such narratives by some Japanese intellectuals and government ministers. This resolve to reassert national pride has stiffened in response to the reactive nationalisms of Japan's neighbors.

It might be claimed that since Japan was the aggressor and colonizer in its past relations with China and Korea, historical interrogation of practical past narratives must fall in large part to Japan. Yet given the impasse described above, it seems that there is an onus upon scholars and intellectuals from all these countries to cooperate in unblocking it. The trilateral history textbook writing projects undertaken by Chinese, Korean and Japanese scholars since 2002 are an important beginning in this process. (60) These scholars need to turn public esteem for epistemic values to account, reclaim them for historical inquiry and show that cooperative subjection of patriotic, "practical pasts" to historical interrogation can resolve damaging diplomatic confrontations, while leaving room for more balanced, informed and mutually respectful forms of national remembrance.

The point here is not that patriotic pasts be made to labor constantly under the epistemic constraints of historical scholarship, but that they become flexible enough to accommodate historians' criticisms of egregious factual distortions, patriotic biases and romanticisms about wartime experience, and change accordingly. It is important in this respect not to misinterpret Oakeshott's conception of the practical past as a negated "other" for scholarly history, by means of which it can define itself and delegitimate its perceived rivals in myth and patriotic memory. (61) We can take Oakeshott's point that in the practical past there is an experience of the past different from that of the historian, even if we do not have to go as far as he did in making that difference categorical. One mark of this difference in a patriotic practical past is the centrality of moral or spiritual valuations in its storytelling and rituals. Such valuations are (I would argue) incidental to epistemic value-laden historical narratives. For this reason, expectations that practical past narratives conform strictly to epistemic values, or beliefs that they as a matter of course do, are largely beside the point, if not quite category mistakes. Here sufficient space is opened for historical criticism to stand in a second-order relation to the storytelling traditions of the patriotic practical past.

It is difficult to say whether the Yasukuni Shrine will be able to submit its war narrative to such criticism and modify it accordingly. In the end this would require a complete spiritual reorientation away from the old State Shinto and a reappraisal of the values that the Shrine's kami died for; a detachment of Shinto spiritualism from its prior association with emperor veneration and ideals of military sacrifice. It is hard to imagine the shrine accommodating a radically different patriotic narrative in which soldiers and civilians who criticized or refused to comply with militarism become the foci of patriotic memory of the wartime era (as they have in contemporary Germany), and in which the war dead are propitiated and mourned for having died in a wrongful war. (62)

We have seen that the Yushukan narrative, and other patriotic, practical pasts like it, can justifiably be called to answer to historical criticism even if they are not historical narrative. Now we must ask whether narratives of this type are also answerable to individual memory.

DISSENTING WAR MEMORIES AND THE YUSHUKAN

As I noted above, in an Oakeshottian perspective testimony from memory has no special epistemic privilege compared to other data through which we historically reconstruct the past. The historian critically interrogates all such data in building an inferential knowledge of the past. But I have also outlined arguments for recognizing personal memory of past events as having an epistemic privilege in our common understanding of the past. In addition to its use in establishing inferential knowledge of the past, personal memory also potentially gives direct epistemic access to past events, with distinct criteria holding for assessing whether it does succeed in doing this (and is not fabricated or distorted). Memory thus conceived imposes constraints upon what beliefs about the past can count as historical knowledge of the past. There very obviously exists a great body of testimony recounted by the victims of Japanese military aggression during the Asia-Pacific War, attesting to atrocities against civilians, former sex slaves, slave laborers and prisoners of war, and it has been accumulated and published since at least the time of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals. Some historical studies incorporating this testimony have explicitly contrasted it against, and made strongly critical observations regarding, the war narrative at the Yushukan. (63)

It may still be possible to salvage something of a defense of the Yushukan narrative as a "practical past" autonomous from obligation to epistemic constraints. According to this defense, this narrative does not have to answer to the memories of victims of Japan's military campaigns just as, say, the united States' national memory of the Asia-Pacific War does not have to answer to the memories of Japanese civilians who survived the incendiary and atomic bombings of Japanese cities. I trust that my views on such a defense are already clear. The price that such forms of national memory would have to pay for such autonomy is a renunciation of any aspiration to being a historical narrative. one additional problem is that Japanese war survivors have also publicized dissenting memories, and amongst them one deserves special mention: the Okinawan scholar and former Okinawa governor Ota Masahide. Ota experienced wartime service as a member of a student conscript unit, the blood and Iron Corps, during the battle of Okinawa in 1945. In his case, memories of his wartime experience have underwritten his motivation to criticize the Yasukuni Shrine. There is also a clear divide between what he remembers and how the Yushukan commemorates the events he remembers.

