Mexico’s Yūshūkan Mindset

By Joshua S. Treviñoe

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

 

In 1613, the Keichō Embassy under Hasekura Tsunenaga set forth from Japan to the Viceroyalty of New Spain, landing at Acapulco and spending some time in Ciudad de México — not even a full century removed from its past as Tenochtitlan — before proceeding to Europe. The Japanese visit, including a retinue of samurai, was chronicled by the Nahua annalist Chimalpahin, who recorded armed conflicts between the visitors and their Spanish escorts. For a certain class of history buff, swordplay between a Spaniard of the Siglo de Oro and a samurai has the aura of a fantastical happening, but this episode was real. The outcome was a non-mortal wound for the Spaniard while the Japanese mission proceeded onward.

 

Spain’s interest in Japan had been sharpened 20 years prior with Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s launch of the Imjin War versus Joseon Korea and Ming China — the Spanish Philippines were understood to be next on his list of aspirations — and the burgeoning ranks of Japanese Christians, reaching into the hundreds of thousands, lent spiritual connection to the strategic. A Spanish priest even traveled with the Japanese armies as a chaplain to some of Hideyoshi’s Christian soldiery, an unofficial Habsburg-imperium presence on the war-wracked Korean peninsula. The embassy nevertheless came to a fruitless end, with Hasekura failing to secure liaison between his daimyo and the powers of Europe, and Japan turning toward cruel repression of its Christians and instituting managed isolation from Europe that would last two centuries. In the end, its legacy was a grand-strategic moment missed for all parties, and a small community of descendants of the retinue in Spain, to this day bearing the surname Japón.

 

This historical episode comes to mind when considering events in Mexico now, illuminated by the lens of a recent sojourn in Tokyo in which this author visited a handful of the sites at which the Japanese memories of the 20th-century wars are kept. The Yūshūkan Museum at the (deservedly controversial) Yasukuni Shrine offers one version of that memory: There, the Japanese wars through late 1945 are cast as rational responses to events, and the Japanese leadership and conduct of those wars are positively interpreted, preposterously so, in some cases. (Hideki Tojo, for example, fought against racial discrimination in Asia; Manchukuo was a noble effort at multiculturalism; and though there is an entire locomotive from the infamous Burma railway in the lobby, there is not a word on the slaves who built it.) It’s quite easy to see how the place inflames sentiment elsewhere in Asia. Americans have the luxury of regarding the thing as a species of absurdity — the adherents of this sort of historical interpretation are also typically the most dedicated proponents of the modern U.S.-Japan alliance — but there is an unpleasant chill upon entering the hallway in which the kamikazes are glorified, and a restored Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka floats above.

 

The nearby National Showa Memorial Museum, focusing upon the wartime experience of the Japanese home front, tells it straight and is rewarding for the American visitor. It’s impossible to miss the parallel here with much Southern historiography on the American Civil War — these comparisons arise throughout the experience of Japanese memorialization of the war — but that doesn’t mean either case is wrong on its merits. Although not for the reasons the Yūshūkan curators would have it, Japanese wartime suffering in Japan was indeed tremendous, and in the final year became horrific, and a fullness of historical memory includes it. The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage — a very out-of-the-way (from a tourist perspective) and comparatively small museum — brings it home in full. This small establishment commemorates the Great Tokyo Raid of March 9 and 10, 1945, in which the B-29s of the U.S. Twentieth Air Force razed much of the city with incendiaries, plausibly killing about 100,000 men, women, and children. The hellish tableau of Tokyo wreathed in firestorm and charred corpses is a portrait of the bloody 20th century alongside scenes of Verdun and Stalingrad. To its immense credit, the center places the episode in its historical context — the visitor is informed that Imperial Japan was terror-bombing Chinese cities long before the coming of the Americans.

 

The thing itself was monstrous, but of course the American airmen flying the missions were not monsters. (I will plead partiality here: my grandfather was a B-29 gunner, although the war ended before he flew a single combat mission.) Neither were the Japanese families incinerated by the raid. It is altogether a good opportunity to reflect upon history and how we understand it. A modern progressive approach simply cannot do it, just as the patriotic militarism of the Yūshūkan is insufficient. Both enforce a stark binary that slashes downward through every element of human existence. A cause may be right or wrong, but to borrow from Solzhenitsyn, the line between good and evil passes through every human heart.

