Yasukuni
I’ve recently been doing a lot of research work on the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan for a rhetoric paper in my one seminar class. It’s such an interesting place, and I encourage you all to check it out.
The site is a Shinto Shrine that honors the dead soldiers from all the conflicts in which Japan has been involved. The controversy over the site is that the language here is very nationalistic (a no-no for Japan since the war), and 14 Class A War Criminals from World War Two (as convicted by an American jury) are honored here.
While there are a variety of political implications that I won’t go into, since politics are not my forte, it is impossible to forget that the site really is a religious one as well. Should we not honor the dead because they did bad things in their lives in the name of their country, or such all dead be honored?
Yasukuni Shrine, Japan, Shinto


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