Next year is the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In advance of that, Jinja Shinpō is running a series of articles contributed by the Gokoku Jinja across Japan, each introducing one of the kami venerated there — that is, one of the war dead. (The series title is “Our Jinja’s Enshrined Kami” — わが社の御祭神.)
The Gokoku (“Nation Protecting”) Jinja were formalised in the final years, and in a couple of cases the final months, of the war, but many of them have roots in the nineteenth century. They are local jinja at which the war dead from an area, normally a prefecture, are enshrined and venerated. Unlike Yasukuni Jinja, some of them also enshrine people who have died in non-war service to the state since the war, but their kami are overwhelmingly military casualties. Most prefecture have exactly one, but a handful have two or more (I am not sure about the reasons, which are probably local and different in each case), and neither Tokyo nor Kanagawa has any.
The series is proving very interesting because each jinja appears to have a free choice of whom to introduce, and how, and so these choices tell us something about how the jinja wants to be perceived. So far, the articles have avoided glorifying the idea of fighting for the Tennō. One introduced a woman who was killed during the Japanese civil wars in the late nineteenth century, another a kamikaze pilot who died in his teens. A recent article was much more about the posthumous son of the dead man, and his visits to the area in China where his father died. Another was largely about the struggles of the wife left behind when her husband died, and is quite clear about the man not wanting to leave his family to go and fight. A lot of the articles are based around the accounts of bereaved family members.
The impression given by this series, then, is that the Gokoku Jinja in general see their primary role as that of mourning the war dead, and supporting the bereaved. Their attitude towards war, or at least the wars they mention, appears to vary — some articles would not be out of place in an anti-war collection, while others say too much about the nobility of fighting to qualify for that — but all are, unsurprisingly, committed to honouring the dead whom they enshrine.
This creates a conflicted attitude towards war. On the one hand, the jinja are aware of the suffering and grief caused by these people’s deaths. On the other, they do not want to criticise those who volunteered to, for example, fly a kamikaze mission at the age of eighteen.
I think that this series may also, in a sense, be supposed to mark a shift in the role of these jinja. The people who can remember the war dead are now all over eighty, and the jinja are going to have to change the people they serve, and the way they serve them, in order to survive. The enshrined kami will not change, but they must now, as in this series, be introduced to people who never met them.