Restoration Was a Creation, Not a Discovery

Before we can talk about Edo-period Shinto, one fact needs to be in place. At the time, only two houses in all of Japan could issue the license that recognized a shrine official with the words "You are a priest." They were the Yoshida house and the Shirakawa house.

The Shinto of the Yoshida house goes back to Yuiitsu Shinto, the "One and Only" Shinto brought to completion in the Muromachi period by Kanetomo Yoshida (1435–1511). In Kyoto's Sakyo Ward, Mount Yoshida still rises with a presence all its own, and on it stands Yoshida Shrine, the head shrine of the Yuiitsu Shinto that Kanetomo founded. His attempt to gather the gods of the whole country into a single sacred precinct and worship them there was groundbreaking, or perhaps even violent, and it gave rise to one of the lineages of the great Shinto authorities of the Edo period.

Put roughly, Yoshida Shinto was a new religion of the Muromachi period, but the Tokugawa shogunate gave it official sanction. The decisive step was the Shosha Negi Kannushi Hatto, the regulations for shrine priests issued in 1665. Under them, the Yoshida house won the lucrative right to issue a license called the Shinto Saikyojo to every shrine priest in the country who held no rank at the imperial court. Most priests of the day could become priests only once they held a Yoshida license, which meant that the very qualification to worship the gods was controlled by a single family. And so the Yoshida, who had begun as a new religion, eventually became the absolute guardians of Shinto and took the leading role in monopolizing its privileges.

The Shirakawa house, by contrast, claimed descent from Emperor Kazan, the sixty-fifth emperor, who reigned in the Heian period (r. 984–986), and for generations it held by inheritance the office of Jingihaku, the court official in charge of rites for the gods. Because it was the house that held the office of haku, it was called the Hakke, the house of the haku, and its Shinto came to be known as Hakke Shinto. Although the house by rights carried the prestige of overseeing the rites of the imperial palace, it long trailed behind the Yoshida. However, from the eighteenth century onward, the Shirakawa also began gathering disciples and issuing licenses of their own, and a contest took shape in which two licensing authorities vied for the shrine priests of the entire country. What is intriguing is that both great powers of Shinto were based not in Edo but in Kyoto.

In other words, Edo-period "Shinto" was first of all a system of control through licensing, before it was any kind of doctrine. That system survives today in a different form. To become a Shinto priest in Japan, one must in practice graduate from either Kokugakuin University in Tokyo or Kogakkan University in Ise. Through licensing, the effort to take hold of Shinto as a privilege had already begun in Edo-period Kyoto.

Kanetomo Yoshida, who became the founder of Yoshida Shinto (Yuiitsu Shinto), which still has its main shrine on Mount Yoshida, a holy ground of Kyoto, reversed the already established honji suijaku and declared that Shinto is the root (seed), Confucianism the branches and leaves, and Buddhism only the flowers and fruit. Though he was a Shinto man, this age was almost wholly under the influence of Buddhism, and if one looks at Kanetomo's own claim, one finds a strong Confucian influence in it. The Confucian influence is typical in his claim that Shinto is the root (seed), Confucianism the branches and leaves, and Buddhism the flowers and fruit, but the moment he set the god back as the source of all things, Shinto, which until then had had no substance, was at last coming to a stage of religious birth with Buddhism as its mother body.

Meanwhile, neither the Yoshida nor the Shirakawa had the talent the new age required. This is where Atsutane Hirata appeared. Already well known, Hirata became a disciple of the Shirakawa house in 1823 and established ties with the Yoshida house as well in 1831. While making use of the authority of both houses, he in fact gathered disciples from all over the country into Ibukinoya, the school he ran himself, and seized complete intellectual leadership.

What, then, did Hirata put forward? What he created was not another licensing system but a cosmology. In one stroke, he expanded Shinto from a structure ruled by particular families into a cosmology, and here lies the heart of Fukko Shinto, the Restoration Shinto that Hirata advocated.

Its intellectual source was Norinaga Motoori, the Kokugaku scholar whom Hirata revered as his teacher. Norinaga held that "when people die, they fall into Yomi, the defiled land of the dead," and he said nothing of what lay beyond. Hirata could not bear this bleak view of life and death. Between them runs a rift, the rift between Norinaga, who lived in the eighteenth century before the upheavals began, and Hirata, who lived through the turbulent late Edo period. So in his major work, Tama no Mihashira (1813), Hirata boldly rebuilt the world after death, and this is the intellectual ground on which his teaching came to be called Fukko Shinto.

Fukko Shinto was not the discovery of a lost, pure Japan. It was a creation, newly raised up to answer the demands of its time. Hirata's genius lay in the charisma with which he summed up this creation in a single word, "restoration," for that one word became the decisive moment that broke the dominance of the Yoshida and the Shirakawa, the established houses of Shinto.

Atsutane Hirata's Restoration Shinto is a world in which "Shinto" itself does not exist. Atsutane started from a sense of unease with the "Shinto that was not Shinto" that had been spoken of as Shinto until then, and he was irritated that people went on talking about the object in a place where the object itself did not exist. This unease can be applied today to every sphere of life. The true worth of Restoration Shinto thus lies in its creative power, which gave birth to Shinto anew, and not in any reflection of something nurtured in Japan since ancient times. What gave birth to it, one could say, was the age itself.

Armed with this singular vantage point and an extensive network, Hirata shook the Shinto establishment to its foundations. The two dominant lineages—the Yoshida and Shirakawa houses—had reached a historical impasse, unable to adapt to the currents of a changing world. Rapidly losing their authority, they were forced to seek the aid of Hirata, an outsider and heretical scholar who championed the unseen realm. Under Hirata’s unorthodox leadership the two factions were reconciled, and the Restoration Shinto he codified came to be known as Hirata Shinto. In truth, modern and contemporary Shinto traces its roots to this very school.

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.

Yoshida Shinto thus receded, together with its distinctive teachings, into the background of history. Yet even as the power of the two houses waned at this turning point, the most important event in the history of Japanese Shinto was taking place. As their authority faded, the secret teachings of both houses, handed down for generations from master to a single heir, flowed out into the wider world one after another.

That outflow of secret teachings has in fact made its way into the spiritual framework of Japanese society today, and without realizing it, we too are enclosed within its ramparts. Mount Yoshida, where it all began, still carries a strange divine presence, and I feel that seeds for thinking about the future lie buried there.