As I have already been pointed out, the Yasukuni Shrine has given special mention to the non-combatant Okinawan student conscripts who served as nurses, messengers, laborers and ammunition carriers during the battle of Okinawa. According to the pamphlet distributed to foreign visitors to the Yasukuni Shrine, they "rose up to defend their homeland from the invading united States forces" and those who died in the fighting "found their resting place in the Yasukuni Shrine." (64) Ota Masuhide was one of those young people who "rose up to defend their homeland" in 1945. As someone who had come from humble origins to study teaching at an elite college in Okinawa, he aspired with other upwardly mobile young Okinawans to be assimilated into Japanese society. He had thus completely imbibed the militaristic ideology of the time, believing that his life was a part of Japan's "national will" (kokka ishi) and "war system" (senso taisei). (65) However, as he recounted in his 1962 book about the Okinawa battle, the experience of the Okinawa battlefield and its mass killings made him call that way of life into question. during his stint as a prisoner of war he realized he could no longer entrust his life to such "empty slogans," and like his compatriots, he renounced the militaristic ideology he had formerly adhered to. (66) The stage was set for his career as an academic, peace activist and independent-minded governor of Okinawa. As governor of Okinawa he helped establish a memorial for all of the Okinawan battle dead, including both combatants and noncombatants, but he has been highly critical of other war memorials in Okinawa, and of the Yasukuni Shrine. In a recent book Ota criticized a trend in Okinawa for war monuments to be built with the same ideals as the Yasukuni Shrine, noting that 32 out of 73 war monuments erected in Okinawa since 1960 "glorify the war." (67) His view of the shrine's wartime role can be summarized in the following assessment: "in the end [it] became a facility that acted as a fundamental spiritual center for Japan's militaristic ideology, a fact no one can deny." (68)

The discrepancies between Ota's individual memory of the Okinawan battle and the Yushukan's commemoration of his and his peers' sacrifice are extremely telling. For Ota the militarism that started the war, the hopelessness of the Japanese military position in the Okinawan campaign and the slaughter in it of so many civilians, including hundreds of heavily indoctrinated teenaged conscripts, discredited the ideology for which the Yasukuni Shrine still stands. but for the Yushukan, the battle of Okinawa was a righteous struggle, in which the spirits of Ota's peers earned enshrinement at the Yasukuni for their sacrifice.

For all the reasons I have outlined above, the struggle between the historically corroborated memories of war survivors such as Ota and the Yushukan narrative is asymmetrical. Cultural historian Ueno Chizuko has offered a contrasting view of dissenting war memory to mine; she writes of how a separate reality embodied in the remembered experiences of war crimes survivors, such as the Korean women pressed into sexual servitude for the Japanese army, can "overturn" the dominant reality of the powerful, including wartime perpetrators of sexual crimes and their contemporary apologists. However, Ueno disavows such criteria as "correct" and "mistaken" for adjudicating between these realities. (69) This suggests a rather symmetrical struggle in which it is unclear what other criteria will determine that the remembered realities of minorities prevail over the remembered realities of the powerful.

The asymmetry I am speaking of arises when dissenting testimony from personal experience satisfies criteria for its veracity and is corroborated by evidence, for that verification and corroboration place it into a powerful, authoritative relation with the patriotic past narrative it dissents from: it has epistemic warrant, in the eyes of scholars, and also of a national and international reading public. A patriotic-past narrative that does not accommodate such testimony, acknowledge its criticisms and modify itself enough to include more diverse experiences of war, often lacks unifying, public legitimacy. It might be objected that this is an inevitable failing of all forms of collective memory of war. If they are to be intelligible and to be valued, they cannot help but be selective in their use of recorded war memories and use only those that legitimate particular beliefs about a past generation. The important question is whether such a narrative will be valued as an object of national consensus where it is in conflict with the memories of prominent surviving members of the generation it purports to commemorate, and with the published testimony of those now dead. The Yushukan narrative and others like it in Japan have failed to gain this status.

*

The arguments presented here should not be taken as amounting to opposition to the existence of the Yasukuni Shrine or to the right of the Japanese people to commemorate their war dead. I suspect that many people, including former Japanese prime ministers, pay their respects there without admitting any belief in the war narrative exhibited in the Yushukan. In any case, my aim has been to question the untrammeled right of the Yasukuni Shrine and its supporters to write war history as they see fit, and also to question the autonomy of the resulting narrative from historical and memory-based criticism. but the horizons of the criticisms here outlined extend far beyond the Yasukuni narrative. Patriotic, practical conceptions of the past in Japan, in its regional neighbors or in any other nation cannot attain the same evidentially grounded experience of the past achievable in history, and as collective memory they cannot attain the same direct epistemic access to past events potentially afforded by personal memory. Nevertheless, in conflicts of the type described in this essay, they must become answerable to historical scrutiny, and to the demands of personal memory.

