Court rules against families who wanted relatives’ names removed from Yasukuni

The Osaka District Court rejected a lawsuit today from a group seeking the removal of their relatives’ names from the list of war dead enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine.

The AFP’s article about the case contained a headline implying that the court ruled that the names must stay on the list, a choice of words that implies the court had expressed a favorable view towards the Yasukuni enshrinement. For some reason, it does not contain any information about why the court ruled the way it did. Quite a bad article.

Kyodo News actually reported the reasons the judge gave when announcing the decision:

In Thursday’s decision, Muraoka brushed aside the plaintiffs’ argument that Yasukuni Shrine has infringed upon their human rights to respect their loved ones and cherish memories of them by unilaterally enshrining them collectively without the relatives’ consent, saying such rights are out of the range of legal protection.

In the suit, the plaintiffs pursued the Japanese government’s responsibility for the collective enshrinement, saying it helped Yasukuni Shrine over many years by providing information on the war dead.

But the judge rejected the claim, saying it is up to the shrine’s discretion based on its religious principles to decide who it would enshrine.

So there you have it: the court has not ruled that the names must stay (that is something for the shrine to ultimately decide), but rather that it doesn’t see anything illegal about the religious practice and thus does not have the authority to stop it.

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