Yesterday was election day in Taiwan, and the pitch of the anti-China warmongering rhetoric from the neoliberal-neoconservative Japanese political block under the defacto leadership of Aso Taro has been conspicuous in the mass media.
In addition, a scandal surrounding the Japanese Self Defense Forces and the shrine has also just come to light, so the timing is right for this long overdue post. The headlines are full of citable evidence that enables these background factors to be synced with present developments in real time.
This blog was the first to raise, in English (or Japanese, for that matter), the attempts to exploit the Meiji Restoration by using the Japanese term “Ishin” from “Meiji Ishin” (i.e., “Meiji Restoration”) in the name of a new political party, and this post addresses topic matter along the same thematic lines. The bigger picture is that some of those with the reigns of political power currently in their grip in Japan are descendants of those that helped bring about the fall of the Tokugawa bakufu with the aid of the U.S. and UK to establish the Meiji Oligarchy (明治藩閥), and all of those parties seek to portray the Meiji Restoration as the pinnacle of Japanese history.
I will post this in rough draft form and try to revisit it later to revise.
DEEP BACKGROUND
First, the Yasukuni
Shrine was established after the Meiji Restoration to honor those that died in
the battles to overthrow the Edo Bakufu (Tokugawa shogunate) and restore the
emperor as sovereign after about 1,000 years of rule by military houses that
were all headed by individuals related to the royal house with one exception: Toyotomi
Hideyoshi.
The Meiji
Restoration was carried out in large part by the two feudal domains (“han”) of
Choshu and Satsuma located at the western end of the Japanese archipelago. After
the U.S. opened up the country with the Black Ships, and imposed unequal treaty
terms, including extraterritoriality on Japan, the UK engaged in arms smuggling
and trade with Choshu and Satsuma through Hong Kong, and the U.S. provided
training and support to those seeking to overthrow the government as well.
These events
happened after the West failed to infiltrate and undermine the Japanese polity by
employing Christianity as a Trojan Horse of sort, a typical colonial modus operandi.
Oda Nobunaga had to suppress the Christians after he had initially allowed the
first church (called a Christian temple) to be established in Kyoto.
The West had to make recourse to force to open the country, and eventually resorted to supporting the anti-Bakufu “loyalists” that wanted to restore the emperor as sovereign with appeal to the authority of Shinto mythology. There was a movement called sonno-joi (revere the emperor, expel the barbarians) that preceded and then spearheaded the zealot movement, which, counterintuitively had been enabled, to a certain degree, by the tolerant policies toward religion of the Bakufu, leading to divergences even within the house of Tokugawa itself. Traces of that can probably be traced back to the nationalistic Confucian school of thought that came to be known as the Mito School of Mito domain which, under the tutelage of Tokugawa Mitsukuni (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Mitsukuni) in the form of the Mito school of that produced a mytho-centric compilation of the history of Japan (“Great History of Japan”), and later a document entitled “Shinron” (New Theses”) by Aizawa Seishisai. It’s expedient here to quote the Wikipedia entry on the later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aizawa_Seishisai):
In 1799 he became involved in the compilation of the Dai Nihon-shi (Great History of Japan) being undertaken by the Mito school.
In 1825 he wrote his Shinron ("New Theses"), a collection of essays that dealt with issues such as Tokugawa defence policy and how the ships were a threat to Japan. Aizawa also tried to describe conditions in the West and theorize why those states had gained so much control; in his opinion Westerners used religion to inculcate conformity in the masses.
He also claimed that Christianity was used by the colonial powers to subvert native cultures and governments by creating a fifth column that would collaborate with and facilitate military conquest by Europeans. He discussed the religious policies established by the Toyotomi government and continued by their successors, the Tokugawa shogunate, in this context.
Furthermore, he believed that if Japan's way of life was to survive, it would need to take up its own state religion in order to prevent cultural assimilation via Christianization and discussed the concept of kokutai ("national polity") in this context. The Shinron would become an important work for the sonnō jōi movement and his theory of the Kokutai would be developed by future thinkers.
Suffice it to say that the "history" of Japan composed by the Mito school scholars was not objective in any modern sense of the word, and though I haven't read it, its narrative can be surmised from what others have written about it (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1tg5hgw).
H. D. Harutoonian wrote a review of the book by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi called, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 in which the first English language translation was presented, and the review is excerpted below for context.
But, above all else, it was Aizawa Seishisai's Shinron (1825) which catalyzed the Mito discourse into a classic argument capable of convincing samurai of the dangers confronting the realm. It mobilized a generation of "loyalists" to act in their own interest...
