A pair of Chinese stone guardian lions stands at the approach to Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo, their plinths still bearing inscriptions that identify them as gifts from a town in Qing-era Hebei and as relics taken from Liaoning after the 1894–95 war. For more than a century these objects — among many others taken during Japan’s imperial campaigns — have been exhibited in shrines, museums and private collections in ways that blur provenance and, in some cases, celebrate conquest.
A small Japanese civic group calling itself the China Cultural Property Return Campaign has pressed Yasukuni and other institutions for the return of such objects. Its founder, lawyer Ichinose Keiichiro, says Yasukuni first received delegations and then increasingly refused to engage, shifting from written replies to telephone rebuffs that leave no record. Shrine officials have offered only cursory statements and have declined to address the question of repatriation directly.
The shrine is hardly an isolated case. Inside the Imperial household there exist restricted collections described by some Japanese writers as a “second Yasukuni”: the “Gofu” repository at the Imperial Palace, created in the 1890s to hold wartime trophies and memorial material. Scholars also point to university gates, private memorial halls and museum storerooms where objects taken from China, Korea and elsewhere during Japan’s imperial era remain on display or in guarded custody.
Legal hurdles complicate any straightforward restitution. Japanese civil law contains an “instant acquisition” doctrine that can transfer title to a bona fide third-party buyer and a civil statute of limitations that treats looted antiquities like ordinary stolen goods, often extinguishing claims after a few years. Evidence linking objects to wartime seizures may be scarce after a century, and some government archives remain inaccessible. These legal and evidentiary obstacles make litigation difficult even where moral cases are clear.
Chinese and some Japanese scholars frame the issue not only as property law but as historical accountability. Ho Zhengxin, a leading Chinese expert on cultural repatriation, notes that China long abandoned formal war reparations claims but has consistently sought the return of specific artefacts. Japanese academics invited to Chinese forums have warned that conservative bureaucratic culture in Tokyo and a reluctance to confront imperial-era abuses will hamper progress unless international pressure and public awareness grow.
There are precedents. Japan returned a Korean victory stele to Seoul in 2005 after protracted negotiations, and in 2011 it repatriated more than a thousand volumes of Joseon-era royal records. Those cases offer a model for negotiated returns, but they also underline that politics, geopolitics and third-party mediation — notably by the United States during the Cold War era — can be decisive.
For Beijing the campaign to recover dispersed cultural property is as much about historical memory as it is about museums: artefacts are physical records of a narrative China says was stolen and suppressed. For Tokyo the question cuts across law, national identity and domestic politics; institutions that frame wartime objects as trophies resist transparent provenance work. The result is a standoff in which international norms on restitution, domestic legal reform and frontal historical reckoning will determine whether century-old objects become returned artefacts or permanent symbols of contested pasts.