Erasing Deathscapes, Preserving Glory: War Commemoration and the Institutional Persistence of Violence in Modern Japan

Abstract

This article examines the institutional formation and transformation of war commemoration in modern Japan, focusing on the relationship between symbolic enshrinement and the treatment of physical remains. While existing scholarship has emphasized memory, narrative, and political controversy—particularly debates surrounding Yasukuni Shrine—it has paid comparatively little attention to the materiality of the war dead and the embodied practices through which relationships with the deceased continue to be maintained. This study addresses this overlooked dimension as a critical aspect of war’s enduring legacy. Drawing on archival sources, it traces a historical trajectory from early shōkon practices to the establishment of Yasukuni Shrine, the development and postwar dissolution of military cemeteries, and the emergence of large-scale remains recovery. It argues that Japan’s commemoration system developed as a dual structure in which the spirits of selected war dead were symbolically integrated into state-centered institutions, while their bodies were subjected to processes of regulation, mobilization, cremation, and fragmentation. Using Vamik Volkan’s concept of “chosen trauma” and Pauline Boss’s notion of “ambiguous loss,” the article demonstrates that this division has produced enduring tensions in mourning and memory, illustrating the institutional persistence of violence.

1. Introduction

This article examines how modern Japan has structured the treatment of its war dead, focusing on the relationship between symbolic commemoration and the management of physical remains. Situated within broader debates in peace studies concerning war’s legacy, trauma, and memory (Winter, 1995; King, 1998; Gregory, 1994; Gillis, 1994), it addresses a critical but often overlooked dimension: the institutional organization of the dead (Lloyd, 1998; Tarlow, 1999, 2000; Awazu, 2017).

Existing scholarship has tended to emphasize the role of collective memory, national narratives, and political controversies in shaping postwar understandings of the past. In the Japanese context, discussions have centered particularly on Yasukuni Shrine as a site of contested memory, reflecting tensions between remembrance, nationalism, and reconciliation. While these approaches have generated important insights, they largely privilege the symbolic dimension of commemoration (Mullins, 2021) and pay comparatively little attention to the materiality of the war dead and the embodied practices through which relationships with the deceased are sustained. Rather than treating graves, human remains, and memorials simply as symbols of the deceased, this article approaches them as material media that enable and sustain relationships with the dead through embodied social practices.

The continuing relevance of this perspective is reflected in contemporary debates over the legacy of the Asia-Pacific War. In its 2024 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations (Nihon Hidankyo) criticized the Japanese government’s longstanding refusal to provide state compensation for those who died in the atomic bombings, arguing that postwar policies have remained largely confined to medical support for radiation-related illnesses (Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, 2024). Rather than viewing this controversy solely as a question of historical responsibility or collective memory, it also raises a broader question concerning the institutional relationship between the modern state and those who died as a consequence of war. In this article, the material dimension refers not simply to physical remains or commemorative objects themselves, but to the bodily relationships sustained through them. From this perspective, the institutional relationship between the modern state and the war dead constitutes a crucial yet largely overlooked dimension of postwar Japanese memory culture. Attending to this dimension not only complements existing scholarship on symbolic commemoration but also invites reconsideration of how postwar memory has been institutionally constituted through the management, absence, recovery, and material mediation of the dead. Put differently, this article argues that what is ultimately at stake is not simply how the war dead have been treated, but how that institutional relationship has been materially and bodily constituted and sustained.

Building on this understanding, this article argues that the material dimension of war commemoration extends beyond the treatment, absence, and recovery of physical remains. It also encompasses the material media through which relationships with the war dead are maintained in social practice. In modern Japan, the relationship between spirits and bodies was institutionally structured through a dual system: the symbolic enshrinement of selected war dead at shrines, and the physical management of their remains through burial, cremation, and subsequent recovery.

This dual structure did not remain stable. While symbolic institutions such as Yasukuni Shrine have persisted, the material infrastructures of war commemoration—most notably military cemeteries—were dismantled or erased after 1945. At the same time, the bodies of the war dead became increasingly mobile, fragmented, and often absent, giving rise to large-scale remains recovery efforts that continue to the present.

Drawing on archival sources and combining historical analysis with theoretical perspectives on chosen trauma (Volkan, 1997) and ambiguous loss (Boss, 2006), this article demonstrates that Japan’s war commemoration system is characterized by a structural division between enshrined spirits and absent or fragmented remains. It argues that this division is not merely a historical outcome but an enduring condition shaped by institutional processes.

