People visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on Oct. 17, 2019. AFP-Yonhap

Japan's Supreme Court rendered judgment in January on a suit that was initially brought by 27 Korean plaintiffs in 2013. The petition, which was rejected with one dissenting opinion, followed unsuccessful trials launched in 2001 and 2007. The case was filed by families of individuals who were forcibly conscripted for Imperial Japanese's military actions during World War II. The plaintiffs demanded that Tokyo's controversial Yasukuni Shrine be excluded from their mourning process and that the names of Koreans be removed from its Symbolic Registry of Divinities.

Widely regarded in East Asia as a symbol of militarism, the Shinto shrine has long cast a shadow over South Korea's relationship with Japan. While celebrations are underway for the 60 anniversary of this relationship, bilateral ties are still marred by multiple unresolved historical disputes. The Yasukuni Shrine is where all of the Japanese military casualties between 1868 to 1945 are collectively memorialized and remains a key source of tension. To 'honor' their service in the name of the emperor, who himself was regarded as a living god, the fallen are memorialized as the protective deity of Japan. For this reason, Yasukuni officials have argued that once a name is enshrined, it cannot be removed.

As Japan's wartime conscription intensified amid World War II, enshrinement at Yasukuni was wielded by the Japanese state for propaganda purposes. Making the ultimate sacrifice to defend the divinely descended emperor and the nation was upheld as a most holy and honorable action. The prospect of enshrinement at Yasukuni, where the emperor himself paid respects, was intended to legitimize the war effort and its coerced mobilization.

Behind the main sanctuary at Yasukuni Shrine, where more than 2.46 million people who lost their lives in different battles or theaters of war and are enshrined as divinities, is a building called the Reijibo Hoanden (the Repository for the Symbolic Registry of Deities). This building was built with funds donated by Hirohito in a private capacity in 1972 to mark Yasukuni's 100th anniversary. Inside are 2,000 volumes containing formal and bureaucratic details, including the enshrined individuals' military status, service records and circumstances of death.

The first Korean believed to have been enshrined in Yasukuni is Bae Dae-young, who died in 1922 during the Siberian expedition, per a notice in the Gazette of the Government-General of Korea on May 11, 1926.

Throughout the 1930s, announcements concerning the enshrinements of Koreans increased in frequency. Yet 87 percent of the enshrinements at Yasukuni relate to Japan's participation in the Pacific theater of World War II. Overall, the enshrinements include a cumulative total of 21,181 Koreans and 27,863 Taiwanese, as well as Okinawans and Indigenous Ainu whom the Japanese forcibly assimilated into their nation. Dozens of Koreans who were presumed lost were mistakenly enshrined, too. Some of these men participated or were represented by their family members in the successive Korean lawsuits.

The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers' imposition of the Shinto Directive to abolish the unofficial "State Shinto" resulted in Yasukuni becoming a private religious entity rather than its demolition. The vast majority of Koreans enshrined in Yasukuni were added without their families' knowledge or consent by shrine officials after the end of Japan's occupation by Allied forces in 1952.

History professor Akiko Takenaka, director of the Global Asias Program at the University of Kentucky, told The Korea Times that Japanese war-bereaved families compiled data on military-related deaths from the Asia-Pacific War through war-bereaved families submission of paperwork to Japan's Ministry of Welfare (later Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare). This valuable data was shared with Yasukuni Shrine to complete the enshrinement. While Koreans lost their Japanese citizenship and were made ineligible for the Japanese government's pension system, Takenaka explained that transcripts of lawmakers' debates suggest there had been an earnest effort to identify Korean and Taiwanese nationals for enshrinement, sincerely believing that enshrining their souls was doing the right thing.

People walk through a Torii gate at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, Aug. 15, 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. Yonhap

Kim Sung-eun, chief researcher at the Center for Historical Truth and Justice, told The Korea Times that Japan had informed the South Korean government around 1965, when relations were normalized, that some 21,000 Koreans had been enshrined at Yasukuni. Although this figure received mention in the daily press, it was not accompanied by a list of names and was not widely recognized by the public. Only in the 1990s did victims and their families begin to piece together evidence of enshrinement from military records obtained from the Japanese state.

In the Japanese Supreme Court's recent judgment, Chief Justice Kazumi Okamura ruled that a Korean bereaved family whose father was enshrined in 1959 had lost their right to seek compensation under Japanese law due to the expiration of the 20-year statute of limitations.

When interviewed, Takenaka stressed her surprise at the judgment's focus on the statute of limitations. Having closely followed similar cases launched by Okinawan bereaved families, she said the statute of limitations was never cited as a reason for dismissal. Rather, it hinged on the court's lack of jurisdiction over whether­ family members possess exclusive rights to mourn. As cited in her 2015 book, "Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar," the court determined that the plaintiffs "did not have a right or legal interest to exclusively remember or memorialize the deceased and to reject such actions by others."

