Located on the city’s eastern mountains, Ryōzen Kannon (霊山観音) is a Buddhist religious site and memorial to the war dead of World War Two. It is crowned by a towering statue of Kannon, the bodhisattva of benevolence and mercy, which has become a well-known landmark in the popular Kōdaiji and Kiyomizu Temple district. 

Ryōzen Kannon was constructed in 1955 by the businessman Ishikawa Hirosuke (石川博資, 1891–1965) to memorialize those who had died for the Japanese empire during the Asia Pacific War. Four years later, in 1959, he added a memorial hall to commemorate the dead soldiers of World War Two, including Allied prisoners of war (POWs). With its urns of soil from across the former Western Bloc, Ryōzen Kannon is also an expression of support for Japan’s Cold War alliance with America (Milne and Moreton 2022).

A national Buddhist memorial for war dead

If we look at its location, as well as its practices and ideologies of memorializing the war dead, Ryōzen Kannon can be seen as a Buddhist alternative to Yasukuni Shrine (Milne and Moreton 2022). 

Ryōzen Kannon is located directly in front of Kyoto Ryōzen Gokoku Shrine, a Shinto shrine with great national and prefectural significance as a site for memorializing the war dead. This shrine stands on the former site of the Kyoto Shōkonsha (招魂社), which enshrined those who died in the Bakumatsu period conflicts and Boshin War of the 1860s and were buried on the nearby mountain side at Ryōzen Cemetery (Milne and Moreton 2022; Takenaka 2015).  Following the relocation of the capital, a Tokyo Shōkonsha was built partly based on that in Kyoto, and this developed into Yasukuni Shrine (靖国神社). Yasukuni came to enshrine all those who died fighting for the emperor and empire from the Bakumatsu period onward, thereby becoming the central national institution for glorifying soldiers’ self-sacrifice for emperor and nation. In the 1930s, Kyoto Shōkonsha was transformed into what it is today, the Gokoku Shrine for war dead of Kyoto Prefecture (Shirakawa 2015). 

The connections between Ryōzen Kannon, Yasukuni Shrine, and Gokoku Shrine are not only geographical. As suggested in the quote from Ishikawa above, he seems to have planned for Ryōzen Kannon to imitate Yasukuni Shrine’s role in memorializing the war dead in a religious manner that fit the times. Thousands of veterans, war bereaved family and friends, and curious sightseers from all over Japan visited Ryōzen Kannon in its first years, many dedicating Buddhist tablets to their lost ones. 

Memorializing POWs and the former enemy

In the late 1950s, Ryōzen Kannon was transformed into a site that memorialized not only those that died fighting for the Japanese empire, but also POWs and fallen enemy soldiers of World War Two. In 1958, Ishikawa and other heads of Ryōzen Kannon unveiled a stone monument dedicated to “the world’s unknown soldier.” While its inscription suggests that it commemorates all unknown soldiers of World War Two, contemporary reports show that it was actually made primarily for Allied POWs who died or went missing in Japanese imprisonment (Milne and Moreton 2022). 

In 1959, this stone slab moved to a newly-constructed building named the Memorial Hall, where it still stands today. In an annex of this hall are filing cabinets with information on the fate of over 48,000 POWs who died or went missing in while prisoners of Japan during World War Two. The annex also contains a cabinet with vessels of earth from 24 war cemeteries across the world. Collected in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these are from states aligned with the Western bloc, suggesting that this hall memorializes not only the dead of World War Two but also of the Cold War (Milne and Moreton 2022).

Memorializing Japanese Americans

In the 1960s, Ryōzen Kannon became a site to memorialize Japanese Hawaiian war dead. In 1962, a memorial ceremony at Ryōzen Kannon was the linchpin of a one-month tour of Japan by veterans of the 100th Battalion, a unit of mainly Nisei (second generation) Japanese Americans from Hawai'i who are renowned today as one of the most awarded units in American military history (Milne and Moreton forthcoming). 

The 100th was formed by soldiers keen to prove their allegiance to the nation. Although they fought on the European front, they chose “Remember Pearl Harbor” as their official motto and proof of this allegiance (Go For Broke n.d.). After the war, their veteran association took on the motto of “For Continuing Service,” reflecting their transition toward serving the local community and postwar reconciliation (100th Infantry Battalion Veterans n.d.). The memorialization at Ryōzen Kannon’s Memorial Hall of their comrades (338 who died in Europe and seven in the Korean War) can be seen as another step toward reconciling themselves with this traumatic past, and bridging their Japanese and American/Hawaiian identities (Milne and Moreton forthcoming).   

In addition to Ryōzen Kannon, the veterans were welcomed by the Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko at their palace in Tokyo, mayors and other government and corporate leaders from across Japan, and former Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru. They also attended ceremonies in Hiroshima and Tokyo (at Meiji Shrine), traveled throughout much of the Honshu and Kyushu islands, and visited the US occupied Okinawa and British Hong Kong (Milne and Moreton forthcoming). As these meetings and visits indicate, this was also a trip of reconciliation and the strengthening of US-Japan relations in the midst of the Cold War.