From this perspective, the Japanese case illustrates what may be termed the institutional persistence of violence: a condition in which past violence continues to shape the present through enduring arrangements governing the dead. By bringing the material dimension of death into focus, this article contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of how societies reckon with war’s legacy and highlights the importance of integrating symbolic and material approaches to commemoration in the pursuit of reconciliation.

2. From Identification to Enshrinement: The Formation of a State Commemorative System

Yasukuni Shrine has long been regarded as the central institution for the commemoration of Japan’s war dead. Yet its origins lie in a set of earlier institutional and religious arrangements that structured how the dead were identified, commemorated, and enshrined. This section examines the establishment of the Tokyo Shōkonsha by analyzing contemporary archival documents, focusing on the relationship between administrative investigation and religious enshrinement (Yasukuni Shrine, 1983).

The document issued on 12 January 1875 (Meiji 8) by the Dajōkan (Grand Council of State) marks a decisive moment in the formation of a state-sponsored system of commemoration in modern Japan (Dajōkan, 1875). Addressed to the Ministry of Home Affairs, it orders the enshrinement of those who had died for the imperial cause since the late Tokugawa period at the Tokyo Shōkonsha, a proto-Yasukuni institution that would later develop into Yasukuni Shrine. At the same time, it mandates a comprehensive investigation to identify and register previously unrecognized individuals who had died in loyal service. Significantly, however, the directive does not abolish earlier commemorative sites. Instead, it explicitly stipulates that the Higashiyama Shōkonsha in Kyoto and various regional shōkon grounds are to remain in place.

Notably, the directive designates Kaei 6 (1853) as its starting point. In subsequent Meiji discourse, this year—marked by the arrival of foreign fleets, beginning with Perry’s expedition—came to be framed as the onset of a national crisis. The commemoration of those who died “for the imperial cause” is thus temporally anchored to this moment. In this sense, the emerging system of enshrinement can be read as aligning the memory of the war dead with a collectively articulated experience of crisis, approximating what Volkan has conceptualized as a “chosen trauma.”

This provision raises a fundamental question: why were earlier sites such as the Higashiyama Shōkonsha preserved, even as commemoration was being centralized within the Tokyo Shōkonsha? If the latter was to function as the primary locus of state-sponsored enshrinement, what role did these pre-existing sites continue to play?

An answer begins to emerge when this directive is read alongside two earlier proclamations issued in 1868, at the outset of the Meiji state. A directive dated 24 May 1868 ordered all domains to investigate and report the names, dates of death, and other identifying details of those who had died in battle since the beginning of hostilities (Ministry of Justice, 1873). These records were to be submitted to the Jingikan (Department of Divinities), thereby initiating a process of centralized registration of the war dead. At this stage, the state’s engagement with the dead was primarily administrative: it consisted of the identification, enumeration, and inscription of individual bodies into an official register.

A second proclamation, dated 10 May 1868 and associated with Iwakura Tomomi (1825–1883), a leading court noble (kuge) and a central statesman of the Meiji Restoration, reveals a different but complementary dimension (Iwakura, 1927). It ordered the establishment of a shōkonsha at Higashiyama in Kyoto for those who had died for the imperial cause. The purpose of this institution was not only to commemorate the dead, but also to console their spirits and to make manifest their loyalty and moral resolve as a means of inspiring the broader population. Crucially, it reflects a religious conception in which those who had died violently in conflict were understood to risk becoming aramitama—unpacified and potentially disruptive spirits—thus necessitating ritual acts of summoning and pacification (shōkonsai).

The term shōkonsha itself requires closer attention. Although commonly translated as “shrine for summoning the souls,” it was also used more broadly to refer to shōkonjō (“sites for summoning the souls”) and shōkonbochi (“cemeteries for summoning the souls”). These institutions were therefore not conceived simply as shrines in the conventional sense. Rather, they simultaneously functioned as places where the bodies or human remains of the war dead were buried and as ritual spaces in which their spirits were summoned and pacified. This dual function reflected the widely shared East Asian conception of konpaku (hun and po), according to which the spiritual and corporeal aspects of the person remained distinct after death while requiring complementary forms of ritual care.

Within this framework, the shōkonsha should not be understood simply as a shrine (Kobayashi & Terunuma, 1969). Rather, it functioned as a hybrid commemorative institution that integrated ritual practice with a cemetery-like space. It was not only a site for ritual commemoration but also a burial ground, bringing into co-presence both the spirits and the physical remains of the dead.

