| NOTA |
(★)1. This book is the first authoritative volume in English on Yasukuni, the controversial Shinto shrine in the heart of Tokyo, dedicated to the Japanese war dead. Fourteen Class A war criminals are enshrined at Yasukuni, while the shrine's museum narrates the history of Japan's involvement in the Pacific War in a way that can best be described as revisionist. Visits to the shrine by cabinet members often set off protests at home and abroad, especially in China, Korea and Taiwan, and Yasukuni remains a source of considerable mistrust between the Chinese and Japanese Governments. The distinctive feature of this volume is that it sets out neither to commend Yasukuni nor to condemn it; it seeks, rather, to present authoritative yet divergent views, in order to render more complex an issue which, in the media at least, has long been portrayed in atarkly simplistic terms. It accommodates chapters by leading pro-Yasukuni and anti-Yasukuni Japanese intellectuals; it carries multiple Chinese perspectives; and there are also critical contributions from Western commmentators who offer their own insights on the shrine and its place in post war Japanese diplomacy, ideology and history. 2. John Breen is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at SOAS, University of London. He is the co-editor, with Mark Teeuwen, of Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami (University of Hawai'i Press) and co-author, with Mark Teeuwen, of A Brief History of Shinto (forthcoming Blackwells) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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