NOTES

My thanks are due to the editors and two referees at History & Memory for comments and criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper, to Kanno Reika for proofreading my translations of Japanese language texts and to my former students Fukunaga Midori, Mikami Tsuyoshi and Ogawa Mika for their input into some of the ideas discussed in this paper.

(1.) Takashima Shuji, "Japan's War dead and the Yasukuni Shrine," Japan Echo 33, no. 5 (October 2006) (available atwww.japanecho.com/sum/2006/330503. html).

(2.) See, for example, the essays published in John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan's Past (New York: Columbia university Press, 2008).

(3.) John Breen "Yasukuni and the loss of Historical Memory," in ibid., 143, 153.

(4.) There is overlap between this study and Zheng Wang's background analysis of the patriotic, collective memories and narratives that underpin history textbook writing in Japan, China and South Korea. Although I undertake a more philosophical analysis of the Japanese patriotic war narrative within the institutional setting of the Yasukuni Shrine, my general views about such narratives are the same as Wang's. See Zheng Wang, "old Wounds, New Narratives: Joint History Writing and Peacebuilding in East Asia," History & Memory 21, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2009): 101-26.

(5.) John Nelson. "Social Memory as ritual Practice: Commemorating Spirits of the Military dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine," Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 2 (May 2003): 449-50.

(6.) Ibid., 451.

(7.) Ibid., 449-50.

(8.) John Breen, "Yasukuni Shrine: ritual and Memory," Japan Focus, June 3, 2005, http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2060, n.p.

(9.) Stephen large, Emperor Hirohito and Showa Japan (London: Routledge, 1992), 60-63; see also the excerpts of the wartime moral education tract "The Way of Subjects" in David J. Lu, Japan: A Documentary History: The Late Tokugawa Period to the Present (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 439-40.

(10.) Beatrice Trefalt notes that by the 1930s the Yasukuni Shrine's cult of the fallen soldier had taken on a central role in Japan's educational and political life. See her "Fanaticism, Japanese Soldiers and the Pacific War, 1937-1945," in Matthew Hughes and Gaynor Johnson, eds., Fanaticism and Conflict in the Modern Age (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2005), 41.

(11.) The description that follows is derived from the author's observations on four visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, in May 2006, November 2007, February 2008 and February 2010.

(12.) Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Japan and German (London: vintage, 1995), 224-25.

(13.) John Breen, "Introduction: A Yasukuni Geneology," in idem, ed., Yasukuni, 10.

(14.) Nitta Hitoshi, "And Why Shouldn't the Prime Minister Worship at Yasukuni? A Personal view," in Breen, ed., Yasukuni, 135.

(15.) See Okazaki Hisahiko, "Change Needed at Yasukuni," Japan Times, September 5, 2006; and "Telling the Truth at the Yasukuni Shrine," ibid., February 2, 2007.

(16.) See Nitta, "And Why Shouldn't the Prime Minister?" 125-42; Keichiro Kobori Yasukuni Jinja wo kangaeru (Thinking through the Yasukuni Shrine) (Tokyo: Japan Policy research Center, 1999); Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensoron (on war) (Tokyo: Gentosha, 1998).

(17.) Nitta, "And Why Shouldn't the Prime Minister?" 140

(18.) Buruma, The Wages of Guilt, 223.

(19.) Breen, "Yasukuni and the loss of Historical Memory," 148, 152, 161.

(20.) Breen, "Yasukuni Shrine."

(21.) From gallery 8 of the Yushukan, "The China Incident." rather inconsistently, a display only a few meters away refers to "anti-Japanese harassment and terrorism" in Manchukuo, and that "under such circumstances, the Kwantung Army resorted to force. As a result, Manchukuo was established." There are frequent references in this gallery to the "terrorism" of the Chinese provoking defensive actions from the Japanese forces in China, leading to full-scale conflict.

(22.) From gallery 10. The exhibit on the "Nanjing Incident" refers to general Matsui's orders demanding adherence to strict discipline and his warning that "anyone committing unlawful acts would be strictly punished." The exhibit does not state whether these orders were obeyed or whether offenders were subsequently punished.

(23.) From gallery 11, "greater East Asian War (1)": "The embargo on oil threatens Japan's very survival. Japan is faced with momentous decisions."

(24.) Thus a display on the disastrous Imphal campaign in Burma in 1944 admits that Japanese forces were "short of ammunition and supplies due largely to negligence of logistics" and that this led to terrible suffering for Japanese troops. From gallery 12, "The greater East Asian War (2)."

(25.) An Introduction to Yasukuni Jinja, multilingual pamphlet distributed to foreign visitors at the Yushukan, February 2008.

(26.) Notably, and most recently, Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

(27.) Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (oxford: oxford university Press, 1933).

(28.) Ibid., 42-43, 112, 113, 106.

(29.) Ibid., 105.

(30.) Ibid., 103.