Taken together, these documents reveal a three-stage process in the formation of modern Japanese commemorative practice. The first stage consisted of the administrative identification and registration of the dead; the second involved the ritual and symbolic integration of their spirits; and the third, exemplified by the 1875 directive, entailed the institutional consolidation of these practices within a centralized framework. However, this consolidation did not eliminate earlier forms. Rather, it reconfigured them.

The 1875 directive can therefore be understood not simply as an act of centralization, but as a transformation of an earlier institutional logic. While the Tokyo Shōkonsha functioned as a centralizing apparatus of state-sponsored enshrinement, earlier sites such as the Higashiyama Shōkonsha retained their significance as loci in which the spiritual and corporeal dimensions of the dead remained intertwined. The coexistence of these sites thus reflects not a transitional inconsistency, but a structural feature of early Meiji commemorative practice.

In this sense, early shōkonsha practices preserved a unified field of spirits and physical remains (Imamura, 2006; Tsuda, 2009; Murakami, 2022)—a configuration that would later be restructured into separate regimes of symbolic enshrinement and physical burial. What emerged from this transformation was not merely a change in institutional form, but the gradual differentiation of the symbolic and material practices through which relationships with the war dead were maintained and governed. This historical differentiation laid the institutional foundation for the dual structure of war commemoration examined in the following sections.

3. Institutionalizing the Body: Military Cemeteries and Burial Systems

While the spirits of the war dead were integrated into a symbolic and moral order through institutions such as the shōkonsha, their physical remains required a different form of institutional management. This section examines how the treatment of bodies became increasingly systematized, leading to the establishment of military cemeteries and burial systems in modern Japan.

The establishment of the Higashiyama Shōkonjō (shōkon burial ground) and the Tokyo Shōkonsha served two closely related purposes. The first was to clarify the system of rewards and punishments that had been reconfigured since Kaei 6 (1853), and the second was to console the spirits of those who had died in battle for the imperial cause. These objectives were inseparably linked: the commemoration of the dead functioned simultaneously as a form of moral recognition and as a mechanism for the reconstitution of political order. Consequently, those who had fought on the side of the so-called “enemy forces” (zokugun) were excluded from this framework and, even today, are not enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine.

At the same time, because the shōkonsha was fundamentally a shrine, its primary function lay in the ritual enshrinement of spirits rather than in the burial of bodies. In its earliest form, the Higashiyama Shōkonjō combined these functions, operating as a space in which both the spirits and the physical remains of the dead were present. However, this integrated form of commemorative practice did not become a sustained institutional model. Instead, it was gradually replaced by a distinct system for the management of bodies.

This alternative system took shape in the form of army burial grounds, later expanded into the broader framework of army and navy cemeteries. With the introduction of modern military organization, a systematic mechanism for the collection, management, and burial of soldiers’ bodies was established. Following the promulgation of the Conscription Ordinance in January 1873 and the establishment of the garrison (chindai) system in December of the same year, Japan was divided into military administrative districts, each of which maintained its own burial grounds. The physical remains of fallen soldiers were thus incorporated into a spatial framework under direct state control. These studies demonstrate that military cemeteries were not merely burial spaces, but constituted a nationwide institutional system through which the state systematically organized, classified, and managed the bodies of the war dead (Harada, 2003; Yamabe, 2003).

The system was further specified through a series of regulations, including the Kashikan Heisotsu Maisō Hōsoku (Burial Regulations for Non-Commissioned Officers and Soldiers) of 1873, the Rikugun Maisō Kisoku (Army Burial Regulations) of 1897, and the Rikugun Bochi Kisoku (Army Cemetery Regulations) of 1938 (Imperial Japanese Army, 1873, 1897, 1938), as well as detailed provisions such as the “Regulations on Army Burial Grounds” (Rikugun Maisōchi Sōhō Kisoku). These regulations defined in detail the structure of burial sites, the form and dimensions of grave markers, and the permissible modes of funerary rites. Funerals were restricted to Shinto or Buddhist forms, while grave markers recorded the rank, name, and date of death of the deceased. Distinctions in rank were reflected in the size and form of the markers, ensuring that individual identification was maintained even within a standardized spatial arrangement. In this way, the bodies of the dead were not only commemorated but also subjected to systematic administrative ordering.

Administrative control extended beyond burial itself. Regulations governing the interment of non-commissioned officers and soldiers required that deaths be reported to local authorities, who in turn were to notify the family. Relatives were permitted to claim the body within a specified period; however, in cases involving infectious disease or urgent circumstances, burial was to proceed according to military regulations regardless of family wishes. Furthermore, burial fees and land values were formally specified, indicating that the treatment of the dead had become an integral component of an administrative and economic system.