The invocation of the statute of limitations was also criticized in an editorial by the Asahi Shimbun on the grounds that its use allowed the court to skirt the larger issue of whether the government's provision of information on the war dead was constitutional.

Who Koreans' loved ones are co-mingled with as 'divinities' further complicates the propriety of enshrinement. The Yasukuni Shrine treats as equals the high commanders who orchestrated Japan's aggressive and brutal military actions with the young soldiers who were killed fighting in a war they had been forced or seduced into participating in.

Beginning in 1959, at the urging of their families, until October 1967, four batches of names were honored in Yasukuni, bringing the total number of deified Class B and Class C war criminals to more than 1,000. Significantly, 148 Koreans were convicted as Class B or C war criminals and 23 of them were executed. These Koreans are also enshrined. However, they have largely been ignored in both countries. They were excluded from compensation in Japan like other Koreans and generally disdained as collaborators by Korea, although they eventually were officially recognized by the state in 2006 as victims of forced mobilization under Japanese colonialism.

In 1978, a retired military officer named Matsudaira Nagayoshi (1915-2005) led secret rites in his capacity as Yasukuni Shrine's chief priest to deify all 14 Japanese Class A war criminals. This included the head of Japan's wartime government, General Hideki Tojo, and General Iwane Matsui, whose troops were responsible for the mutilations, rapes and murders of Chinese civilians in the Nanjing Massacre.

Hirohito reportedly opposed the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals on the grounds that Yasukuni was supposed to honor only the souls of those who went to war and died for the nation. After eight visits, Hirohito paid respects to Yasukuni for the last time in 1975, three years before the secret honoring of the war criminals.

A Shinto priest leads Japanese lawmakers during a visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, April 23, 2024. AFP-Yonhap

Under the 2001-06 premiership of Junichiro Koizumi, the Yasukuni Shrine finally became a full-blown international issue. Although political visits had occurred before, Koizumi's multiple trips to the shrine provoked sharp criticism in Korea as well as China. Nevertheless, Koizumi's visits have been used to justify the actions of subsequent visitors, including then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2013 and members of the Suga Cabinet in 2021. Most recently, in October 2024, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba sent a ritual offering to the shrine three weeks after taking office, which prompted Korea's foreign ministry to protest. The patronage of Koizumi and his successors has also helped to rehabilitate the images of war criminals, like Tojo, as his great-grandson, Hidetoshi Tojo, confirmed to academic Gary J. Bass.

Certain right-wingers in Japan have argued that there was never a need for the Yasukuni Shrine to seek consent from bereaved families, whether they be Japanese or not, for enshrinement. They maintain that the families should feel honored by the commemoration of their loved ones. When it comes to Koreans, it is further asserted that the deceased were Japanese at the time of their deaths and, therefore, remain Japanese in death. Regarding the presence of the war criminals, criticism is turned towards the Tokyo Trials. They claim the judges from Allied powers ignored "the fact" that Japan's war efforts were part of a clash of empires and that territories seized by Japan were exploited imperial possessions in need of liberation.

Right-wing activists visit the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, Aug. 15, 2021, the anniversary of the end of World War II. Reuters-Yonhap

Since the debate over Koizumi's visits, prominent voices within the Japanese political establishment have occasionally appealed for an end to political visits. One of the most notable was the staunchly nationalist Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, in office 1982-87, who had himself endured criticism for visits while in office. An alternative, nonreligious national memorial to Japan's war dead — free from any association with internationally condemned war criminals — has also been studied and proposed as an option by lawmakers at various times since the end of the war.

Despite it not changing the current situation, the opinion of Associate Justice Mamoru Miura, the only dissenter in the Supreme Court case, warrants recognition. It also represents the minority view of Japanese families who have filed cases to have the names of their family members removed for religious — as well as political and other — reasons. Miura reasoned there is scope to thoroughly assess whether the state violated the plaintiff's religious freedom under Japan's constitution for the reason that enshrinement was a national policy. His lengthy submission offers hope to the plaintiffs and their supporters, in both Korea and Japan, that the fight is not over yet.

As this year marks the 80th anniversary of liberation and the clock ticks, the number of individuals who grew up in the shadow of Japan's war and colonialism is becoming fewer. While debates can be had about whether the shrine has the legal right to memorialize the dead, the emotional trauma of knowing that Korean bereaved families' loved ones are enshrined alongside those directly responsible for unjust conscription and other oppressive policies in colonized Korea and broader East Asia cannot be overstated.

The protracted time that would be needed to reach a future judgment has discouraged some from pursuing further litigation or relitigation, but Miura's opinion could be the rallying cry that the next generation needs to carry on the fight that was started by those who came before.

Jack Greenberg works as a consultant, researcher and freelance writer. His current focus is on heritage and conservation issues, historical memory debates, truth-seeking and reconciliation and civilian massacres of the 1950-53 Korean War. He was the recipient of the Global Korea Scholarship and earned a master's in international studies at Korea University. He is also an alum of McGill University.