 

This brings us to Mexico, where that long-suffering country arrives at twin straits in short order. By the end of this month, it will reckon with the treaty-designated deadline for review of USMCA reauthorization. Simultaneously, it will soon have been 60 days since the American indictments of a host of Mexican senior politicians. Both concerns are existential. The Mexican economy, which staggers along at near-zero growth under the perennial mismanagement of its political class, requires both access to the American market and an influx of remittances to avoid contraction, and even collapse. The Mexican civic sphere requires a scouring of its prodigious narco-political class if it is to be the liberal democracy envisaged, but never actually achieved, by its founders (and re-founders in the eras of Benito Juárez and the revolution of the early 20th century). Hardly a decade after Mexican independence, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the Mexicans . . . took the Federal Constitution of their neighbors, the Anglo-Americans, as their model, and copied it with considerable accuracy. But although they had borrowed the letter of the law, they were unable to create or to introduce the spirit and the sense which give it life . . . [and therefore] to the present day Mexico is alternately the victim of anarchy and the slave of military despotism.” Thus then as now. One might think that the present Mexican regime of the leftist Morena party, which conceives of itself as the direct inheritors of Juarez and the Revolution both, would be eager to complete that work at last, bringing to Mexico a governance and a civics worthy of its own historic aspirations.

 

Yet it will not. USMCA may or may not be reauthorized, although the odds are in its favor; but the narco-politicians subject to U.S. indictment will probably not be surrendered absent pressure yet to be brought to bear. The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum — not herself among the narco cohort — has publicly affirmed her opposition to their extradition and further accused the United States of using the indictments to undermine Mexican sovereignty. What could have been a case of binational cooperation against cartel criminality among the political ranks has been transformed by the Mexican side into a test case for or against Mexican independence itself.

 

All history is contingent, and very few things have singular causes. Yet we may acknowledge primary causes, and one of them here is the nature of Mexican historical memory. To borrow from the Japanese case, there is no parallel to the Showa Museum or the Center of the Tokyo Raids in the Mexican civic narrative. There is, however, a Yūshūkan.

 

Precision is necessary here. There is no Mexican record of world-historical crimes of the nation against other nations requiring acrobatic apologetics. This is not to say that terrible criminality within history does not exist in the Mexican narrative, only that it is mostly perpetrated against other Mexicans. (The horrifying Aztec record, the mass bloodletting of the revolution, and the nightmarish massacres of the present cartel wars all testify to it.) It is to say that within Mexican historical understanding as it coalesced in the 20th century, Mexico is wronged rather than wrong, Mexico is perennially menaced from without, and Mexico is a polity distinguished by its moral mission.

 

You see this conceit at the museum of national history at Chapultepec, for example, in which the Mexican defeats at the hands of Texans and then Americans in the 1830s and 1840s are cast as conspiratorial outcomes of a superior power versus one both weak and righteous. You see it in the museum of the interventions at Churubusco, in which the predations of invading powers are amalgamated into a singular phenomenon with many episodes all signifying Mexico as victim and virtuous resistance. You see it in the popular revision of the memory of the Spanish Conquest, which is recast as an aggression and a catastrophe. You see it nearly every day in Mexican officialdom, from the presidential mañaneras downward, in the invocations of soberanía deployed to preclude things like arresting politicians who take cartel bribes. This is all Mexico’s Yūshūkan mindset: What seems obviously wrong to all other nations is explicable and right if only one grasps the virtue of Mexican intentions, and the perfidy of her foes.

 

All this has the paradoxical effect of diminishing the Mexicans themselves, who are stripped of their vigor, their achievements, their deserved justice, and the complexity of their humanity. The real record of Mexico across history testifies to the opposite: Mexican agency and even victory across time. It was the indigenous peoples of Tlaxcala and elsewhere who provided the quantitative force that overthrew Tenochtitlan, not the Spanish.