In wartime, these procedures were further extended and intensified. Under the “Wartime Army Burial Regulations” promulgated on 17 July 1894, the bodies of fallen soldiers were collected by specially organized battlefield clearance units and interred in communal graves near the battlefield or encampment (Imperial Japanese Army, 1894, 1904). Rituals of pacification were conducted by military chaplains or Buddhist clergy, while grave markers continued to reflect rank. Enemy soldiers, whose identities were often unknown, were typically buried collectively; in cases involving large numbers of dead, cremation was carried out, and markers were erected where possible. In overseas theaters of war, where the long-term maintenance of cemeteries proved impractical, bodies were later exhumed, cremated, and their remains or hair returned to the home islands for reinterment.

A decisive transformation occurred in the Shōwa period. The “Army Cemetery Regulations” of 1938 abolished earlier burial regulations and redefined burial grounds as cemeteries, while introducing new principles governing the treatment of remains. In principle, the bodies of deceased soldiers were to be interred in family graves, and the state institutionalized the return of remains in the form of divided ashes or hair. At the same time, collective commemorative structures such as chūreitō (memorial towers) and communal ossuary monuments were established, into which portions of the remains were deposited.

As a result, the bodies of the war dead were no longer treated as fixed entities anchored in a single burial site. Instead, they became objects subject to collection, movement, cremation, and division. The physical remains were effectively split between state-sponsored commemorative systems and family-based religious practices, and in many cases were managed in the absence of their full material presence.

This transformation reveals a fundamental shift in the treatment of the dead: from an integrated space in which spirits and bodies coexisted, to a differentiated system in which the symbolic and material dimensions of the dead were institutionally separated. It is this reconfiguration that provided the historical conditions for the postwar problem of remains recovery.

4. Institutional Collapse and Remains Recovery

The institutional arrangements that had structured the treatment of the war dead in modern Japan did not persist unchanged. Japan’s defeat in 1945 brought about a fundamental rupture in the system that had governed the treatment of the war dead. With the dissolution of the Imperial Army and Navy, the system of military burial grounds—through which the bodies of fallen soldiers had been collected, managed, and interred—ceased to exist. As a result, the state lost the institutional framework that had previously organized the material disposition of the dead, necessitating a reconfiguration of practices under entirely new conditions.

At the same time, Yasukuni Shrine was separated from the state under the principle of the separation of religion and government established in the postwar constitution, and was reorganized as a private religious corporation. In other words, the system of enshrinement that had functioned as a central component of state ritual was removed from the sphere of public authority and repositioned within the domain of religion. Consequently, the two institutions that had respectively managed the spirits and the physical remains of the war dead—Yasukuni Shrine and the military cemetery system—were simultaneously detached from the state. No unified institutional framework remained to integrate the symbolic and material dimensions of the dead.

The former military cemeteries, deprived of their administrative authorities, were transferred from the Army and Navy Ministries to the Ministry of Finance and subsequently to local governments. In many cases, gravestones were removed and the sites were repurposed as public parks or local memorial spaces. Once central to the state’s management of death, these cemeteries were both institutionally dismantled and gradually erased from public memory.

Within this context of institutional rupture, postwar Japan reoriented its approach to the war dead around the practice of remains recovery. The bodies of the fallen were no longer treated as entities to be interred within an existing burial system, but as objects to be located, collected, and repatriated from former battlefields. In this sense, the physical remains of the dead were redefined not as fixed presences anchored in a cemetery, but as mobile and often absent entities requiring recovery.

The scale of this problem was immense. The number of Japanese war dead overseas in the Asia-Pacific War is estimated at approximately 2.4 million. Following the entry into force of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the Japanese government initiated large-scale recovery operations as a national project. To date, approximately 1.28 million sets of remains have been repatriated, while roughly 1.12 million remain unrecovered. These efforts were carried out in several planned phases under the Ministry of Health and Welfare (now the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare), including the First Phase (1952–1957), Second Phase (1967–1972), and Third Phase (1973–1975), after which the government declared the “completion of planned recovery.” Nevertheless, recovery operations continued in regions that later became accessible due to changing political and logistical conditions (MHLW, 2024).

From 2006 onward, recovery efforts were further supplemented by information provided by private individuals and organizations. In 2016, the Act on the Promotion of Recovery of Remains of the War Dead was enacted, redefining remains recovery as a responsibility of the state. Under this framework, an intensive implementation period was established, and a designated organization—the Japan Association for Recovery and Repatriation of War Casualties—was tasked with carrying out the operations. Due to delays caused in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, the law was revised in 2023, extending the intensive implementation period to fiscal year 2029. Remains recovery thus continues as an ongoing national undertaking (MHLW, 2024).

