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Paper short abstract:

Housing the spirits of almost 2.5 million war dead the Yasukuni Shrine is a highly controversial religious site. I will analyze how the “noble spirits” are being framed within the shrine’s onsite museum Yûshûkan and used to streamline and control worshippers’ imagination of the enshrined spirits.

Paper long abstract:

Since the Yasukuni Shinto Shrine proclaims to house the spirits of almost 2.5 million selected war dead and proposes a particularly contested brand of war-memorialization, it has been thoroughly researched. However, attention devoted to the on-site museum Yûshûkan is mostly limited to focusing on the exhibition’s deliberately revisionist narration of war history and its disruptive effects on war memorialization (Allen 2015, Breen 2005, Uchida 2007). In my presentation I will expand the scope of analysis on the Yûshûkan by inquiring the role it fulfills within the Yasukuni Shrine complex. After establishing how visits of the exhibition are being incorporated into the worshippers' schedules, I will take up the museum's claim that it was in fact not a historical or war museum, but “exhibiting numerous historical items that enable to grasp the sincerity of the divinities” (Yasukuni Jinja 2019). Taking this self-assertion as a starting point my presentation will focus on the narratives that are projected on the divinities within the exhibition. By showing which biographies of “noble spirits” are being selected and which aspects of them are foregrounded, downplayed or ignored I will explore how the concept of “sincerity” (magokoro) is presented to the visitors and which receptions the museum strives to evoke or suppress. Inspired by Rumi Sakamoto’s analysis of the emotional impact of suicidal narratives at the Yûshûkan (Sakamoto 2014) I will present exemplary exhibits and untangle the biographical, representational and spiritual dimensions within the exhibition’s framing of the “noble spirits”. I propose that the museum’s selectivity is not determined by willful blindness or nationalist ignorance towards empirically informed narratives of war memorialization. Instead the Yûshûkan is being strategically utilized by the shrine in order to visualize the otherwise invisible and intangible enshrined spirits and render them emotionally accessible for a mainstream audience. Thus, I argue that the museum fulfills a vital role for the shrine in streamlining the worshippers’ projections and foreclosing diverging imaginations of the war-dead.