63,141 war dead from Hokkaido and Sakhalin commemorated here, under a name that has changed three times.
The shrine commemorates 63,141 war dead from Hokkaido and the island of Sakhalin. Founded in 1910 as a shrine to the spirit and built in its present form in 1912, it changed its name twice more in the twentieth century: ‘Hokkaido Shōkonsha’ and then, from 1939, ‘Hokkaido Gokoku’; because of the restrictions imposed by the Allied occupation on shrines linked to the war, between 1946 and 1951 it bore only the name ‘Hokkaido Shrine’.
It stands in Asahikawa. It is one of the gokoku jinja (Shinto shrines established in every prefecture from the Meiji era onwards to commemorate the local soldiers who died in war), and, unlike an ordinary shrine, its whole purpose is commemorative.
🚉 Gokoku Shrine · 4 min walk
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