The Age of State Shinto — Modern Japan and Religion

In the previous episode, we watched how, in postwar Western Europe, Christian Democracy gently bound religious values to modern politics. It was a model in which faith, without ruling the state, was quietly involved as the foundation of politics.

Then, in the same era, across the sea in Japan, how did religion and politics meet? The answer differs considerably from Western Europe. Modern Japan sought to place faith at the pillar of the state, and that attempt reached its peak amid the catastrophe of war, only to be dismantled with defeat.

What this chapter looks upon is the era often called ‘State Shinto.’ From the Meiji Restoration to defeat — about eighty years. Let us calmly trace the years in which the Japanese state swung greatly between religion and politics.

The Attempt to Place the Gods at the Center of the State

The story begins with the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

As the newly born Meiji government advanced the building of a nation centered on the emperor, it sought to place Shinto as its spiritual pillar. That same year, the government issued the order separating Shinto and Buddhism. This sought to dissolve the fusion of Shinto and Buddhism — shinbutsu-shugo — that had long continued since ancient times, and to remove Buddhist elements from the shrines. It is recorded that this triggered a movement of haibutsu-kishaku, in which temples and Buddhist statues were destroyed in various places.

The government further issued, in 1870, the Imperial Rescript on the Promulgation of the Great Teaching, seeking to spread Shinto as a teaching for the people. A system was also established to rank shrines across the country, with the Ise Grand Shrine at the apex. Centered on the Department of Divinities, later the Ministry of Religion, the government attempted to instruct the people through Shinto.

This logic that ‘shrines are not religion’ was at once ingenious and fraught with deep tension. By making worship at shrines a duty of the people rather than a faith, it sought, in form, to make this compatible with freedom of religion. But in reality, it also meant the state requiring of the people a particular religious ritual.

The Tension with Freedom of Religion

The Constitution of the Empire of Japan, promulgated in 1889, provided for freedom of religion in Article 28. Yet it was a conditional freedom — ‘within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects.’

Under this condition, Shrine Shinto was placed outside the framework of religion and kept a special status. Meanwhile, Buddhism, Christianity, and Sect Shinto were treated as ‘religion’ and placed under state management. Shinto as the state’s rites, everything else as private faith — a dual structure.

This structure permeated the hearts of the people through education. In schools, reverence for the emperor was taught, and worship of the emperor’s portrait and the recitation of the Imperial Rescript on Education became daily routine. At New Year and at festivals, people visited the local shrine, and soldiers heading to the front were seen off before the shrine — such practices melted into the fabric of everyday life. Worship at shrines, too, was widely carried out as a duty of the people. For many, it is said, this was less a faith in particular doctrines than a manner of being a member of the nation. For that very reason, between the official stance that State Shinto was not a religion and the reality that worked upon people’s hearts, a gap always remained.

On the other hand, this mechanism also imposed a heavy burden on minority believers. Over the matter of shrine worship, it is known that some Christians and Buddhists held conflicts of conscience. Freedom of religion was written into the constitution, but its substance was always framed by the order of the state.

War, Control, and Dismantlement

Entering the Showa era, as Japan inclined toward war, state control over religion intensified all the more.

The Religious Organizations Law, which took effect in 1940, placed religious organizations under state supervision. Under the wartime regime, many religions were called upon to cooperate with national policy, and organizations whose doctrines were deemed in part unsuited to the state were, it is said, sometimes forced into suppression or dissolution. Faith was incorporated into a spiritual mobilization for the prosecution of war.

Then, in 1945, defeat. The General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ), which occupied Japan, issued the so-called Shinto Directive on December 15 of that year. It ordered the abolition of the mechanism by which the state protected and supported Shinto.

Thus the special bond between Shinto and the state, built up over roughly eighty years since Meiji, was undone. Shrines became one religious corporation among many, and faith left the hands of the state and returned once more to the sphere of the individual.

The experience of modern Japan shows, as one concrete example, what can happen when religion and politics become bound together. The attempt to make faith a pillar of the state had, on one side, the power to unite the people, but on the other side it pressed down the freedom of the minority and, in the age of war, became a tool of control as well. In contrast to the gentle model of Western Europe we saw in the previous episode, the path Japan walked was a more tension-filled one. Rather than one being right, it was that to the universal question of how to set the distance between religion and politics, each society gave a different answer.

With defeat, faith was for a time cut off from politics. But that did not mean the relationship between the two had ended. In postwar Japan, faith would meet politics once again. This time, in a wholly new form: seats in the legislature.