Importantly, these postwar practices should not be understood merely as a process of dealing with the aftermath of war. Rather, they must be situated within a longer trajectory of institutional transformation. As demonstrated in the preceding sections, the bodies of the war dead had already been rendered mobile, divisible, and administratively regulated during the wartime period. The postwar recovery of remains therefore operated within a framework in which the location of bodies was uncertain and their retrieval was institutionally anticipated.

A further significant feature of the postwar system is the limited number of national burial sites for the war dead. At present, only two national cemeteries exist: the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery in Tokyo and the National Okinawa Cemetery for the War Dead. Both function as collective ossuaries in which recovered remains are interred without individual identification, and neither is associated with a specific ritual community. In this respect, they operate as anonymous graves, in which the dead are incorporated into a national framework while lacking a direct connection to familial or communal structures of mourning.

In sum, the defeat of 1945 simultaneously dismantled the institutional structures that had managed both the spirits and the bodies of the war dead. In their place emerged a new configuration centered on the recovery of remains. This transformation reveals that the bodies of the dead were no longer treated as fixed entities anchored in a stable location, but as mobile, uncertain, and often absent presences. Postwar remains recovery should therefore be understood not simply as a response to wartime loss, but as the outcome of a longer process of institutional reconfiguration in the treatment of the dead in modern Japan.

5. Theorizing Institutional Relationships with the War Dead

5.1. Chosen Trauma and the Symbolic Integration of the War Dead

The preceding sections have traced the historical formation, transformation, and collapse of the institutional arrangements governing the war dead in modern Japan. This section turns from historical reconstruction to theoretical interpretation by situating the present study within broader debates on war, trauma, and large-group psychology, and by explaining why the concepts of chosen trauma and ambiguous loss provide a particularly appropriate framework for understanding the institutional relationships between the modern state and the war dead. Although trauma studies have generated extensive scholarship on the psychological consequences of war, particularly through the study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among combat veterans and survivors, these approaches have primarily focused on trauma at the level of the individual. By contrast, Vamik D. Volkan’s concept of “chosen trauma” shifts the analytical focus to large-group psychology, examining how collective identities are formed and sustained through socially transmitted representations of past violence. This perspective is particularly appropriate for the present study because it illuminates how relationships with the war dead become institutionalized as part of the cultural environment within which later generations understand themselves. Rather than treating chosen trauma simply as the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memory, this article adopts Volkan’s framework because it conceptualizes trauma as part of the cultural environment through which institutional relationships with the war dead are reproduced across generations.

Volkan’s theoretical perspective emerged not only from his clinical work on complicated mourning and linking objects, but also from his lifelong engagement with large-group conflicts, shaped in part by his own background as a Turkish Cypriot psychiatrist. His work moves between the intimate psychic world of bereavement and the collective formation of large-group identity. In this sense, chosen trauma should not be understood simply as a memory of past injury. Rather, it refers to a socially transmitted and affectively charged representation of past defeat, humiliation, or mass death that becomes incorporated into large-group identity.

In 1875 (Meiji 8), the Dajōkan (Grand Council of State) issued a proclamation announcing the establishment of the Tokyo Shōkonsha for the purpose of enshrining the spirits of those who had died for the imperial cause “since Kaei 6 (1853)” (Dajōkan, 1875). This proclamation should be understood not merely as the founding of a religious institution, but as an attempt to reorganize and institutionalize a specific historical experience within the process of modern state formation. Viewed through Volkan’s framework, the external crisis initiated by the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853, together with the subsequent internal conflict of the Boshin War, came to be reconfigured not simply as a sequence of historical events but as elements of a narrative of “restoring the imperial order.”

Within this framework, the deaths of imperial loyalists were endowed with privileged meaning. The establishment of the Tokyo Shōkonsha thus functioned as an institutional device that transformed these historical experiences into a religious-symbolic system. By enshrining selected war dead as spirits who had died for the imperial cause, the emerging Meiji state incorporated violent death into a symbolic order that reaffirmed its own legitimacy. The commemoration of the dead therefore did not merely preserve memory; it helped constitute a cultural and political environment in which later generations could inherit a particular narrative of crisis, sacrifice, and national restoration.

A crucial element in understanding the structure of this system is found in the concluding clause of the same document: “However, the Higashiyama Shōkonjō and similar sites shall remain as before.” This statement indicates that the establishment of the Tokyo Shōkonsha presupposed a dual structure consisting of shrines for the ritual enshrinement of spirits and burial grounds for the treatment of bodies. In other words, while the spirits of imperial loyalist war dead were symbolically enshrined at the Tokyo Shōkonsha, their physical remains continued to be materially processed and interred at shōkon burial grounds.

