xp_logs | Jishin Da!: Yvette, Jane

Yvette and Jane explore the Yasukuni Shrine and muse over its meaning.

It was a very big gate. Even by standards taller than Yvette. The small Albanian girl stood at the base of one of the columns staring up, for a moment unmindful of the crowds around her. Yasukuni Shrine was moderately busy, but not as much as some of the other sites they'd visited, and the wide, empty expanses helped a lot.

There was nothing Jane wanted so much as to be able to fly up to the top of the gate and perch there, watching the people go by. You could probably see forever from up there. Checking to see where Yvette was, Jane wandered over to the opposite pillar and began to pace back to her, counting her steps. Why was it so wide? Were they expecting giant souls?

"What do you think?" She asked the younger girl when she reached her side.

"It is very, how you say, imposing?" Yvette looked around at the shrine, its collection of buildings and statues and the rest. "It is seeming very important to the people, I think."

Jane nodded. "Very. I wasn't expecting it to be so big." She dug out her guidebook and thumbed to the right page. "It says the shrine was built in 1869, but the picture they have here doesn't really look the same." She gazed up the path at the imposing building before them. "I guess they've added on a bit since then."

"There has been more war since then," Yvette supplied softly. "More souls to be keeping safe."

"Not in the original plans, I guess," Jane joked quietly, suddenly uncomfortable. How do you protect something that might not exist? And shouldn't that be more something God would do anyway?

"In my country, there are no places like this. People would like to be forgetting the war, I think." Yvette's voice was contemplative. "I do not know if this is the good thing. If there is the shrine for the remembering, to not be doing the same again, that is a good thing. But if it is to make war be the good thing..." She trailed off, remembering some of the literature she'd read about this place, and the controversy surrounding it.

Jane considered her words before speaking. "Remembering is good, both what is won and lost. Sometimes it is necessary to fight for what you believe in. But there's a difference between remembering and celebrating. War is nothing that should be celebrated."

Yvette nodded. "This is very true." She tilted her head at Jane. "You are not coming from the place with war, are you Miss Jane?"

"No, not recently, anyway. But we've been in a lot of wars." Jane pursed her lips. "Have you ever been to Washington?" she asked Yvette.

Yvette shook her head. "Not yet. We try to have the field trips, but it is difficult when there is kidnapping and dinosaurs."

"Um. Okay." Jane blinked, not really sure how to respond to the obvious language flub. "Well. It's nice, I hope the class gets to go soon. But they have a lot of war memorials there, and Arlington, which is a big military cemetery. And mostly they focus on remembering the cost of going to war. How many people we lost, and why we had to do it. But sometime people misunderstand their purpose and look at them as monuments to being the biggest bada- er, tough guy in the world. They look at the monuments as being a celebration of going to war. And that's not right."

"Not so different to here, yes?" Yvette light touched the gatepost with a gloved hand, wishing she could feel the texture of the aged wood. "People think it is about both."

"Not very, no." Jane agreed.