Yasukuni Shrine and Yūshūkan Museum

Yasukuni Shrine stands in Kudankita, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo. It was founded on 29 June 1869 (Meiji 2), by the will of Emperor Meiji, as Tokyo Shokonsha to enshrine those who had died fighting for the new government in the Boshin War. It was renamed Yasukuni Jinja in June 1879 and ranked as a Special Government Shrine. Japan's military dead from successive foreign wars were enshrined here thereafter; before 1945 the shrine was administered jointly by the Army and Navy Ministries and held a special place within State Shinto.

According to the shrine, about 2,466,000 souls are enshrined, the great majority from the wars after 1937: about 2,134,000 from the Pacific War (which the shrine calls the Greater East Asia War) and about 191,000 from the war in China, as well as about 88,000 from the Russo-Japanese War. They include roughly 28,000 people from Taiwan and 21,000 from Korea who were mobilized under Japanese rule; some bereaved families have asked for their relatives to be removed, which the shrine has refused. In 1946 Yasukuni became an independent religious corporation.

On 17 October 1978 the shrine enshrined fourteen Class A war criminals, including Hideki Tojo; this became public through press reports the following April. Emperor Showa did not visit after 1975, nor have his successors. Prime Minister Nakasone's official visit in 1985 drew strong protests from China and South Korea, and visits by prime ministers and cabinet members have repeatedly become flashpoints in East Asian diplomacy and in disputes over historical memory, while opinion within Japan is divided over the separation of religion and state and over war responsibility.

The Yushukan, in the shrine precincts, was founded in 1882 as Japan's first military museum. Its original building, designed by the Italian Cappelletti, was damaged in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake; the present main building was rebuilt in the early 1930s with the involvement of Ito Chuta. Closed after the war and leased for a time to an insurance company, the museum resumed limited displays in 1961 as a hall of treasures and relics, reopened under the name Yushukan in the mid-1980s, and was fully renovated and enlarged in 2002. Exhibits include a Mitsubishi A6M5 Zero, the C56 31 steam locomotive that ran on the Thai–Burma Railway, a Suisei dive bomber, a Kaiten human torpedo and an Ohka, together with many letters and portraits of the dead. Its presentation of Japan's wars as wars of self-preservation has been criticized by scholars in Japan and abroad as revisionist and as evading questions of aggression and responsibility.