Today, 15th August 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Japan. (In Japan, the war is held to have ended on the day when Shōwa Tennō made a broadcast speech announcing, with masterly understatement, that the war had “taken a turn not necessarily to Japan’s advantage”.)
This is a major event for the Shinto establishment. There has been a series of articles in Jinja Shinpō, one a week for the last year, introducing individuals enshrined in each prefectural Gokoku Jinja (護國神社), the local jinja for the war dead. There have been a lot of special memorial matsuri, across and beyond Japan. Yasukuni Jinja (靖國神社) is running special exhibitions in its museum, and redid the English language pamphlet they distribute. The Tennō has given donations to each Gokoku Jinja for the special Grand Matsuri that will be held on this occasion. (Previous Tennō also did this on the decadal anniversaries.)
In all, the war is almost as important to the Shinto establishment as the Shikinen Sengū — maybe even more so, because they talk about the war every year. Why?
One factor, of course, is the outsize role played by World War II in contemporary culture. “The war” is that war, in many contexts, despite there having been a significant number since. This is just as true in Japan.
The Shinto establishment, however, has more specific reasons. An important one is that Jinja Honchō was founded, in 1946, to preserve the structure for Shinto created by the pre-war Japanese state. The original idea, as I understand it, was that the state would take over again as soon as the Occupation ended, and that Jinja Honchō and the prefectural Jinjachō would be an existing structure that could just be incorporated into the government. Obviously, that never happened, and that is a source of serious structural problems with Jinja Honchō today — it was not meant to last this long.
The main function of jinja for the Japanese state was to encourage and focus loyalty to the state. By the 1940s, that meant encouraging commitment to the war, and vigorous support for the troops. The occupying US forces, naturally, clamped down hard on that, with censorship and their own propaganda. It seems that people in the Shinto establishment held on to their beliefs, ready to bring them out again once the Occupation ended. This provided a top-down reason to emphasise the war, and the associated jinja.
On the other side, a lot of Japanese were killed in the war (Yasukuni Jinja enshrines about 2,500,000), and the bereaved families and friends were keen to memorialise them. For many people, that was something that you did at Yasukuni Jinja and the Gokoku Jinja, and this provided bottom-up pressure to maintain the importance of those jinja.
This year, things may be more intense because Yasukuni Jinja and the Gokoku Jinja face a serious crisis. People who can actually remember the war dead are all well into their eighties, at least. Japan has not been involved in any wars since 1945, and so the natural constituency of the war memorial jinja will disappear over the next couple of decades. This is the jinja’s last chance to reinvent themselves while there are still a significant number of people around who do remember the war, and the war dead.
I do not know how this particular aspect of the Shinto establishment will develop in the future, but the priests of those jinja are clearly right to feel a sense of crisis.