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© Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.Court rules soldiers' names to stay on war shrine
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bakabaka
In life AND death, if you are japanese then the state owns your ass!
GJDailleult
No mention of the legal grounds the ruling was based on. Wonder if there were any.
OssanAmerica
These two soldiers must have been unbelievably important if an entire war was justified by their deaths. Who were they?
Scrote
I think the court has no power to order the shrine to remove the names as the state is supposed to be secular.
hokkaidoguy
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.
timorborder
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!!
dreamdrifter
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.
GW
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
dreamdrifter
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.
dreamdrifter
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.
telecasterplayer
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?
buddha4brains
Just wondering what the laws are in other countries. Can a relative have their kin removed from public monuments?
Midnightpromise
Why not just tear down the whole shrine and pretend that no one was killed and nothing at all ever happened?
GW
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
dreamdrifter
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.
Marion Wm Steele
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.
Good_Jorb
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.