It is important to note that this system was fundamentally selective in nature. The Tokyo Shōkonsha—later Yasukuni Shrine—was a shrine rather than a cemetery, and no bodies were interred within its precincts. Moreover, only those who had died on the side of the imperial forces were eligible for enshrinement. The institution thus functioned as a religious apparatus for the commemoration of the dead selected by the state. This selectivity was carried over into the subsequent development of Yasukuni Shrine and became a foundational feature of Japan’s system of war commemoration. The question of “who is to be enshrined” was therefore not merely a religious matter, but one intimately connected to state-driven processes of historical interpretation and political legitimation.

From this perspective, the symbolic integration of the war dead through the Shōkonsha and later Yasukuni Shrine may be understood as a mechanism through which the modern Japanese state organized a collective narrative of crisis and sacrifice. Volkan’s concept of chosen trauma is useful here because it clarifies how memories of violent rupture can be institutionalized and transmitted across generations. Yet the Japanese case also shows that this symbolic integration was never detached from the material treatment of bodies. The very system that elevated selected spirits into a national symbolic order also presupposed a separate regime for the management, burial, and later fragmentation of physical remains.

5.2. Ambiguous Loss and the Material Absence of the Dead

Taken together, Volkan’s concept of chosen trauma and Boss’s theory of ambiguous loss illuminate complementary dimensions of institutional relationships with the war dead: the former explains how relationships with the war dead are symbolically integrated into large-group identity, whereas the latter clarifies how the material absence of the dead shapes the continuing experiences of bereaved families. If chosen trauma helps explain the symbolic integration of selected war dead into a national commemorative order, Pauline Boss’s concept of “ambiguous loss” provides a useful framework for understanding the unresolved condition produced by the absence or fragmentation of physical remains. Boss’s theory was not developed as an abstract model of grief alone. It emerged from her long-standing work with families living under conditions of unresolved absence and uncertain presence, including families of prisoners of war and missing-in-action soldiers, as well as families affected by depression, dementia, traumatic brain injury, addiction, and other conditions in which a loved one is physically present but psychologically or relationally altered. Her early work on families of missing fathers and POW/MIA cases, including studies associated with the Naval Health Research Center’s Center for Prisoner of War Studies in San Diego, is especially relevant here (Boss, 1975). In this respect, ambiguous loss is a concept rooted in the practical problem of how families live with uncertainty when ordinary markers of death, mourning, and closure are unavailable. Ambiguous loss refers to a situation in which the absence of a loved one is not definitively confirmed or psychologically resolved, thereby preventing mourning from reaching a clear point of completion (Boss, 2006). Although Boss developed this concept primarily in relation to prisoners of war, missing persons, and families living with unresolved absence, it is equally relevant to the experiences of bereaved families of the Japanese war dead.

As discussed in the previous sections, the symbolic integration of spirits was accompanied by a contrary process affecting the bodies of the dead. Within the institutional framework of the modern Japanese state, physical remains were progressively separated from their spiritual counterparts and reconstituted as mobile, divisible, and administratively regulated entities. Particularly from the Shōwa period onward, the bodies of the war dead were subjected to cremation, division, transfer, and partial return, resulting in their distribution between state-managed commemorative systems and family-based religious practices. In many cases, however, the full material presence of the dead was never restored.

This condition became especially visible in the postwar problem of remains recovery. The number of Japanese war dead overseas in the Asia-Pacific War is estimated at approximately 2.4 million. While roughly 1.28 million sets of remains have been repatriated, approximately 1.12 million remain unrecovered. In 2016, the Act on the Promotion of Recovery of Remains of the War Dead redefined remains recovery as a responsibility of the state. Nevertheless, the recovery of remains has remained incomplete, and most recovered remains cannot be individually identified. They are therefore often treated through collective interment rather than being returned to specific families.

Facilities such as the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery in Tokyo and the National Okinawa Cemetery for the War Dead exemplify this condition. They function as repositories for recovered remains that cannot be individually identified, effectively operating as anonymous graves without direct familial affiliation. These sites offer a national framework for the treatment of remains, but they do not fully resolve the relational absence experienced by bereaved families. The dead are materially present in collective form, yet remain absent as identifiable persons within familial and communal networks of mourning.