 

Ulysses S. Grant, in his Memoirs, disagreed emphatically with the characterization of Mexico’s soldiery of 1846–1848 as intrinsically inferior, and the certainty of American war success was much more tenuous than it might seem: Taylor’s army never meaningfully advanced after Buena Vista, for example, and Scott’s army might have been entombed in the Valley of Mexico given a Mexican civics that was not in evidence in the 1840s, but was in the 1860s. The official Mexican memory of the Pershing Expedition focuses upon the putative injustice of it, but one almost never reads that, in 1916–1917, Mexican forces adeptly curbed and repelled American forces at engagements deep within Mexico. Mexicans are educated on the Niños Héroes who threw themselves to their deaths off Chapultepec in 1847 in the face of the victorious Americans; and they are mostly unaware of the heroic Mexicans of Escuadrón 201 who fought alongside the Americans in the Pacific theater during the Second World War. The heroic Mexicans of the military and law enforcement who give their lives today against cartels and criminals, numbering in the thousands across the past two decades, receive no memorialization whatsoever. Mexican civic narrative focuses sharply upon interventions against Mexico, and never seems to mention Mexico’s own record of the same against the soberanía of other peoples, from the Carrancista fomenting of insurrection in south Texas in 1915, to former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ham-handed interventions in American civics in 2018–2024, to the present-day role of Mexican consulates in aiding evasion of American immigration enforcement, and Mexican-state support for the Cuban dictatorship. One may assess these episodes as one wishes, justified or not, moral or not, but what they are not is passive.

 

This is the paradox and the pity of Mexico’s Yūshūkan mindset: it requires Mexico to be weak. The historical Japan of the real Yūshūkan is, despite its inevitable end, conceived as a strong and vital nation. The Mexican Yūshūkan discards that central quality but retains the victimization and righteousness.

 

A Mexican regime grounded in a confidence born of those qualities, and a full historical record rather than one adulterated and shaped for particular ends, might at least have a Yūshūkan mindset more like the Japanese, one in which the apologetics for the nation coexists with an ability to relate to the United States as a peer rather than a paranoiac. But that regime does not exist. The fullness of Mexican history illuminates two centuries of mismatch between the extraordinary capacities of the Mexicans and the ceaseless incapacity of their ruling elites. Mexico’s own Yūshūkan, then, protects the regime rather than the nation.

 

Four hundred years ago, the Keichō Embassy came to Mexico, and if one had to predict then which of the two realms, Japan or Mexico, would in the 21st century be cosmopolitan, and which would be parochial, one would likely have gotten the actual answers exactly reversed. Yet this illuminates a hope for Mexico, which is not condemned to its dysfunction, nor to its cartel-riven regime, by any iron law of history. That history is contingent, and there are always new choices to be made. Mexicans have been laboring for some time now to set up their own counters to the Mexican Yūshūkan: bereaved mothers demanding accountability for state and cartel murders, quiet laborers seeking to build a working civil society, and even the occasional brave politician who will speak plain truths. Perhaps someday they will constitute the majority. There is no alternative but to hope.

 

In the meantime, Mexico arrives at twin dilemmas at month’s end, and how it navigates them will tell us nearly everything about the Mexican future, and its rootedness in the Mexican past. In 1847, a Saltillo muleteer named Eduvige Ydrogo signed on to haul supplies for Zachary Taylor’s invading army, and the last record of him in history is condemnation to hard labor, and likely death, in the Yucatan, for aiding the enemies of Mexico. In 1941, a boy named Allen Brady Fincher from Van Zandt County, Texas, who joined the Marines to see the world, arrived at his own end by way of eight Japanese bombs, entombed in the USS Arizona. My direct Mexican ancestor and my distant Texas cousin were different men in different wars, and their memory lives in different ways.

 

Allen Brady Fincher, USMC, is not a live issue in U.S.-Japanese relations. He is a tragedy of history.

 

Eduvige Ydrogo, muleteer, is a current event in the two centuries of America and Mexico. He is, for them, a traitor even now.