Word: yasukuni
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...forced contributions supplied the rest of the money needed. Priests were government officials (the Shinto priesthood was sometimes used as a handy niche for overage army officers). In shrine Shinto, the loyal citizen could even hope for his own apotheosis. By 1939, Tokyo's majestic military shrine, Yasukuni, had been dedicated to 10,000 mitama, or glorified souls, who had died for the Emperor...
More than 2,700,000 Japanese visited the shrine of the Emperor Meiji (Hirohito's grandfather). Five hundred thousand padded to the Yasukuni Shrine, above which the souls of Japan's war dead are said to hover, and clapped hands respectfully to get the souls' attention. Amid the wooded hills of Ise, southwest of Tokyo, 360,000 worshiped at the Grand Shrines of Shintoism...
There was a notable vacancy this week among the ghosts of Bushido warriors who circle endlessly above Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine. The AWOL god was Naval Warrant Officer Magoshichi Sugino, who was racked up among the immortals 42 years ago when (supposedly) he lost his life in Admiral Heihachiro Togo's crippling attack on the Russian Far Eastern fleet at Port Arthur...
...General Homma for war crimes in the Philippines. Said she: "Today's judgment does not come from God, it comes only from a human. I believe that some day God will pass final judgment. I am satisfied-and I know my husband is satisfied-to be buried in Yasukuni Shrine with the rest of the Japanese soldiers who fell at Corregidor...
Then Prince Higashi-Kuni made pilgrimage to the famed Meiji and Yasukuni shrines. There he offered a Shinto prayer to Japan's fallen war heroes, those who "gave their lives to become the spirits which guard our Empire." There he pledged himself "to endure all hardships in safeguarding national polity . . . and reconstructing Japan...