In this sense, the postwar recovery of remains should not be understood merely as a humanitarian or administrative response to the aftermath of war. It also reveals the persistence of a deeper unresolved structure: the symbolic integration of the war dead into national commemoration coexists with the material absence, fragmentation, or anonymity of their bodies. For the bereaved, this produces a condition in which mourning remains suspended between presence and absence. The dead may be commemorated as national subjects, yet their bodies often remain unrecovered, unidentified, or detached from the specific relationships through which they were known and mourned.

Boss’s concept of ambiguous loss is useful here because it clarifies how the absence of remains is not simply a lack of material evidence, but a continuing relational condition. The problem is not only that the dead body is missing; it is that the social and emotional relationship with the deceased cannot be fully reanchored through burial, identification, or familiar ritual forms. Thus, the material absence of the war dead produces a form of unresolved loss that persists across generations.

Taken together, the symbolic integration of selected spirits and the material absence of bodies reveal the structural tension at the heart of Japan’s war commemoration system. Chosen trauma explains how particular deaths were elevated into a collective narrative of crisis, sacrifice, and national restoration. Ambiguous loss explains how the absence or fragmentation of remains prevented the bereaved from achieving a corresponding resolution at the level of personal and familial mourning. The division between enshrined spirits and unrecovered or anonymous remains thus constitutes not merely a historical outcome, but an enduring condition in which collective commemoration and unresolved personal loss remain inextricably intertwined.

5.3. Materiality and Embodied Relationships with the Dead

While Volkan’s concept of chosen trauma illuminates the symbolic integration of collective memory and Boss’s notion of ambiguous loss clarifies the psychological consequences of bodily absence, neither framework fully explains the significance of the material objects through which relationships between the living and the dead continue to be sustained. The Japanese case suggests that graves, human remains, memorials, and other commemorative sites should not be understood merely as representations of the deceased. Rather, they function as material media through which relationships with the dead are enacted, renewed, and maintained through embodied social practices.

The significance of these material objects lies not simply in what they symbolize, but in what they enable. Visiting a grave, cleaning a memorial, recovering human remains, offering flowers, praying, or speaking to the deceased are not merely symbolic acts of remembering. They are bodily practices through which relationships with the dead are repeatedly enacted within particular material settings. The meaning of these objects therefore cannot be reduced to their representational function alone. Their material presence makes possible forms of interaction that sustain the continuing social existence of the deceased within the lives of the living.

Among these material media, human remains occupy a distinctive position. Unlike memorials or personal belongings, which mediate relationships symbolically, human remains preserve a direct material continuity with the once-living body itself. For this reason, they possess a unique moral, emotional, and social significance. The recovery, identification, burial, and preservation of human remains have therefore assumed profound importance across cultures, not simply because they resolve administrative or legal questions, but because they restore the material conditions under which relationships with the deceased can be re-established.

Importantly, these relationships are not static. They are repeatedly reproduced through recurring embodied practices performed at particular places and particular times. Annual memorial ceremonies, visits to graves on anniversaries, religious festivals, and collective acts of remembrance continually renew the relationship between the living and the dead. Such practices demonstrate that mourning should not be understood solely as an internal psychological process. Rather, it is enacted within networks consisting of persons, material objects, places, institutions, and repeated bodily practices.

This perspective also helps explain why bereaved families continue to return to sites of death long after human remains have been recovered or buried elsewhere. Following the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123 in 1985, for example, many bereaved families continue to gather annually at Mount Osutaka despite the fact that the remains of their loved ones have long since been buried. The crash site functions not merely as a place of historical memory but as a material locus in which relationships with the deceased continue to be renewed through repeated acts of visitation and commemoration.

Seen in this light, the materiality of the war dead is not secondary to symbolic commemoration but constitutes one of its indispensable conditions. By foregrounding the material media through which relationships with the deceased continue to be sustained, the Japanese case extends existing discussions of collective memory beyond questions of representation toward the embodied and relational dimensions through which the legacy of war continues to exist within social life. Because these relationships are materially mediated, however, they are also subject to institutional organization and public authority. The management of graves, human remains, and commemorative sites therefore becomes more than an administrative practice; it becomes a means of organizing and regulating relationships between the living and the dead. This institutional dimension provides the foundation for understanding what may be termed the institutional persistence of violence.