(31.) Ibid., 104.

(32.) Michael Oakeshott, On History (oxford: basil Blackwell, 1983), 43.

(33.) Oakeshott, Experience, 315.

(34.) Ibid., 102.

(35.) See r. g. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. J. Van der Dussen (1946; oxford: oxford university Press, 1993).

(36.) David Cockburn, Other Times: Philosophical Perspectives on Past, Present and Future (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1997), 54.

(37.) Ibid., 258; for an earlier treatment of memory as a source of direct knowledge of the past, see Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 145-51.

(38.) Cockburn, Other Times, 306.

(39.) Ibid., 251-52, 254.

(40.) Ibid., 268.

(41.) Ibid., 271.

(42.) For a similar view, see Russell, Inquiry, 148, 151.

(43.) Cockburn, Other Times, 280.

(44.) Ibid., 246.

(45.) Ingrid M. Cordon et al., "Memory for Traumatic Experiences in Early Childhood," Developmental Review 24, no. 1 (March 2004): 110-11, 117-18.

(46.) See for instance Elizabeth Loftus, "Make-believe Memories," American Psychologist 58, no. 11 (November 2003): 867-73; Kenneth Pope, "Memory, Abuse and Science: Questioning Claims about the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic," American Psychologist 51, no. 9 (September 1996): 957-74.

(47.) Leigh Payne, "In Search of remorse: Confessions by Perpetrators of Past violence," Brown Journal of World Affairs 11, no. 1 (Summer/Fall 2004): 115-25.

(48.) For an example of such selective recounting, see Ueno Chizuko, Nationalism and Gender, trans. Beverley Yamamoto (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2004), 131-32.

(49.) Nitta, "And Why Shouldn't the Prime Minister?" 134, 135.

(50.) I owe this definition to Hillary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard university Press, 1991), 138.

(51.) Ibid.

(52.) Oakeshott, Experience, 330.

(53.) For a discussion of the role practical pasts have played in perpetuating one such conflict--between Israel and the Palestinians--see Daniel Bar-Tal, "Collective Memory of Physical violence: Its Contribution to the Culture of violence," in Ed Cairns and Micheal d. roe, eds., The Role of Memory in Ethnic Conflict (Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 77-93.

(54.) Oakeshott, Experience, 103.

(55.) The current dispute between South Korea and China over the territorial affiliations of the ancient Korguryo and Parhae kingdoms can be seen in a similar light. both sides' demands for greater historical accuracy in this dispute are compromised by their efforts to assimilate these kingdoms to modern national and cultural identities See Andrei Lankov, "The legacy of long-gone States," Asia Times, September 16, 2006.

(56.) Some sample dispatches from this war over facts: "Japan's right-Wing Textbook Is Teaching Material by Negative Example: Comment," People's Daily, April 6, 2005; and "don't Misunderstand Comfort Women Issue," editorial, Yomiuri Shimbun, March 7, 2007.

(57.) Wang, "old Wounds, New Narratives," 109.

(58.) For an analysis of reactive nationalism, see Daqing Yang, "The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: reflections on Historical Inquiry," in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: university of California Press, 2000), 133-79.

(59.) Gilbert Rozman, "Japan and Korea: Should the U.S. be Worried about Their New Spat in 2001?" Pacific Review 15, no. 1 (2002): 1-28.

(60.) Wang, "old Wounds, New Narratives," 102-103.

(61.) I agree with Dominick LaCapra that attempts by scholarly historians to relegate myth and ritual to a "scapegoated other" status only invite a "return of the repressed": for instance, in a populist and nationalist backlash against "elitist" scholars. See his "representing the Holocaust: reflections on the Historians' debate," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limitations of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard university Press, 1992), 126.

(62.) remarkably, some conservative politicians such as former Prime Minister Abe still believe that the self-sacrifice of the kamikaze pilots provides a moral example for the duty of modern Japanese to protect their "freedom and democracy." See his discussion of the kamikaze pilot Washio Katsumi in Abe Shinzo, Utsukushii kuni e (Towards a beautiful country) (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2006), 107-8.

(63.) For an example of a popular history that uses the recounted memories of former prisoners of war in this manner, see Cameron Forbes, Hellfire: The Story of Australia, Japan and the Prisoners of War (Sydney: Macmillan, 2005), 26-29, 46-48.

(64.) An Introduction to Yasukuni Jinja.

(65.) Ota Masahide, Okinawa no kokoro: Okinawa sen to watashi (The spirit of Okinawa: The battle of Okinawa and I) (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1962), 2.

(66.) Ibid.

(67.) Ota Masahide, Shishatachi wa, imada nemurezu (Even now, the dead cannot rest) (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 2004), 24.

(68.) Ibid., 223.

(69.) Ueno, Nationalism and Gender, 128-29.

O'Dwyer, Shaun