A feminist reading of gender and national memory at the Yasukuni Shrine

Abstract

This article is a feminist examination of gender and national memory at the Yasukuni Shrine. It argues that the spaces and practices of Yasukuni and the adjoining Yūshūkan War Memorial Museum idealize a militarized masculinity, which is constructed through enshrinement to produce nationalist bereavement and a celebration of sacrificial death for the nation. An examination of female enshrinement and presentations of femininity at the shrine raises questions concerning the appropriate roles for women under the nation-state. The analysis then focuses on female military nurses, specifically the Himeyuri Student Nursing Corps, who form the majority of the few women enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine. Their depiction as ‘sacrificial daughters’ is problematized through the concepts of gender, sexuality and otherness to understand the context that enables their enshrinement. Finally, the article assesses the possibilities for resistance to the dominant narrative of national memory in both mainland Japan and Okinawa, with special attention to the recollection of experience in survivor testimonies of the Himeyuri, understood as a discursive negotiation of national memory.

Keywords:

• Japan
• military nurses
• militarism
• Himeyuri
• resistance
• experience

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Bart Gaens, Mikako Iwatake and Johanna Kantola for their comments and support. I am also grateful to the two anonymous referees and the editor for their useful comments and suggestions.

Jemima Repo is a doctoral candidate and researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Helsinki. In the field of gender and politics, her current central research interests include reproductive policy, gender equality and citizenship. In her doctoral thesis she examines the production of gender and citizenship in the context of declining birth rates in Japan and the European Union.

Notes

1. Members of the current Japanese military forces, the Self-Defence Forces, are not enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine, although some are enshrined at other prefectural, nation-protecting shrines (Frühstück 2007: 201).

2. Enloe (2004: 220) points out that most militarizing processes occur during peacetime. In addition, not everyone benefits from peacekeeping processes, as can been seen when women are prostituted to and abused by UN peacekeepers (Enloe 2000b: 99–103).

3. Although the official number of students killed is 219, the official school records were burned in the Battle of Okinawa. Researchers have calculated alternative figures with available knowledge (Angst 1997: 108). Himeyuri Peace Museum's official figure is 135 dead, while others cite lower figures, such as 123 (Yomiuri Shinbun 2007), or dramatically higher figures, such as 190 (Nakamura 1976: 241).

4. Some 28,000 Taiwanese and 21,000 Korean male soldiers who fought for the Japanese army are also enshrined at Yasukuni (Seaton 2005: 299). As with the enshrined Himeyuri, their enshrinement at Yasukuni is justified by presenting them as subordinate sons that sacrificed for the father nation. In the case of Okinawans, the sacrifice of colonized peoples appears to have been accepted as a righteous exchange in a patriarchal relationship between father and son. Correspondingly, the displays at the Yūshūkan War Memorial Museum illustrate the Japanese Imperial Army as ‘liberators’ of these colonialized people, rather than as their oppressors. The masculinity of the ‘liberated’ is coded as weak, powerless, even primitive and requiring rescue and instruction by one that is strong, sovereign and civilized. Absent from the displays at Yūshūkan, including that of Okinawa, are the Japanese atrocities, for example the Nanjing Massacre, for which there is no space in the paternalistic colonial discourse.

5. Nicola Piper (2001) contrasts this dynamic transnational activism with the relative neglect of the comfort women issue in Japanese women's groups. One particularly active group with transnational links, however, is the Violence against Women in War Network (VAWW-NET) who in 2000 staged the International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery in Tokyo. Their latest step was to open the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) in 2005 to gather and exhibit documentation on the lives and experiences of comfort women (WAM 2007). The museum is the first of its kind, is located in Tokyo just a few kilometres from the Yasukuni Shrine and can be conceived as a new space that challenges Yasukuni's version of national history.