5.4. Governing the Dead: Materiality and the Institutional Persistence of Violence

Building on this relational account of materiality, this section examines how the institutional management of graves, human remains, memorials, and commemorative sites organizes relationships between the living and the dead. From this perspective, governing the dead is not merely the management of physical objects but the institutional organization of those relationships. This perspective casts the historical developments traced in the preceding sections in a different light. The modern Japanese state did not simply commemorate the war dead symbolically, nor did it merely dispose of their bodies administratively. Rather, it constructed institutional arrangements through which spirits, bodies, human remains, graves, and commemorative sites were differentially organized. The distinction between symbolic enshrinement and material burial was therefore not simply a separation between religion and administration. It constituted an institutional structure through which relationships with the war dead were classified, legitimized, and publicly represented.

The postwar Japanese case illustrates this process with particular clarity. Although the Occupation dismantled the prewar system of military cemeteries, it did not eliminate the state’s involvement with the war dead. Rather, that involvement was reconfigured through new legal, administrative, and humanitarian institutions. The large-scale recovery, identification, repatriation, preservation, and collective burial of human remains gradually became recognized as public responsibilities of the postwar state, culminating in the enactment of the 2016 Act on the Promotion of Recovery of Remains of the War Dead. In assuming responsibility for these material practices, the state did more than administer the physical remains of the deceased. It also reconstituted its authority as the legitimate public institution through which the war dead are represented and commemorated, thereby reorganizing the institutional relationships among the state, the deceased, and the bereaved.

From this perspective, the legacy of war cannot be understood solely through memory, representation, or political discourse. The institutional management of graves, human remains, and commemorative sites is simultaneously the institutional organization of relationships with the dead. In this sense, violence persists not only through historical narratives or symbolic commemoration, but also through institutional arrangements that continue to organize the material conditions under which the war dead are recovered, identified, commemorated, and publicly represented. The institutional persistence of violence therefore refers not simply to the survival of wartime institutions, but to the continuing capacity of institutional arrangements to shape how societies establish, maintain, and transform their relationships with the dead long after armed conflict has ended.

The Japanese case therefore suggests that the governance of the dead is not a peripheral issue of postwar administration but a central dimension of how societies negotiate the legacy of violence. By foregrounding these processes, peace studies can move beyond an exclusive focus on conflict, memory, and reconciliation to incorporate the material and relational conditions through which the consequences of violence continue to be organized long after war has ended. In this sense, governing the dead is also part of governing the legacy of war.

6. Conclusions

This article has argued that the legacy of war cannot be understood solely through memory, representation, or political controversy. Rather, it has shown that relationships with the war dead are materially mediated and institutionally organized through the intertwined management of spirits, human remains, graves, and commemorative practices. By tracing the historical transformation of these arrangements from the early shōkonsha system to the postwar recovery of human remains, this study has demonstrated that governing the dead is, more precisely, a matter of institutionally organizing relationships with the dead through which modern states continue to negotiate the legacy of violence.

The principal theoretical contribution of this article lies in integrating perspectives that have often remained separate. Volkan’s concept of chosen trauma illuminates how collective identities are sustained through symbolic representations of the dead, while Boss’s notion of ambiguous loss explains the enduring consequences of bodily absence. Building on these perspectives, this article has argued that graves, human remains, and memorials function as material media through which relationships with the dead are sustained, and that the institutional management of these material media simultaneously organizes those relationships. From this perspective, the institutional persistence of violence refers not merely to the survival of wartime institutions but to the continuing organization of relationships with the dead through material and institutional arrangements long after armed conflict has ended.

From the perspective of peace studies, these findings call for greater attention to the material media and institutional arrangements through which relationships with the dead are sustained. More specifically, this article suggests that the institutional relationship between the modern state and the war dead constitutes a crucial yet largely overlooked dimension of postwar Japanese memory culture. Attending to this dimension does not replace existing interpretations of postwar Japanese memory culture centered on memory, nationalism, or reconciliation; rather, it complements and extends them by demonstrating how postwar memory has been institutionally constituted through the management, absence, recovery, and material mediation of the dead. By bringing these dimensions into view, the legacy of war can be understood not only as a matter of memory but also as an ongoing organization of relationships between the living and the dead.

Accordingly, reconciliation requires more than remembering the dead or recovering their remains. It also requires a critical examination of the institutional arrangements through which societies organize their relationships with the dead. Such an approach shifts attention from memory alone to the institutional organization of relationships sustained through material media and commemorative practices. Although this article has focused on Japan, the analytical perspective developed here may also prove valuable beyond the Japanese case. Modern states differ considerably in how they commemorate, recover, compensate, or neglect their war dead, yet these practices likewise constitute institutional relationships through which the legacy of war continues to be negotiated. This analytical perspective therefore opens new possibilities for comparative research on the institutional relationships between modern states and the war dead. In this sense, governing the dead is inseparable from governing the institutional relationships through which the legacy of war continues into the present.