Yasukuni and Post-Nationals

I just finished watching NHK’s special program where several intellectuals discussed various political issues surrounding the Yasukuni Shrine. Because tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII, a few TV stations aired similar programs today.

What I noticed is that almost all discussants in these debates were in their 60s. So I cannot but wonder how younger generations of Japanese think of the Yasukuni Shrine and political/diplomatic problems revolving around it. My guess is that younger generations are not as nationalistic as older ones. What young Japanese have is at best “banal nationalism,” to support Japan at international sports competition. I dare to hypothesize that they are post-nationalistic rather than banal-nationalistic: among elementary and junior-high school students, only about 30 percent of them answered “Japan” when they were asked, “Which country would you choose if you could choose a country where you were born and grew up?”

I believe this post-nationalism offers Japanese a chance to become citizens instead of nationals. It seems good not to be subordinated to a nation, an imagined community, that commands nationals to sacrifice their lives. But, for Japanese to convert this chance to create a more participatory-democratic country, they do need a better civic education curriculum. Right now lessons of civic education are devoted to memorization of laws of the state and rights and duties of citizens; they don’t teach students experientially what it means to be a citizen and help them develop skills and dispositions to actively think about social problems and participate in collective actions to resolve them.