How a State Forged Shinto

Yet throughout Japanese history, there was almost no period when Shinto acquired an autonomous religious identity of its own. For centuries, its religious systematization occurred almost entirely within the doctrinal architecture of Buddhism. Shinto, in itself, had not attained the status of an independent religion. While resistance against Buddhist dominance flared from the Heian period onward, the greatest pushback arrived with the rise of kokugaku (国学) in the Edo period. Yet even kokugaku did not turn Shinto into an organized religion. In my view, it was only in the Meiji era and after that Shinto first clearly assumed that character.

Only by seeing through this elusive history can we begin to discern what lay beyond it. The intertwined currents of spirituality and religiosity that dominate any discussion of Shinto today were forged and synthesized in the modern era. The history of Shinto as a religion is not ancient. I wrote this draft out of the conviction that a thorough examination of this modern crucible is the indispensable first step for anyone seeking to understand Shinto.

In fact, the very first place the Meiji government intervened was Ise Jingu. Its aim was to destroy the traditional character of shrines and institutionalize them in a form that would serve the building of a modern nation-state.

From a closed dimension of faith—enshrining the deity native to a particular locality and watching over the people who lived on that land—shrines were thus quietly converted into instruments of devotion to a single unified state. Chosen to stand at the apex of this structure was Ise Jingu: a thoroughly political shrine, selected by bureaucrats.

That Ise Jingu came to be regarded as the highest-ranking shrine in Japan is therefore a story that belongs entirely to the modern era. Nothing of the sort was true before then.

Historically, at each place, a particular family (clan) had carried out the rites of a shrine and handed down the priesthood from generation to generation. The officials of the Meiji government, proud to be the enlightened faction, saw this as "old-fashioned" and set out to destroy it.

In 1871 the government abolished the hereditary priesthood and set the principle that the state would choose and assign the priests. A few shrines were exceptions, and still keep the hereditary system today: Izumo Taisha in Shimane Prefecture and Kono Shrine in northern Kyoto Prefecture, for example.

Having made Shinto the philosophy of the new regime, the government demanded that the center manage it in a single, unified way. But Shinto, however uncertain its origins, held the prototype of a faith that long predates the arrival of Buddhism in Japan. We still speak of the yaoyorozu, the myriad gods. Faith in countless gods exists in as many places as there are on the archipelago and as many forms as there are natural phenomena. No central authority could ever govern it as one. That would have cost the new government its face, so it took two coercive measures: the 1871 prohibition of hereditary shrine priesthoods, and the Shrine Consolidation Order of 1906.

Once the government had seen how well it worked to break the power of the great shrines and manage them from the center, it moved to gather faith into the state in one stroke. This was the Shrine Consolidation Order. It forced the merger and abolition of the countless, varied shrines scattered across the land, so as to make a system the central government could manage. In plain terms it was a way to administer shrines through the bureaucracy. What matters is that both measures were justified in the name of faith and Shinto, while their substance was the building of a modern bureaucratic system.

Yet the spring Hirata opened gained its real power only after his death. With the Meiji Restoration, Kokugaku scholars of the Hirata school streamed one after another into the new government's administration of rites, and they gave the intellectual lead to a series of policies, among them the revival of the Jingikan, the Department of Divinities, the separation of Shinto and Buddhism, and the Great Promulgation Campaign. The scholars themselves were eventually pushed aside within the bureaucracy built by the Choshu faction, but their logic remained in the state.

The result was the end of the Yoshida and the Shirakawa. As the new Meiji government placed shrine priests under state control, it stripped the two houses of the licensing powers they had held. On the surface, the privilege was dismantled, but in reality it was simply transferred to the bureaucracy of the new government. In 1871, the fourth year of Meiji, hereditary priesthood was abolished, ending the era in which a family granted the right to worship the gods, and the office of Jingihaku vanished along with the Jingikan itself. Both houses were later made viscounts in the new peerage, but that was a quiet exit from their role as families that presided over the rites.

Choshu had long been deeply shaped by Jodo Shinshu. Even during the Meiji Restoration itself, Nishi Honganji in Kyoto—head temple of the Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu—backed the Choshu radicals with both funds and weapons. For the officials from Choshu who now sat in the new government, expelling Jodo Shinshu from the modern state was out of the question; the sect had to be treated with great deference.

Satsuma, on the other hand, had long been steeped in Shinto-centered kokugaku and in Mitogaku (水戸学), the Mito school, and its radical wing was filled with fierce opponents of Buddhism. Born in the Mito domain (present-day Ibaraki Prefecture), Mitogaku was a distinctive school of thought devoted to the service of the emperor—in simple terms, a synthesis of kokugaku and Confucianism.

Because the two domains differed in the very faith that lay at their roots, they could never truly come together as one over how to build the new government or what the future of the country should look like. From the very beginning, Japan's guiding vision for how to construct a modern nation-state was split in two.

The seeds of this transformation were sown during the Edo period with the state adoption of Neo-Confucianism, but for clarity’s sake we should look to the era following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. As leaders set about constructing a modern nation-state, they methodically refashioned wa into an instrument of governance. Most notable was the Great Teaching Proclamation of the 1870s, issued as part of the campaign to establish State Shinto. Put plainly, it instructed the populace that their supreme civic duty was absolute obedience to the emperor. The term employed at the time was zuijun (随順), a concept whose etymological roots trace back to the mythic age.

In other words, the notion of wa, steadily modified throughout the Edo era, was seized upon by the Meiji regime to anchor the foundations of modern statecraft. Clothed in the prestige of an unbroken native tradition, it effectively elevated servility to the emperor into a cardinal national virtue. This ideology led in an unbroken line to the conduct of the Japanese people during the Second World War.

What matters is that Jinja Honcho is not a public body of the government. It is plainly a religious corporation. It is a new religion that "reveres the Grand Shrine of Ise as its head shrine," and it holds none of the plural tolerance of belief that Shinto originally had. It is a pyramid of power with Ise at its absolute apex, ruling eighty thousand shrines across the country beneath it. That alone shows how deep the problems are in a body that controls the licensing of priests. It uses this leverage to back conservative Liberal Democratic Party legislators quite directly, with the Shinto Political League as its lobbying arm.

To say it plainly, the answer to the question above is the textbook answer taught in university institutions, which is directly the view of Jinja Honcho. Seen from a sharper angle, it carries the history of modern Shinto strongly and keeps traces of early modern Shinto, but the history, culture and spirit that came before it are nearly absent. What troubles me most is that their answer, "a sanctuary where the gods are enshrined," can say nothing about the Shinto of earlier times. The clearest example is that it is cut off completely from the historical event of shinbutsu shugo, the syncretism of gods and buddhas. This shows that neither priests nor Buddhist monks actually have an answer to that fascinating phenomenon.