Justin Bieber stumbles across the ‘soul of Japan’

As he was being chauffeured through Tokyo this week, pop singer Justin Bieber spotted a leafy oasis in the city's landscape of concrete and steel and asked his driver to stop.

A quick photo and the teen heart-throb was back in his car tapping out a brief, innocuous message to his 51 million Instagram followers. “Thank you for all your blessings,” it read.

Unfortunately for Bieber, he had stumbled across one of east Asia’s most controversial pieces of real estate. Yasukuni Shrine, occupying a single square kilometre of Japan’s capital, is widely considered elsewhere a monument to war, empire and undigested militarism.

The photograph triggered a flood of criticism across Asia and even a comment from China's official spokesman, Qin Gang. Conservative US bi-monthly Foreign Policy said Bieber had "just accidentally offended 1.3 billion people".

The bewildered warbler issued a hasty apology, saying he was "mislead" (sic) to believe that the shrine was only a place of prayer. "To anyone I have offended I am extremely sorry. I love you China and I love you Japan. "

Anne Frank furore
The reaction recalled Bieber's visit to the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam a year ago, when he caused a similar controversy by speculating that the Jewish teenager, who died in a second World War concentration camp, would have been a "belieber", ie a fan.

For many, the Shinto shrine at Yasukuni is a place of prayer, a memorial to Japan’s 2.4 million war dead. But it also honours more than 1,000 war criminals, including the men who led Japan’s military campaign across Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. China, which suffered millions of casualties, bore the brunt of that campaign.

A museum on the shrine’s grounds says teenage suicide bombers (Kamikaze) are heroes and the emperor, reduced to mortal status after the second World War, is still a deity. Shinto officials who run the shrine believe they are protecting the “soul of Japan”.

For much of the time, Yasukuni drops beneath the world’s media radar, and the loudest sound is the buzzing of insects and the shuffle of old footsteps to the main hall where Bieber had his photograph taken.

But Shinzo Abe drove the shrine back on to the world's front pages last December when he became the first Japanese prime minister since 2006 to make a pilgrimage.

The visit caused uproar in South Korea and China, which accused Abe of “trampling on the feelings of Japan’s war victims”.

A self-described patriot, Abe has since explained he was merely paying respects to the people who fought for their country. In well-rehearsed comments, he said he was “praying for peace” at the shrine. “We should never create a world where people suffer in war,” he said.

As Abe knows, however, such platitudes tell, at best, only half the story. The guardians of the shrine, and many of those who visit it, are true believers who do not accept what they call the victor’s narrative of the second World War.

One of these guardians, Nagayoshi Matsudaira, was the shrine’s head priest in 1978 when he secretly enshrined the 14 men who led the war. The men were tried and executed in 1948 by the Tokyo war crimes tribunal.

Matsudaira was hardly a neutral observer. His father was a wartime commander in Japan’s imperial navy; his father-in-law was tried and shot as a war criminal by the Dutch. On the rare occasions when he discussed his actions, Matsudaira was clear about their purpose.

“I argued so-called class-A war criminals should also be venerated as Japan’s spiritual rehabilitation would be impossible unless we rejected the Tokyo tribunal,” he said in 1989.

Diplomatic consequences
Ordinary Japanese people have been living with the diplomatic consequences since. One person who apparently understood was emperor Hirohito, the wartime monarch in whose name millions of Japan's soldiers died. After 1978, he never visited the shrine again.

Supporters of prime-ministerial pilgrimages defend the 1978 enshrinement.

“In Japan, our way of thinking about the dead souls is that we don’t criticise them,” says Yutaka Yuzawa, a senior official with the Association of Shinto Shrines.

“They were protecting the emperor, and by extension the Japanese people.”

Even in Japan, however, that argument is controversial. Historian Yoshinobu Higurashi rejects claims that the main impulse for enshrinement was religious.

“In fact, it was a blatantly ideological and political act driven by an urge to justify and legitimise a highly controversial chapter in Japanese history,” he wrote.

This month, almost 1,000 people in Japan filed two separate lawsuits demanding that Abe refrain from making another pilgrimage. US president Barack Obama, during his Tokyo visit this week, is also likely to have pressured the prime minister to stay away from the shrine.

It remains to be seen how Abe will react. Unlike Justin Bieber, his first concern is not one billion angry Chinese, but Japan’s complex wartime legacy of history and politics.