TOKYO -- The Supreme Court on Jan. 17 dismissed a bereaved family's lawsuit demanding compensation in connection with a South Korean national's enshrinement at Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead.

The South Korean man was drafted into the Japanese military during World War II and enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine after his death. In their lawsuit, his bereaved family claimed that their right to self-determination had been violated because his enshrinement was the result of the government providing the Shinto shrine with a list of the war dead without their permission. The Supreme Court ruling finalized earlier district and high court decisions that had rejected the family's claim.

In handing down the ruling, Chief Justice Kazumi Okamura said that the family had lost their right to seek compensation under Japanese law because over 20 years had elapsed between the man's enshrinement and the filing of their lawsuit. The decision marked the first time the Supreme Court of Japan has ruled on the liability of the government for providing a list of war dead to Yasukuni Shrine.

According to the ruling, Yasukuni Shrine enshrined the bereaved family's father in 1959 after receiving a list of names from the Japanese government. The family filed a lawsuit in 2013, claiming that the provision of names violated the separation of religion and state under Japan's Constitution. In its ruling, the Supreme Court's petty bench applied the statute of limitations under the Civil Code, which states that the right to demand compensation for an illegal act ends if that right is not exercised within 20 years of the unlawful act. The court did not rule on whether the government's provision of names constituted a violation of the separation of religion and state.

In a supplementary opinion, Justice Akira Ojima stated that even if there was an act of the state that violated the separation of religion and state, the level of psychological damage was considerably lighter than that of a serious infringement affecting life or limb, and that the case in question was not one where the statute of limitations would be excluded as an exception.

Justice Mamoru Miura gave the only dissenting opinion among the four justices on the bench, saying there was room to consider the case a violation of the separation of religion and state as the enshrinement had gone ahead as a national policy, and that the case should be sent back to the high court to thoroughly deliberate the issue.

(Japanese original by Kenji Tatsumi, Tokyo City News Department)