John Breen's edited volume features authors from Great Britain, the United States, both Chinas, and Japan. Despite the absence of a Korean perspective, it includes a wide variety of views on Yasukuni Shrine. Breen contributes an introduction, “A Yasukuni Genealogy,” and an essay, “Yasukuni and the Loss of Historical Memory.” His introduction notes that Yasukuni was founded in 1868 to propitiate the spirits of those who had died fighting in the brief civil war that accompanied the Meiji Restoration. Yasukuni subsequently enshrined all modern Japanese war dead as kami (divinities), including Tōjō Hideki and others whom the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal convicted of Class A “crimes against peace” and sentenced to execution after World War II.
Controversy recently arose when Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō made annual Yasukuni visits between 2001 and 2006. Breen's two essays, Caroline Rose's “Stalemate: The Yasukuni Shrine Problem in Sino-Japanese Relations,” Wang Zhixin's “China, Japan and...