The Tour of Yasukuni Shrine: dark tourism, war criminals and a broken audio tour

This Shinto Shrine, located in the centre of Tokyo, is a famous yet highly contentious dark tourism destination. It shot to prominence in 2013 when Japanese president Shinzo Abe visited it to pay respects to the country's war dead, which this site commemorates. Among those honoured are Class A war criminals. This broke international protocol and immediately provoked angry responses from China and Korea.

I had downloaded the app My GPS City which said it offered an audio tour of the shrine. It only featured short text entries for a handful of spots, the map didn't work and other functions were disabled too. It was, in effect, an advert for the real app and a waste of space on my phone.

I picked up the paper guide provided by the shrine and wandered through the gnarled trees. A few things struck me. The shrine was established following a civil war during the Meiji era and later evolved into a national shrine commemorating losses against foreign nations. The names for wars were unfamiliar, there was "the China incident" and "the Greater East Asian War" AKA WW2. Additionally, the English is clumsily written and in need of a proofread. It is obvious no native speaker was ever let close to the text, which says something in itself.  

I came across this panel and immediately connected, eager to see if the audio guide would be as stiff as the brochure. Strangely, however, the audio would not load. I walked to several different corners of this expansive shrine, tried different pages and the Japanese site too, but this audio guide just wasn't happening. This struck me as profoundly odd as I had not experienced this sort of failure of technology before in Japan. This would be the last place I'd expect the technology to seize up so I could only guess there was something to do with the content or management behind the withdrawal of this service. 

Nobody wanted to offer an audio guide then, so I meandered through taking in one "incident" after another. A number of the panels showed Japanese soldiers in China.

The other visitors to the shrine on this chilly February afternoon were mostly middle-aged Japanese men. There can be different motivations for coming to this site and not all who gather here will be right wing nationalists. What is striking, however, is the demographic portrait of the new right that Furuya Tsunehira paints in her article on cyber nationalists in Japan: it is precisely the same group. Contrary to what she asserts, I also got the impression during my two-week stay that they were not a spent force but were exercising growing political influence. An interesting thing she points out is that "history education in Japanese public schools is woefully inadequate, and instruction on modern and contemporary history is particularly sparse." 

The version of history which pervades the shrine is one I heard echoes of during a talk a few days earlier that characterised Japan as a victim of the second world war. The shrine sets itself up to be a religious site that simply honours the fallen but it does so in such a way that it proposes a completely alternative narrative of the 20th century. The museum, which I did not visit, has been singled out by other visitors as particularly guilty of "a retelling of the war from the perspective of the ultra-right wing." I now regret being too tight to pay the 1000 yen entrance fee.

There were statues thoughtfully acknowledging the contributions animals made to 'preserving peace in the nation' or Japanese militarism, depending on your point of view. This got me thinking that, if animals' spirits are also enshrined here too, what is the limit of who is in and who is out? The dogs that died in the wars did not choose to have their spirits enshrined here anymore than the soldiers did, it was simply decided that they'd be honoured here. What if they don't want to be enshrined? Did they get a choice? 

Then comes the question of the Canadian POWs who were used as slave labour in Japan during the war and who died in their droves due to mistreatment and malnutrition. They too made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of the Japanese war effort, but I'd be surprised to find their spirits enshrined here, though I could be wrong. The section of the video around 1 hour 20 features the Yasukuni shrine and a Canadian survivor meeting Japanese veterans. The failure of their otherwise sound memory when it comes to the crucial details of war crimes is telling.

A special memorial had been put up for the Indian judge Dr Radha Pal who sat on the  Tokyo Trials of war criminals and who differed in his opinions to the rest of the panel of judges. The paper that is given out on this memorial is very selective in what it takes from Pal and never mentions things like, "Pal never questioned whether atrocities were committed by Japan at Nanking, he just suspected that the accounts included exaggeration." This would put him in the camp of those who downplay the Nanjing Massacre not those who outright deny it like Toshio Motoya, owner of APA Hotels (a major Japanese hotel chain). Pal's stance may be seen within the frame of Indian independence and his major point is that the justice that was administered was a victor's justice that ignored colonial grievances.

If I compare this site to the Imperial War Museum and Cenotaph in London, there are some similarities in that they both offer self-serving narratives of war and colonial expansion. There is also a religiosity to the latter site with severe sentences handed out for decidedly minor crimes committed there. These sort of sites have this tendency the world over. Where Yasukuni differs is the degree to which it has become embedded within political narratives as a result of the version of history that is projected here. For as long as the versions of history told in Japan and those relayed by its neighbours remain so far apart this site will remain a hot dark tourist site. This will almost certainly remain the case for some time to come as neighbouring narratives are not without their own self-serving particularities too. One just has to compare the Beijing and Taipei WW2 museums to see this most evidently. This is not inevitable; France and Germany managed to jointly produce a history book that is read in both countries. Reconciliation can happen when there is a desire to make it happen. Given the existence of shame cultures as opposed to guilt cultures in East Asia, however, this sort of joint initiative looks as far away as ever as it would entail considerable loss of face. Yasukuni will, therefore, remain divisive for many more years. I just wish they'd fix their audio guide so the full mendacity of it can be fully appreciated.

The Jewish Refugee Museum of Shanghai Tour

I have noticed that there are Jewish history tours in many cities across Europe and I have been meaning to take one of them for a while to see what they are like. For one reason or another I never got round to it but did instead recently discover that there was one in Shanghai. I never realised that the city had a significant Jewish history so, rather than discovering the Jewish history of Paris, Prague or Porto, it was to China's most populous city Shanghai that I turned.   

