Commentary | Kaitlyn Ugoretz, Fearful Resonances: Critiquing Arlington and American Civil Religion through the Yasukuni Problem
The Nation’s Most Sacred Shrine
On January 20th, 2021, President of the United States Joseph R. Biden initiated a new civil ritual by paying a public visit to the “hallowed grounds” of the “nation's most sacred shrine,” Arlington National Cemetery, on the day of his inauguration. Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris arrived to the somber sounds of cannon fire, the national anthem, and military bugle calls. Flanked by three former presidents, with predecessor Donald J. Trump notably missing, Biden ceremonially laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, among other ritual gestures: saluting, bowing his head in reverence, and making the sign of the cross.
Coming on the heels of the deadly pro-Trump riot at the Capitol, news outlets hailed the new Chief and his entourage for embodying the unity of the American people through reverence for the nation’s war dead. American news outlet ABC declared that the visit visually demonstrated that “the country could be unified in the wake of our divisions” by “celebrat[ing] the people who defended freedom and democracy.” In a think piece for NBC, John Carlson praised Biden’s “revival of civil religion” in order to overcome “the toxic rhetoric, bitter divisions and deadly violence of the last four years.”
After the terrifying events of the violent pro-Trump riot at the Capitol, I too wanted very much to give myself over to civil ritual and the cathartic pageantry of American democracy. But the pomp and circumstance surrounding the president’s pilgrimage to Arlington was eerily familiar and unsettling, like listening to a song transposed from a major to a minor key. I knew where I’d heard the tune before.
On the other side of the Pacific, just a few months prior to Biden’s inauguration, former Prime Minister of Japan Abe Shinzō performed a similar ritual at his nation’s own most sacred shrine, Yasukuni. On September 16, 2020, within days of his resignation due to health concerns, Abe visited Yasukuni in Tokyo to pay his respects and report his resignation to the spirits of the war dead enshrined there as “heroic spirits” (eirei) and “protective gods of the nation” (gokokushin). The occasion garnered international attention for being the first time Abe had been seen at the controversial Shinto shrine and war memorial since his visit as PM in 2013, which itself had drawn condemnation from neighboring countries who argued that Abe’s actions signaled support for Japan’s history of militarism.
Proponents of Yasukuni Shrine often draw comparisons with Arlington National Cemetery to legitimize the site as a positive civic monument promoting patriotism, morality, and national unity. But rarely is the comparison flipped to critique how Arlington is problematically deployed to glorify militaristic and religious nationalism and to obscure state violence in the United States. As McLaughlin, Rots, Thomas and Watanabe have recently argued, “theorizing from Japan” helps to both decolonize the fields of Japanese and religious studies and shed new light on problems often glossed over by the rhetoric of American exceptionalism.
In what follows, I argue there is valuable perspective to be gained by applying the same yardstick to the mobilization of the victorious war dead as we do to the mobilization of the defeated. I do not mean to suggest that members of the armed forces do not deserve our respect or that officials cannot practice their personal faith. In fact, as someone with veterans on both sides of my family, I believe we owe it to those who dedicate their lives to service to be critical of the way various actors mobilize memorials like Arlington and war dead. And if we are being honest with ourselves now, the ousting of former-president Trump and change in administration have not suddenly exorcised, but rather continue to enable, the specter of state-sponsored, militant white Christian nationalism long supported by American civil religion and commemorated at sites like Arlington.
Out of Many, One
While scenes of American presidents past and present solemnly paying respects among Arlington’s neat rows of white marble headstones may seem a fitting backdrop for calls for national unity, they belie a contentious history of sectional and sectarian divisions that Americans are still struggling to overcome. One ABC commentator claimed that the ritual visit to Arlington promotes national unity because “it is our hallowed ground where people of all backgrounds, our heroes, are laid to rest.” Presidential historian Timothy Naftali added, “I cannot imagine a more poignant place for our former presidents to gather to deliver a message, a visual message of unity, at a time of anxiety, pain and suffering in our country.” But such statements conceal the fact that the most divisive issue for more than a century at both sacred sites has been determining the criteria concerning who belongs at Yasukuni or Arlington, and thus may be considered “Japanese” or “American.”
In the case of Yasukuni, the issue is a lack of differentiation when it comes to the enshrinement of the war dead. That is, among the more than two million souls on the enshrinement register are a thousand convicted war criminals—including fourteen designated “Class A” by the postwar Tokyo Trials for “crimes against peace”—almost fifty thousand colonial subjects from Okinawa, Korea, and Taiwan (often against their families’ wishes), and even a few individuals still living. To venerate one is to venerate all, and this is one of the reasons that visits to Yasukuni by public officials, particularly members of the imperial family and the Prime Minister, are a major source of ongoing conflict between Japan, neighboring nations that were former colonial territories, and the United States.
Conversely, Arlington’s history is complicated by discrimination regarding who could be included. Near the end of the Civil War, the Union converted the estate from a slave plantation into a cemetery honoring the war dead. But all men were not equal even in death, as black Union soldiers’ graves were segregated from white soldiers, spatially reinforcing the racial hierarchy still at the core of the nation. Military dead from later wars were relocated to new sections of Arlington in the twentieth century, including Confederate soldiers, transforming it into the national cemetery. As Micki McElya argues in The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery (2016), Arlington was constructed over time as “a potent scene for sectional reconciliation, triumphant white supremacy, and imperial might” (138).
