In the middle of January, Japan’s Supreme Court decided against a lawsuit brought by a Korean family against the Japanese government for refusing to remove the name of their deceased relative, who died in the service of Japan’s emperor during the Pacific War, from Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. The family resented the fact that the government had given their relative’s name to Yasukuni for enshrinment without notifying them, insisting that they would have refused enshrinement because they believe that the existence of Yasukuni, which honors Japan’s war dead as a representative of prewar state Shintoism, “justifies” Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Their relative was pressed into service to fight for Japan because he was a Japanese subject at the time, meaning he had no choice. However, after the war, Korean veterans of the Japanese Imperial Army did not receive pensions the way Japanese soldiers did, and the surviving families of Korean soldiers who died during their service did not receive compensation, though families of Japanese soldiers who died did. Many still do, in fact. 

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the suit was based on its interpretation of the statute of limitations. The Koreans in question were enshrined in 1959, and the statute of limitations to bring such a lawsuit is 20 years, which expired a long time ago, thus voiding the suit. But since the family did not learn that their relative were enshrined until the late 1990s, they contend that the statute of limitations does not apply in this case. To confuse the matter even further, the original district court finding against the bereaved family did not cite the statute of limitations but rather judged that the government had not infringed on the rights and benefits of the plaintiff. According to Mainichi Shimbun, in the original 2013 suit, lawyers for the family argued that the enshrinement violated the Constitution’s prescribed separation of religion and state. This was not the first suit brought by a Korean family against the government for the enshrinement of a relative at Yasukuni. A similar suit was also rejected by the Supreme Court in 2011.

The decisions of the District Court and the Supreme Court in this case differ, and in the end they imply pretty much the same thing, which is that no one can remove a name from Yasukuni once it’s been enshrined, though no one has ever convincingly explained why that is. The District Court did not elaborate on its reasons for rejecting the suit, but the Supreme Court said it was because of the statute of limitations, which would seem to be a means of shutting down the matter once and for all. But as Mainichi pointed out, according to the Civil Code, the statute of limitations, at least when applied to a civil suit, does not begin until the party that brings the suit, in this case the bereaved family, is made aware of the “harm” they say has been caused by the defendant, which, in this case, is the Japanese government. As a matter of fact, in appeals last year by the government against a number of successful suits brought by citizens who say they underwent forced sterilization many years ago, the government based its defense on the statute of limitations, which all the courts except one judged did not apply for the same reason that the Yasukuni suit shouldn’t apply: The plaintiffs were not made aware that they’d been sterilized until much later than when the actual sterilization took place.

Korea’s Yohan news service says that “it is believed” that more than 20,000 Koreans are enshrined at Yasukuni out of some 370,000 Koreans who either fought or worked for the war according to records of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, researcher Yasuto Takeuchi, who handles cases related to Koreans in Japan, says that the welfare ministry in 1962 only reported 242,000 Koreans who fought and worked for the war effort, so even the Japanese government can’t keep its numbers straight. It should be mentioned that until the end of the American occupation in 1952, the U.S. military authority forbade pensions and other postwar payments to Japanese veterans and bereaved Japanese families, a proscription that was lifted by the Japanese government as soon as the Americans were gone. However, these payments, which so far have amounted to some ¥80 trillion, didn’t apply to Korean veterans and bereaved families because Koreans were no longer Japanese citizens after the war. 

In the Yohan article, a member of the bereaved family tearfully expressed his anger at the Supreme Court ruling, saying, “I have no words.” He was not demanding compensation. He just wanted to remove his father’s name from the shrine, which honors Class A war criminals and, according to many critics, glorifies war. Neither the government nor Yasukuni informed him and his family that his father had been enshrined. If they had, he would have surely withheld his approval, but that probably wouldn’t have made any difference. The Japanese government believes the Koreans who died for the Emperor belong to Japan, just as they did when they were alive.