Suspect arrested over war shrine ‘toilet’ vandalism

Jiang Zhuojun is accused of buying the paint used by a Chinese social media personality to spray the word ‘toilet’ on the Shinto monument.

Yasukuni Shrine is dedicated to the Japanese who have died in wars since the 19th century. Picture: AFP

A man has been arrested in Tokyo in connection with a notorious incident in which a Chinese social media personality defaced and urinated on a monument in Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto site where hanged Japanese war criminals are commemorated.

Jiang Zhuojun, 29, is suspected by police of buying the paint used to spray the word “toilet” on to a stone pillar in the shrine in central Tokyo.

The man who perpetrated the vandalism, Dong Guangming, 36, known by his online nickname of “Iron Head”, posted a video of the act, which also showed him allegedly urinating.

Yasukuni Shrine is dedicated to about 2.5 million Japanese men who have died in wars since the start of the 19th century. Among them are Class A war criminals convicted and executed by allied tribunals after World War II.

Many Japanese people argue that Yasukuni serves the same role as the Cenotaph in Britain or the US’s Arlington National Cemetery: a politically neutral memorial to sacrifice in war. However, the shrine’s museum and its official website espouse a view of history that justifies Japan’s invasions of other east Asian countries as both heroic and politically necessary.

Dong Guangming in the act.

The act of vandalism, which took place at the end of May, provoked anger among right-wing commentators. One, a plastic surgeon, Katsuya Takasu, a nat­ionalist who has denied the Nanjing massacre and the Holocaust, offered a bounty of 10 million yen (about $90,000) for Iron Head’s capture.

Tokyo police possess warrants for the arrest of Guangming and another man believed to have filmed the stunt but they returned to China hours after the incident, leaving behind Zhuojun, who lives in a town north of Tokyo.

In the video posted online, Guangming expresses his opposition to the decision by the Japanese government to discharge wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ­Pacific Ocean – a move denounced by the Chinese government. “Faced with the Japanese government’s permission to discharge nuclear wastewater, we can do anything, can’t we?” he said.

Yasukuni’s most controversial occupants are the 14 war criminals hanged by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and secretly enshrined at Yasukuni in 1978. Since then, the site has served as the focus of Asian fears of resurgent Japanese militarism.

Tokyo has a secular war memorial, the little-known Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in Chidorigafuchi Cemetery, a few hundred metres from Yasukuni. There have been discussion about establishing a new, larger site of commemoration, but this has been vigorously opposed by the country’s right.

THE TIMES