“We must be critical of how both Arlington and Yasukuni are mobilized to advance particular definitions of national identity and unity predicated on the strategic claiming of war dead in ways that support militarism and racism.”
Though the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was erected in 1921 as a monument to all those who died in the armed forces, it too continues to be implicated in the confederation between white Christian nationalism and American civil religion. That is, while the anonymity of the Unknown is protected in order to maintain the soldier’s universality, that sacralized body is largely assumed to be white and Protestant. It was not until 1948 that Japanese, Mexican, and African American service members were buried alongside white soldiers. Recognizing this shared history, we must be critical of how both Arlington and Yasukuni are mobilized to advance particular definitions of national identity and unity predicated on the strategic claiming of war dead in ways that support militarism and racism.
Is Religion Rite?
Given the constitutional separation of religion and state in both Japan and the United States, the role of religion in the veneration of war dead remains contested at sites like Yasukuni and Arlington. Jolyon Baraka Thomas highlights in Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (2019) that prior to the American Occupation, the Meiji constitutional regime was a secularist system that governed according to a religion/not-religion paradigm. Yasukuni was among those shrines recognized as secular institutions for national rites such as the memorialization of those that died for the nation.
It was the postwar Allied Occupation of Japan that purposefully redefined these secular institutions as sites of “State Shinto,” or religious Shinto nationalism, in order to legally separate them from the state. Today, as a religious juridical person with an enduring national focus, Yasukuni comes under intense domestic and international scrutiny whenever a public official pays a visit. Even when politicians insist that they are visiting in their capacity as private citizens, this publicly visible act of veneration at a ritual site signals support for militarism, nationalism, and the denial of state-sponsored violence.
Arlington is likewise a public site where (quasi-)religious rituals are performed to venerate the nation’s war dead. More often than not, public and official engagement with Arlington is framed by white Christianity, as is the majority of civil religion in the United States. As I mentioned above, the Unknown Soldier is popularly assumed to be white and Protestant. And every year, volunteers place hundreds of thousands of Christmas wreathes on all the graves in the cemetery. As a result, other volunteers have taken it upon themselves to go and remove the wreathes from Jewish, Muslim, and other markedly non-Christian graves out of respect for the deceased’s personal faith or non-faith.
Some may argue that Arlington embraces religious freedom and pluralism due to the fact that the National Cemetery Administration offers over sixty different religious symbols that can be engraved on one’s headstone to indicate their personal faith. But the NCA wields the power to grant or deny petitions for the acceptance of certain beliefs and symbols and has demonstrated implicitly Christian biases in the past. For example, in 2007 the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the NCA for denying decades of requests for the inclusion of the Wiccan pentacle. Whenever Arlington’s sacred status is invoked, it is undergirded, however implicitly, by the logics of Christianity.
No Rest for the Weary
On Inauguration Day, news commentators characterized Arlington National Cemetery as a “place of healing” where people of different religious and political orientations could unite in common reverence for the dead and the military by proxy through their elected officials. But had the same media outlets been assigned to comment on the Japanese Prime Minister’s visits to Yasukuni, they surely would have expressed deep concern and criticized the event as divisive and promoting militaristic and nationalistic ideology.
We should have no illusions of how easily civil ritual can shade into militant white Christian nationalism. Just weeks before President Biden made the sign of the cross at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier during a public wreath laying ceremony, pro-Trump rioters paraded crosses, bibles, and “Jesus 2020” signs on the Capitol grounds and through the besieged halls. This is the most recent example in a long history of violence promoted by white Christian nationalism. Just in the past few years, we have witnessed too many forms of religious and racial violence: the mass shooting and bombing of non-white and non-Christian religious communities, police brutality, and the irreparable destruction of immigrant families. Americans need to take a good look at how civil rituals such as the wreath laying ceremony at Arlington may be part of a tradition that is complicit in the nation’s own problems with militarism, nationalism, imperialism, and the denial of reparations for the victims of state violence.
The past four years have exposed many flaws in American society that we cannot begin to address by returning to the “business” of America “as usual.” While Americans may enjoy a moment of catharsis in the pomp and circumstance of civil rituals like those held at Arlington, the cemetery is not the place nor the symbol in which we will find lasting the healing we need. We cannot heal a deeply divided nation by appealing to the same forces that have caused those divisions. This national crossroads is the perfect time and place to reevaluate persistent issues, including the functional establishment of Christianity as American civil religion and the glorification of death for the state over the injustices perpetrated and abetted by that same state on the living. In order to truly defend their democracy, Americans must first come to terms with the discordant truth of their nation’s hypocrisy.
Kaitlyn Ugoretz is a PhD Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She specializes in contemporary Japanese religion, online sociality, popular culture, and new media studies and her research focuses specifically on the globalization and digitization of Shinto.
To cite this essay, please use the suggested entry below:
Kaitlyn Ugoretz, “Fearful Resonances: Critiquing Arlington and American Civil Religion through the Yasukuni Problem,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, March 15, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/FWJV7719.