For a work which acquired the status of a national classic and has proven a source of inspiration in modern Japanese society for those who especially worry over questions of identity and foreign influence, it is appropriate that at last we have available in English Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi's translation of the Shinron, accompanied by a long and informed account of the genealogy of its production and of its intended meaning for late Tokugawa society. Aware that the text's popularity "took on a life of its own" (p. x) despite Aizawa's more immediate intention, Wakabayashi appears to be less committed to explaining this dynamic, and the subsequent canonization of Shinron as a classic, than he is with accounting for the particular conditions prompting its production, in order to show how a cul- turally xenophobic statement was constructed under the sign of Western learning.
Clearly, Wakabayashi is committed to the historiographical convention which has sought to demonstrate that the collapse of the Tokugawa was precipitated by outside forces (the West), and that the incorporation of Western knowledge established the foundations for Japan's later successes in modernization. Yet, the very conditions that charged the Shinron with so much meaning for young samurai could, in fact, militate against its "enjoyment" and "usefulness" for general readers, especially if the translation were not supplied with a historical gloss. {omission} Aizawa and the Shinron will never appeal to a general reader of English precisely because the Shinron's status as a classic in Japan relies upon the power of the text to constantly evoke the image of reference and representation as a historical trope signifying a crisis specific to the Japanese experience. Fortunately for the modern reader, Wakabayashi has concentrated his energies to supply the necessary supplement.
As stated earlier, Wakabayashi's purpose is to provide a genealogy of the idea of expulsion (joi), which figured so prominently in Aizawa's text. {omission} Apparently, he wishes to revise interpretations of the late Tokugawa period that have insisted upon seeing Aizawa and the Mito inflection of Confucianism as instances of retrograde cultural xenophobia, the last stand of Japanese reaction, so to speak, inimical to the achievement of independence and modernity. {omission} In order to make this move, it is vital to show that the "expulsionism" associated with the earlier policy of seclusion (sakoku) and the type promoted later by Aizawa and the Expulsion Edict represented two quite distinct moments, which were not necessarily related in a single causal series. {omission} In this regard, Wakabayashi must argue that what Aizawa learned from the West and, thus, occupied the heart of his own discourse was the identity of Western national power and the unifying role of a civic religion. Yet, this results in weighting an observation derived from Western history over the nativist elements that Aizawa enlisted everywhere to give this identity expression, without offering the necessary explanation as to why the former should have appealed more than the latter to eager samurai activists.
The policy of “joi” (expel the barbarians) had been around since Oda Nobunaga had to suppress the Christians after it was discerned that the evangelizing mission encompassed a divisive political subterfuge, so that aspect was not new to Japan in the 18th century. The Tokugawa also had to engage with that problem, eventually decided to close the country to foreigners.
Thus the Tokugawa
faced a dilemma in that it could not simply repudiate the growth of
mytho-centric history in the face of the problem with foreigners trying to
infiltrate and undermine Japanese society in response to which it had closed
the country and promoted all forms of Japanese culture and religion, including
so-called “national learning” (kokugaku (国学)),
which started as a literary movement aimed at restoring understanding of
ancient texts. Various threads converged to see this nativistic movement evolve
into quasi-popular support to restore the emperor as sovereign of a basically theocratic
state. The Tokugawa was actually not opposed to reforming the system of governance
of the country and there were great strides made toward reconciling the
shogunate and the court before Emperor Komei met his untimely demise by smallpox.
Tokugawa Keiki (also
known as Yoshinobu) continued to implement reformist policies, but that was
opposed by the radicals among the court nobles, including seven whom had fled
Kyoto to take refuge in Choshu, as well as the prefectures of Choshu, then Satsuma,
Fukui, and Tosa. Tokugawa Keiki was spoken highly of by the Westerners who had a
chance to interact with him, and appears to have been a very capable statesman.
I’ve talked about Marius Jansen’s book, Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration numerous time, so this post is going to introduce another monograph about the Meiji Restoration focusing on Choshu (Choshu by Albert M. Crag, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration (https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Albert-M-Craig/dp/0739101935/ref=sr_1_9?crid=3ESU3YNUKS4ZT&keywords=choshu%2C+albert+m.+craig&qid=1705152148&s=english-books&sprefix=choshu+albert+m.+craig%2Cenglish-books%2C244&sr=1-9)),
as well as a book on the Yasukuni Shrine edited by John Breen: Yasukini, the war dead and the struggle for Japan's past (https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/John-Breen/dp/1850659079/ref=sr_1_4?crid=1CQBNFK4RGDQM&keywords=Yasukuni%2C+the+war+dead+and+the+struggle+for+Japan%E2%80%99s+past&qid=1705154153&s=english-books&sprefix=choshu+albert+m.+craig%2Cenglish-books%2C1057&sr=1-4)
I’ve posted about Kishi Nobusuke and Abe Shinzo, who represent a tie to the Choshu faction of the Meiji Oligarchy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_oligarchy), and I have briefly described some connections of Aso Taro to the Satsuma faction of the Meiji Oligarchy (https://kyoto-inside-out.blogspot.com/2019/11/americas-unholy-trinity-of-evangelical.html), but of course there is more to the story. It could be said that Aso Taro is now performing the role of leading hawk in Japan, since the former Defense Minister Kishi (great grandson of Kishi Nobusuke and from Yamaguchi prefecture (formerly Choshu)) was forced to resign after stating that Taiwan represented a “red line” for Japan vis-à-vis mainland China in 2023.
