Yasukuni Shrine

This guide to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo turns on one night in October 1978, when a newly appointed head priest, Nagayoshi Matsudaira, performed a secret ceremony inside the honden to fold fourteen more souls into a shrine that already held nearly two and a half million war dead, including wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo. It traces why his predecessor had held the same request for nearly a decade and refused it, and the argument that decision still carries. Look up at the eighty-foot red torii gate you passed beneath to get here.