The August 5th issue of Jinja Shinpō carried a long interview with the new chief priest of Yasukuni Jinja, Ōtsuka Umio. He is an unusual choice because he was not a priest when appointed, nor is he the scion of one of the eminent families of Japanese history, like the Fujiwara, Tokugawa, or Imperial line. Rather, he is a retired admiral, and previous head of the officer school of the Maritime Self Defense Forces. (Not the navy. We don’t have a navy. Or any other armed forces.) The fact that his given name means “sea man” makes me wonder whether there was a family tradition, but the interview does not touch on it.
The interview does touch on the problems he had of having to learn how to serve as a chief priest in about three weeks between his appointment and the spring Grand Matsuri. He also mentions that all the priests at Yasukuni spend a lot of time cleaning, even the senior priests — indeed, the senior priests are responsible for the areas closest to the kami. (I wonder how general that is. It is plausibly common practice.) He remarked that people in the military self defense forces also spend a lot of time cleaning, but that senior officers do not do it, and that he had suggested to his former colleagues that it might be a good idea to change that.
He does not say anything directly about why he was asked to take the role, but he does say something about his background that suggests the reason. He had, apparently, attended the main festivals at Yasukuni 24 times before being appointed. That’s not every year, but he was on active service in the self defense forces (and then ambassador to Djibouti for a couple of years), so it suggests that he was making a very determined effort to attend if he could. His background has no particular link to Shinto (he described his background as typically Japanese: he went to a Catholic school quite close to Yasukuni, and his home had a kamidana and Buddhist altar), but a senior member of the self defense forces with a strong personal link to Yasukuni is a strong candidate for the chief priest.
A number of the things that he did say were interesting. He emphasised that he has always seen Yasukuni as a place where he could remind himself of what he was committed to do in defence of peace (lay down his life, basically), and that he had never seen the jinja as militaristic. He praised contemporary Japanese culture, which does not see war and conflict as the natural state of things, and emphasised the importance of the Shinto belief in living in harmony with nature, rather than mastering it.
His comments on Yūshūkan, the museum at Yasukuni, were particularly notable. The ground floor is mainly given over to introducing a selection of the people enshrined there, so there are lots of stories of young men killed in their twenties or thirties. The first floor, however, is a history of Japanese security policy from 1854 to 1945, which portrays it all as defensive responses to the actions of the West. Revd Ōtsuka said that this museum takes a particular point of view on history, that it is important to decide for yourself whether it is right or wrong. He does not mention his own opinion, but the orthodox position in the Shinto establishment is that that is not a point of view but simply the truth, and that no true Japanese should think otherwise.
He spent considerable time talking about the obvious, but crucial, fact that Yasukuni is at a transition point. It is almost 80 years since anyone died in military service to the Tennō, and so the youngest people who can actually remember anyone enshrined at Yasukuni are in their mid to late eighties. Until now, Yasukuni has mainly been supported for emotional reasons — bereaved families grieving for those they have lost. In the future, it must be, he said, supported by people who have made a more rational decision to honour those who gave their lives for their country. The jinja has to explain why that is important, and how it should be done. That will, he said, influence how things are presented in Yūshūkan, and how the adherents’ society deals with its members. In short, he thinks that Yasukuni needs to develop its own theology, one it can share with the other jinja for the war dead.
Based on what he chose to mention, and what he chose to avoid, in this interview, I think he might be looking to make significant changes to Yasukuni Jinja’s approach. The fact that he was an active member of the Self Defense Forces will give him significant moral authority. We will see what happens.