NEAR BACKGROUND
After the incursion
of the Black Ships, the Tokugawa government was assailed as the cause of the weakness
of Japan on the grounds that Confucianism and Shinto mythology mandated that
the emperor be the ruler. So the Tokugawa was labeled as a sort of usurper of
imperial power by outsider domains ("tozama" domains) seeking to exploit the
court.
There were
courtiers that advocated rejecting the demands of the American for trade
treaties and to open ports, but the bakufu knew that they could not resist the
force of western military might. One of the first domains to side with such
courtiers, who came to be regarded as the radical faction, was Choshu, and one
reason for this is that Choshu had retained a somewhat special relationship to
the court, having once funded an enthronement ceremony when there were no other
funds, based upon the purported derivation of the Mori line of feudal lords of
the domain to a woman who was impregnated by the first son of Emperor Heizei
(Heian period). For some reason was compelled to leave Kyoto for the far
west of the country. The only source for this material in English is found in
Craig’s book on, as per the following 2 pages.
Choshu neighbored Satuma, and eventually they joined forces to topple the bakufu, but other feudal lords had earlier expressed their disapproval of the bakufu’s granting of treaties to the U.S., etc., noteworthy among them being Tokugawa Keisho (also known as Yoshikatsu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Yoshikatsu) and Matsudaira Keiei (also known as Yoshinaga/Shungaku: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsudaira_Yoshinaga). These two individuals can be evaluated as having betrayed the bakufu through action or inaction and colluded with elements seeking to topple it and transfer political power to the court, but I will only go into detail as relevant to the topic of this post. Here, in the second and last pages I’ll reference in this post from Craig’s book, it can be seen that Matsudaira Keiei had agreed to collude with Satsuma’s Okubo Toshimichi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ckubo_Toshimichi) to oppose a second punitive expedition against Choshu.
What is relevant
here is that Okubo Toshimichi was the great grandfather of Aso Taro. Aso Taro
is connected to the Meiji Oligarchy on both the maternal and paternal sides of
his family, another aspect of which will be taken up below.
Moving into the post WWII era, after the U.S. pardoned Class-A war criminal like Kishi Nobusuke and others associated with the Meiji Oligarchy, the issue of the Yasukuni Shrine appears. There have been a couple of informative papers written on this topic recently, though from somewhat different perspectives. There have also been a couple of books published since Breen's book, and though I have not read them, as per the screenshots below, there is a preview for the tome by Mark Mullins available on Amazon, so I checked the index, etc., and found no entry for Matusdaira Nagayoshi, a significant figure in this post. There are numerous entries for Abe Shinzo, and a few for Aso Taro, but the corresponding content is not available in the preview.
I am not going to go into depth here, but I do want to make a connection that appears to have been overlooked in regard to the potential role of Aso Taro in the appointment of perhaps the most controversial head priest to have ever been appointed as head priest of Yasukuni Shrine: Matsudaira Nagayoshi (https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%BE%E5%B9%B3%E6%B0%B8%E8%8A%B3). There is no English Wikipedia page (only Chinese and Korean, aside from Japanese), so I have linked to the Japanese page, but Breen provides the following information about him.
To advance the argument that Yasukuni Shrine has always been as much about political power as religion, I will quote an important passage in the Breen book from one of the above pages (p. 13).
...the first dedicated Yasukuni chief priest was a samurai from Choshu by the name of Aoyama Kiyoshi who had no specialist knowledge of Shinto. Aoyama's appointment established at Yasukuni tradition of chief priests frequently hailing from a military background with no Shinto training.
That political power and religion are united in a theocracy is academic (hahaha), but it bears emphasizing here, under the circumstances.
The individual named Matsudaira Nagayoshi with a background in the Japanese imperial navy that was apparently arbitrarily selected through an opaque process and established as "head priest" ("guji" (宮司)) of the shrine then proceeded to enshrine 14 executed Class A war criminals that the government under the CIA installed LDP political party created by Nobusuke Kishi had established in 1955 had long since been promoting, but the Shinto priesthood had firmly rejected, as is described in Breen's book.
