ABSTRACT
In Japan there are many more monuments resembling our war memorials than was believed for a long time. We may offer the figure of between 800 and 1,000 important sites commemorating victims of the Second World War, each site comprising as many as dozens of steles. In total, nearly 10,000 monuments (ireihi, chūkonhi, chūreitō …) have been listed, and it is estimated, from statistics obtained in the zones where local investigations have been made in depth, that there remain about 5,000 still to be discovered. 1 We should moreover take account of all those that were destroyed at the end of the war and under the Occupation. Even so, however precious it may be, the quantitative recording of these monuments is not an end in itself: the classification of these structures is indeed complex, since neither their form, nor their whereabouts, nor indeed their raison d’être are really coherent.
