Sunday May 27, 2012

JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION

Court rules soldiers' names to stay on war shrine

National Feb. 27, 2009 - 05:53AM JST ( 17 )

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17 Comments

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bakabakaFeb. 27, 2009 - 08:05AM JST

In life AND death, if you are japanese then the state owns your ass!
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GJDailleultFeb. 27, 2009 - 09:11AM JST

No mention of the legal grounds the ruling was based on. Wonder if there were any.
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OssanAmericaFeb. 27, 2009 - 09:19AM JST

Nine people argued that slain relatives were enshrined in the religious >institution without the approval of their families and that their deaths >were used to justify the war.

These two soldiers must have been unbelievably important if an entire war was justified by their deaths. Who were they?
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ScroteFeb. 27, 2009 - 09:45AM JST

I think the court has no power to order the shrine to remove the names as the state is supposed to be secular.
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hokkaidoguyFeb. 27, 2009 - 09:52AM JST

GJDailleult: No mention of the legal grounds the ruling was based on. Wonder if there were any.

There is no law on the books in Japan - or anywhere else I'm aware of - protecting people from having their name recorded at a shrine.

If you know of one, I'd be interested to hear it.

the court's ruling, as reported elsewhere, reflects this. It could find no evidence that anything illegal had actually happened, and ruled that it was the shrine's business to decide who gets recorded and who gets removed.
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timorborderFeb. 27, 2009 - 09:58AM JST

In life AND death, if you are japanese then the state owns your ass!

This is a great critique of the mentality of the Japanese body politic. Bravo!!
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dreamdrifterFeb. 27, 2009 - 10:36AM JST

This is a pretty sloppy article which doesn't go into what legal arguments were being put forward by either side or by the court.

Apparently the relatives argument was that　the refusal of the shrine to annul the enshrinement of these soldiers amounted to a violation of a form of "personality rights" to remember the dead in their own way.

The shrine referred to a 1988 ruling that the concept of "religious personality rights" has no legal merit, and claimed that the rights being claimed by the plaintiff are identical to this concept. It also claimed that under freedom of religion a court cannot order it to remove names from the written list.

The court ruled that these rights being claimed by the plaintiffs are mere expressions of disdain against a religions act and against the shrine, and do not fall under those protected by law. The court commented that seeking the relatives approval would be desireable in terms of social courtesy, but giving legal merit to one's disdain against a religious act of another party would amount to a violation of freedom of religion.

The plaintiffs also claimed that, because the government co-operated by providing the shrine with a list of names, the enshrinement was an act carried out jointly by the state and the shrine and therefore anticonstitutional, and claimed compensation of 1,000,000 yen per person from both the state and the shrine.

The government's defence was that provision of information is within the scope of its normal administrative affairs, and that the actual enshrinement was carried out by the shrine.

The court ruled that the enshrinement was indeed a decision made by the shrine.

court ruled that the enshrinement was carried out by the shrine.
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GWFeb. 27, 2009 - 10:52AM JST

my paper today mentions religous fredom for allowing yasukuni to use their names, funny the dead people & their families dont seem to get that SAME religious freedom, guess what that means there is only selective religous freedom.

Damn I hope they dont plaster my name all over that shrine
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dreamdrifterFeb. 27, 2009 - 11:02AM JST

GW - The shrine is not preventing the relatives to practice their own religions, and the relatives do not have a right to prevent the shrine from practising its own religion. So the freedom of religion is being applied uniformly, not selectively.
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dreamdrifterFeb. 27, 2009 - 11:19AM JST

The relatives should start a new religion in which the head priest at yasukuni is personally worshipped as god, with pictures, statues, weird ceremonies and everything. See how he would like that.
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telecasterplayerFeb. 27, 2009 - 01:19PM JST

“I feel disgust and pain. I want my brothers released from being servants of the emperor,” she wrote in a letter to supporters last year.

Akihito could easily solve this by issuing a statement, but that's not going to happen, is it? His father reportedly disliked Yasukuni. Who's in charge in the imperial household?
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buddha4brainsFeb. 27, 2009 - 03:48PM JST

Just wondering what the laws are in other countries. Can a relative have their kin removed from public monuments?
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MidnightpromiseFeb. 27, 2009 - 05:15PM JST

Why not just tear down the whole shrine and pretend that no one was killed and nothing at all ever happened?
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GWFeb. 27, 2009 - 06:50PM JST

dreamdrifter

ok so you wud have no problems if the JWitnesses or harikrishinas used your name for whatever they want, I wud say get stuffed but hey
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dreamdrifterFeb. 27, 2009 - 10:50PM JST

GW - You seem to think that religion using your name for what they want is a violation of your freedom of religion, when it is actually a violation of your "religious personality rights". Don't confuse these two because this court case was actually a head-on conflict between these two.

The case was essentially freedom of religion VS religious personality rights, and the court ruled in favour of freedom of religion.

And anyway when did I say I agreed or disagreed with the court ruling? I actually happen to tend to disagree with it.
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TheMarionFeb. 28, 2009 - 01:24AM JST

this whole Yasukuni Shrine is one vast enigma. The biggest war criminal of all was the Emperor Hirohito and he went unscathed at the end of WWll while a dozen of his henchmen went to the gallows and later were enshrined, (but no one knows where their remains are.) This whole mess leaves me confused, especially at the actions of Douglas McArthur.
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Good_JorbFeb. 28, 2009 - 02:06AM JST

Shame that the court didn't put more weight on the "government co-operated by providing the shrine with a list of names" and deem the act of adding the names a political act instead of religious act, especially after the class A war criminals were secertly added to the list. Poor families will always have to honour their family members and honour those who got them killed because of thier poor military decisions.