IT TOOK half a century for Lee Hee Ja to find out what happened to her father after he was conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army. When the truth came out she was devastated.

Mrs Lee’s father was conscripted as a Korean auxiliary in 1944. The following year, aged 23, he was killed in fighting in southern China.

His family in Korea were told nothing of his fate, but the Japanese establishment did not forget him. His name, and the details of his death, were relayed to Tokyo and found their way to the custodians of Yasukuni Shrine, the great monument to Japanese militarism.

Then came what to Mrs Lee was the final insult: in a solemn ceremony her Korean, Christian father, a forced labourer torn from his wife and young child, was formally enshrined as a Shinto deity.

“I was so angry when I learned that,” she said. “Japan’s war killed my father. It brought immeasurable suffering to Koreans and many other Asians. To have him enshrined alongside war criminals is insane, and a humiliation. Even after his death he is under the control of the Japanese.”

Yesterday, Mrs Lee expressed her fury in person. With a group of war-bereaved relatives from Korea, Taiwan and Japan, she presented herself at Yasukuni and demanded that her father’s name be removed from the shrine’s sacred tablets. She and the others have filed lawsuits making similar demands; a legal battle not over money or an interpretation of history, but over the ownership of the souls of the dead.

“You already profaned our human rights once by the war of invasion,” Mrs Lee shouted through an interpreter at a bemused Shinto priest. “If you keep enshrining him here, this is nothing less than a blasphemy on the human rights of our people.”

Since the 19th century Yasukuni has been a place of commemoration for the war dead, and the place to which their spirits go when they die; a combination of Cenotaph and Valhalla. Kamikaze pilots used to say their farewells with the words, “Let’s meet at Yasukuni”. About 2.6 million names have been inducted as “kami”, or Shinto deities.

But admittance to Yasukuni is not limited to the willing. The roll of the dead includes 21,000 Koreans and 28,000 Taiwanese, most of them colonial conscripts, and Japanese who would never have willingly associated themselves with a place explicitly associated with right-wing nationalism.

“It was an extreme cruelty to send my father, a Buddhist priest and a respecter of life, to fight on a battlefield to kill human beings,” said the Rev Ryuken Sugawara, also a Japanese Buddhist priest, who led the protest at Yasukuni yesterday. “I can’t bear for him to be enshrined here. He would never have wanted this.”

Also at Yasukuni are the 14 Class-A war criminals, including the wartime Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, hanged by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. They were secretly enshrined in Yasukuni in the 1970s. Ever since, the shrine has served as a symbol for Asian fears of resurgent Japanese militarism.

Japanese prime ministers were forced to stop making annual pilgrimages because of the rage they provoked in Seoul and Beijing. When the present Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, revived the custom, it marked the beginning of an ongoing chill in Japan’s relations with its neighbours. Seven lawsuits have been filed against the Prime Minister, and a court in the southern city of Fukuoka has ruled that his visits to Yasukuni are unconstitutional.

But Mr Koizumi has insisted that his visits will continue, and the shrine shows no sign of bowing to the demands of Mrs Lee and Mr Sugawara. “In Shinto, you cannot revoke a god once he has been enshrined,” a Shinto priest told them yesterday.

KOREA OCCUPIED

1945: 2.5 million Koreans serving abroad in the Japanese Empire

Number of Koreans forced to work in Japan: 1.2 million (Korean estimate); 80,000 (Japanese government estimate)

Number forced to join Japanese army: 160,000 (Korean estimate)

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