00:00Francis Wood is an historian and the former head of the Chinese collection at the British Museum.
00:05Francis, welcome. And for viewers who might not be familiar with this story and the Yashukuni Shrine,
00:12why does it carry such enormous significance after all these years, 81 years?
00:19Because the shrine was built deliberately by the Meiji Emperor towards the end of the 19th century
00:26to commemorate military martyrs and those who had served.
00:32And it continues to represent the, as it were, the war memorial of Japan.
00:38And the trouble is, too, that it's visited frequently by military and political leaders.
00:46Is it the underlying disputes, is it really about the shrine itself,
00:53or is it about perhaps a wider perception that Japan has perhaps never fully confronted its wartime past?
01:04I think it's very much that.
01:06I mean, the shrine stands, you know, like we have our cenotaph in Whitehall that commemorates those who fell in
01:12war.
01:12But the Yashukuni Shrine definitely does somehow, it is imbued with militarism,
01:19with the idea of Japan as a military force.
01:22And it is very provocative because Japan has never really come to terms with what happened in China,
01:30particularly in the Second World War.
01:31You know, the massacre at Nanjing of 1937, one of the most horrific events of the Second World War,
01:37has never really been confronted by the Japanese.
01:40And so every time anyone visits the Yashukuni Shrine, to the Chinese, it's a reminder of the Nanjing Massacre.
01:48The Japanese might well say, and Japanese politicians in particular might well say,
01:54that they're simply paying their respects to those who died for their country in war.
01:59Why do China and South Korea reject that?
02:05I think particularly because they feel that the Japanese have never really admitted what happened.
02:11I mean, the most terrible atrocities were committed by the Japanese in Korea and China in the Second World War.
02:17Massive rapes, murders, terrible tortures of civilians, scientific experiments on prisoners of war and so on.
02:26None of this has been acknowledged by the Chinese, by the Japanese.
02:30And so the Chinese and the Koreans really feel that it's still an open wound.
02:35This generation is sadly dying off.
02:4080 years on, is it possible that this tension might simply disappear into history?
02:51I think the worrying thing, really, is that Japan recently has shown signs of being more militaristic.
02:59That after the Second World War, I mean, Japan was really kind of rather coerced into being peaceful.
03:04I mean, the United States occupied Japan and so on.
03:07They were really constrained to follow a fairly pacifist line.
03:11But that's definitely going.
03:13And so people in Taiwan, in the Philippines, in Korea and in China might well feel that Japan's military is
03:20now a rising threat.
03:23Francis, good to talk to you.
03:25And thank you very much indeed for coming on the program.
03:27Francis Wood, the historian and former head of the Chinese collection at the British Library.
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