Moreover, Matsudaira Nagayoshi, as it turns out, is the great grandson of Matsudaira Yoshinaga, the feudal lord of Echizenzen domain (now Fukui prefecture) that was colluding with the Satsuma official Okubo Toshimichi (Aso Taro's great grandfather) against the bakufu.
One can only speculate as to the appointment process of Nagayoshi, but given the prominence of Aso Taro in the government and Nagayoshi ancestral connection to the Meiji oligarchy through his great grandfather, whom, as is recorded in Craig's book, was working behind the scenes in cahoots with Okubo, it is not such a leap to imagine that Aso Taro et al. played a role in Nagayoshi's appointment. That would have enabled the LDP politicos (and there was no meaningful other political party to speak of at the time) to accomplish to things.
First, they could bring into the fold an individual connected to the Tokugawa clan whose ancestor had conspired against the bakufu with the leaders of the so-called loyalist (royalist might be more appropriate, but that lacks the theocratic dimension as well) of the restoration movement. In other words, he has a pedigree of one of the great military houses in Japanese history, and affiliation with the Meiji Oligarchy (Matsudaira Yoshinaga was made a Marquis (I believe) in the British style aristocracy adopted by the Meiji oligarchs). As his Wikipedia page records, however, it wasn't long before he realized that the government he had helped to install was not necessarily a good one.
In new Meiji government he served in a number of cabinet-equivalent posts, including Chief Executive of Internal Affairs, but soon resigned all posts in protest of the domination of the Meiji government by members of the former Chōshū and Satsuma domains.
Second, they facilitated the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals against the will of the Shinto religious establishment to achieve their own narrow political interests.
Here, to readers in the West, it may not be clear why the Chinese, Koreans, and even Russian government warns against resurgent militarism in Japan, so I hope that this post sheds a little light on some of the factors in the background.
Finally, before taking briefly taking up the current events, another aspect of Aso Taro's family background merits attention. That relates to his grandfather, the former prime minister Yoshida Shigeru (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigeru_Yoshida). According to an NBC news article that is still available online (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17385978), there had been a plot by ultranationalists connected to U.S. military intelligence that had planned to assassinate Yoshida and carry out a coup in 1952. Much of the information in the article is probably reliable, but we know from other disclosures that it was in fact a secret U.S. foreign policy from 1950 to promote right-wing politicians in order to have the pacifist Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan revised (as I have blogged about with reference to official U.S. diplomatic history), and that it was the CIA that funded the creation of the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) by Kishi Nobusuke in 1955 (as I have blogged about). Here is the first page of that article.
Last but far from least in this section is the rejection of the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals and basic intrusion of the Yasukuni Shrine into the Shinto religious world. First and foremost among the reactions is that of Emperor Showa at the time, who ceased visits by the royal family to the shrine in 1975, as per the following page in Breen's book from the chapter by Takahashi Tetsuya.
Almost all of the scholarship I have read, including the preview of Mullins' book, for example, writing on this topic point out, the actual Shinto religious establishment has basically always been opposed to such actions by the Yasukuni Shrine, actions taken arbitrarily and unilaterally. Here, it bears stating in no uncertain terms that the emperor of Japan is the figurehead of the Shinto religion, and carries out Shinto rituals associated with Shinto mythology and practice that have been passed down through the ages. I would imagine that he is considered to be the head priest, or sort of the Pope of Shinto by the rest of the Shinto religious establishment, but that is out of scope here and beyond my limited knowledge of actual Shinto as an organized religion.
Accordingly, though the title of this post includes the term "Shinto Fascism", in one sense, Yasukuni Shrine is somewhat outside of the established Shinto religion, but it's role since the Meiji Restoration cannot be ignored or made light of, so it is considered a "controversy" in Japan, but the courts refuse to recognize visits by government officials as violating the separation of the constitutional separation of church and state.
RELATED CURRENT EVENTS
It would appear that Aso Taro is a little more on the right-wing side of the political spectrum than was Yoshida Shigeru, but the record is not clear on that, as per the Wikipedia article. And once again, subsequent history per the public record demonstrates the indisputable efforts of the U.S. government to install ultra-nationalist right wing politicians that pay visits to Yasukuni Shrine and the its association with Japanese militarism.
If you need any more convincing evidence about the latent issue of Japanese militarism and its association with Yasukuni Shrine, a scandal broke this week do the the coordinated visit to the shrine by high level officials in the Japanese SDF and members of their unit, as per the following article.
In closing, I'm going to make this brief and just post a few front page articles from the English language main stream news media in Japan from the past week about Aso Taro, and the gist is readily apparent; i,e., the evocation of the so-called right to self defense in this case would appear to be a clear violation of Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan. The full articles can be accessed via the links found in the images.
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