Yasukuni has inordinately dominated scholarship on Japanese war memorialization. In contrast, this panel shows how diverse religious actors, sites, and rituals shape and mediate war memorialization in ways irreducible to nationalism. The first paper looks at the new religious movement Konkōkyō to show how religions utilize rituals of war and peace to navigate their marginalized position in society. The second examines how a 1930s Nichiren priest reinterpreted a Japanese-Mongolian medieval war monument to highlight memorialization’s role in diplomacy. The third discusses an “ear mound” of body parts taken from victims of Japan’s sixteenth-century invasion of Korea to analyze the shifting role of burials and pacification in postwar peace rhetoric. The fourth explores political discourse of rituals conducted in Japan for the Korean war dead of Japan’s wartime colonial mobilization. These papers show how war memorialization is not simply nationalistic celebration, but rather a complex, multi-faceted, transnational negotiation.
Since the early twentieth century, Konkōkyō, a Sect Shinto new religious movement, has conducted war memorials and spirit pacification rituals (ireisai) on behalf of Japan’s civilian and military war dead. I trace the development of Konkōkyō ireisai from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) through the present to demonstrate how marginalized religions utilize memorial rituals to mediate their position in wartime and postwar society. Konkōkyō’s ireisai evoke the group’s history of service to the wartime Japanese state while reifying its postwar pacifist identity. I examine continuities and shifts in Konkōkyō ireisai to show how rhetorics of peace and war coexist in spirit pacification rituals across time. Postwar Konkōkyō relies on local bodies rather than the national organization to conduct these rituals, avoiding nationwide attention and controversy. Konkōkyō postwar ireisai transform the institution’s wartime activities into an ongoing pacifist mission, seeking to pacify the war dead and war responsibility tensions.
In 1938, Prince Demchugdongrub, a descendant of Chinggis Khan and leader of a Japanese-backed Pan-Mongolist movement, stood on Shika Island in Kyushu to honor Mongol soldiers slain there during the thirteenth-century invasions of Japan. The site, once feared as a “Mongol mound” marking the execution of captured invaders, had been transformed by the Nichiren priest Takanabe Nittō into the Great Memorial Stūpa for the Mongol Army, dedicated to the war dead of both sides under the ideal of onshin byōdō (equality of friend and foe). This paper examines how medieval memory was reframed in 1920s-30s Japan to align with impartial Buddhist compassion with imperial Pan-Asianism. Through textual analysis and attention to Mongol and Chinese responses, the paper argues that the monument functioned as a hinge between pacification and expansion and reveals how Buddhist ritual became a contested medium of transnational diplomacy on the eve of total war.
My paper takes up the shifting meanings of Kyoto’s “ear mound” (mimizuka) over the course of the modern and contemporary periods, particularly as it is articulated in relation to other sites of commemoration organized around the entombing of bodily remains. The ear mound is understood to contain not ears but noses, taken from Korean and Chinese soldiers and civilians killed during the failed Japanese invasions of Korea in the late sixteenth century and brought back to Japan as trophies. The burial mound seems to have operated during the early modern period both within a framework of spectacle and one of spirit pacification. In the paper, I explore how ritual pacification becomes connected to post-war rhetorics of “peace.” I am interested especially in how the ear mound and places like it become sites of cathexis for competing national interests and thus sites of contestation.
This presentation examines contemporary rituals dedicated to Koreans who died as a result of colonial mobilization during World War II. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it analyzes ceremonies performed either by ritual specialists—Buddhist monks or mudang (Korean shamans)—or by non-specialists drawing on the model of Confucian-inspired ancestral offering rites (chesa). It shows how the ritual's aim of appeasing the dead becomes articulated with broader political and social issues, including claims for historical justice, the division of the Korean peninsula, and relations—at both grassroots and diplomatic levels—between South Korea and Japan.
| Jolyon Thomas | jolyon@sas.upenn.edu | View |