I found it amusing that when I stepped inside I was asked to wear an elasticated plastic bag around my shoes. The reason given was to keep the place clean but, since I have not had this request in other museums, I began asking myself whether it was because the building was a former synagogue. Lost in such speculation, I didn't precisely catch what the guide was trying to tell my group. I was on the English language tour and my group mostly consisted of elderly Jewish American who had come on a Smithsonian Journeys package tour of China. Upstairs, another group was on the Chinese tour.

On this metal wall outside were the names of the Shanghai Jews as recorded in the city register. I saw two American men studying it carefully, looking for the names of family members. They were clearly moved when they found one. Our guide, however, had no obvious Jewish ancestry. He did, however, have a keen interest in Jewish history and culture and while he had an odd accent, even by Chinese standards, his English was good and he could tell the story with some precision and charm.

Stepping into the modern museum, we watched a grainy video and were then shown around the exhibits. We touched upon this one about Ho Feng Shan who our guide dubbed 'the Chinese Schindler'. It seems he had a particularly vivid life and there was only time time to hear about his role in issuing a large number of exit visas permitting Jews in Austria to escape to Shanghai. His actions were not officially recognised in his lifetime, indeed he fell out with the ROC government who denied him his pension over a dispute he claimed was politically motivated. Settling in California, it was only after he died that he was publicly thanked and his wartime actions held up first by Israel and then, interestingly, by the PRC. At least, that is how the history is told here. An interesting candidate for a bio-pic, I would say.

The guide stopped to show us this map of the different routes Jews took to come to Shanghai. Because the museum contained so much material, when explanations were given at all, they were often somewhat rushed in order to keep the tour under an hour in length. This meant I did not appreciate until later that different Jewish groups had been settling in the city for some period of time before the war and there existed stratification amongst them. 

This picture of the Israeli Prime Minister put a face on something I had been increasingly feeling through the tour. Namely, that in order to understand this museum it was important to understand the processes by which it came about and to ask whether it served any purposes in addition to that of remembrance. The narrative of the Shanghai Jews, while known to some, was not celebrated until fairly recently. A number of things had to happen to thaw what were not immediately warm relations between the states of Israeli and the PRC, created in 1948 and 1949 respectively, in order for this episode of history to be given the embassy treatment. In China that would be the process of political and economic reform from the 80s onwards. In Shanghai, its relative calm during the political turbulence of 1989 combined with the more recent taking stock of and promotion of the city's heritage, must figure too. As for the Israeli side, I know less, though there are, apparently, early movements afoot in transforming Hongkou into a 'new Xintiandi' with Israeli investment. Whether these financial relations are simply the fruits of improved diplomatic relations and a shared history or are in some way the motor for political engagement and cultural diplomacy, is difficult to say.

This is the short video Xie Xie Shanghai that was made in 2015 and which features Benjamin Netanyahu, amongst others, saying thank you to the city for providing Jewish refugees shelter during the war. The video is curious in that it mixes a political message  with tourist aesthetics. The beach and bar scenes come straight out of a 'Visit Israel' promotional video and is another example of the tourist gaze exceeding itself and finding its way, now, into state level diplomacy. 

The top floor of the museum was where Shanghai's Jewish history was put into the service of political education. Most notable was this educational video (chapter 4) that contrasted Western thought with Chinese thought. Western thought was characterised as conquering nature and as the science of evolution, which slid effortlessly into Nazism, while Chinese thought centred upon living in harmony with nature. Confucian values were attributed to the Jewish American politician Michael Blumenthal, values that rubbed off on him during the time he grew up a refugee in Shanghai. Essentially, anything positive was linked to traditional Chinese culture while anything negative was of Western origin. I had the impression that whoever produced the video was not used to having to defend their opinions in any sort of open debate. If they had, they would have had to have come up with something a bit more refined and robust. In the UK such a video would simply be laughed at then ignored but here it passes for normal.

The museum is today's focal point to the Jewish heritage of Hongkou, but the neighbourhood also has a walking route taking in other historic sites, too. There was not so much to see and a guide would have helped to bring the otherwise blank addresses to life. Disturbingly, a series of public artworks on the side of the street commemorating the area's Jewish heritage, had been slashed. This one shows the youthful American artist Peter Max, being taught to paint. Who did this, or why it happened, I have no idea. There is no significant history of anti-Semitism in Shanghai, as far as I am aware, but there is more to this story than my brief tour could reveal.

Final stop was The White Horse Cafe, a reconstruction of a Jewish cafe that used to do business nearby. The place was unusual not only on account of the man inexplicably crashed out on the lawn outside, but also because it was a European-style cafe run by and for Chinese customers. I should be used to this concept by now as we have had French-themed cafe chains in the UK, such as Cafe Rouge, for a while. I seem to remember that last time I went to a Cafe Rouge (a rare event) they had employed some foreign students as their waiters, but I also recall that the whole place felt like a protracted and ever so slightly embarrassing fancy dress party. White Horse Cafe had the same vibe. Here, this game was augmented by an exhibition upstairs about Polish Catholics saving Jews. The exhibition was sponsored by a southern Polish regional governmental body, an area trying to establish connections in Shanghai on the back of the Jewish Refugee Museum. While the story that the exhibition panels recounted was no doubt true, the whole thing smacked just a little too obviously of political opportunism to be taken entirely at face value.