Yasukuni

I teach my students how to make a presentation in English. This is a good method to teach how to make slides, together with providing them with an opportunity to speak in English. (Yesterday I did it myself to show supposedly^^ a good example. It was fun.)
A couple of months ago, a student talked in the presentation about Yasukuni Shrine. This student has been quite eager and fervent to know anything about Japan since he studied abroad for one year. It had brought home to him that ignorance about his home country means devoid of his identity.
His presentation was not bad. He talked about the history of the shrine emphasizing how it worked as an inspiring machine to the Japanese soldiers and commanders, young and old, to devote their lives to the country. Most well known is the Kamikaze attack (suicide attack; 神風攻撃) in which young pilots in a fighter plane called zero (零戦) dived into the chimney of a battleship or aircraft carrier to destroy its heart, engine. The kamikaze zero-fighter planes carried fuel just for one way trip to the target, in case they might got cold feet and changed their minds. In those cases Yasukuni was their only mental fallback. They plunged into the battle ships saying "see you in Yasukuni." They believed they would be enshrined in Yasukuni together after life... sense of camaraderie... with the young fighters, with Japanese people in general who visit the shrine to worship their spirits.
Everyone knows that together with young souls, so called war criminals are also enshrined here, who ordered them to fight against impossible odds only to be killed in World War II. It is sometimes compared to a case "what if Hitler had been worshiped together with "innocent" victims in the War."
I can understand the feelings of those people who hate Yasukuni. But Shitoism is not a religion for individuals. It is all about nature and "us" as a collective humble human beings as a part of nature. We are a child of Nature whatever we do. In a way, we can say, whatever we do is also a conduct of Nature. If we die there's no discrimination between us whether we did good or bad while we are alive. This idea sounds discouraging but nature is not always made for our convenience. Punishing criminals after they die may be to use a religion as a deterrent force against crime. Shintoism used to stand aloof from such pragmatism.
I like the concept underlying Shintoism. It deep-rooted in Japanese culture. Good people and bad people are all humble existence under mother Nature. It is hard to be explained since it is not about logic. Just as all attempts to explain our nature logically end up in failure, our life and death cannot be explained logically. People in general seem to lack the understanding of this fact.
Forgiveness is one of the things we have forgotten.