Shinbutsu Bunri: The Separation That Solved Nothing

In practice, this meant that everything fell under the jurisdiction of Buddhist temples. Even Shinto priests, as a rule, were compelled to hold Buddhist funerals. Yet at the same time, freedom of discourse was largely preserved during the Edo period, and the shogunate did not intervene in scholarly debate.

Throughout the Edo period, Shinto priests repeatedly mounted anti-Buddhist arguments, and great numbers of them suffered exile, execution, or the extinction of their hereditary priestly houses. Through this long ordeal, the conviction that Shinto and Buddhism were distinct steadily hardened, strengthening resistance to a shogunal order that upheld Buddhism. Answering directly to this sentiment among the priesthood, and supplying the theoretical engine that sharpened their anti-Buddhist stance, a new field of learning was born: kokugaku (国学), or National Learning.

It was in this climate that arguments for shinbutsu bunri (神仏分離), the separation of kami and buddhas, began to take conscious form, yet for a long time the movement remained unable to break through. Expelling a newly arrived religion like Christianity was straightforward enough, but more than a thousand years had passed since Buddhism first reached Japan, and historically Japan's religious landscape was synonymous with shinbutsu shugo (神仏習合)—the fusion of kami and buddhas.

For kokugaku scholars and Shinto priests burning with the desire to uncover a pure Shinto, it was exceedingly difficult to untangle a millennium of Buddhist admixture and distil Shinto in an unalloyed form. Moreover, in both financial power and sheer numbers of adherents, Buddhism remained overwhelming beyond comparison.

At the time, Shinto was divided broadly into two factions, both sanctioned by the shogunate. Anyone wishing to found a new shrine had to obtain authorization from one of the two; opening a shrine on one's own authority was forbidden. These were the Yoshida house (Yoshida Shinto), whose lineage reached back to the medieval period, and the Shirakawa house (Hakke Shinto). Both had their seats not in Edo, the political center of the day, but in Kyoto.

So long as these two great houses remained divided, they stood no chance against the overwhelming power of Buddhism. Drawing on kokugaku, Hirata launched an energetic campaign of proselytizing, and under his formidable influence the two rival camps were at last brought together. In substance, Restoration Shinto was the Shinto of Atsutane Hirata.

Yet once the work of setting up the new government actually began, Iwakura realized that Tamamatsu's strain of Restoration Shinto had far too many enemies. Concluding that it would be perilous to entrust the practical execution of modern Shinto policy to that camp, he kept them at arm's length. The flashpoint was haibutsu kishaku (廃仏毀釈)—the drive to abolish Buddhism and smash its images, sweeping Buddhism out of Japan altogether.

In fact, barely ten days after the anti-Buddhist campaign was set in motion, the Grand Council of State issued an immediate public notice declaring acts of Buddhist suppression a crime. Casting out Buddhism had been the long-cherished wish of certain Shinto priests throughout the Edo period, who hoped to make Shinto the cornerstone of a modern Japan, yet in the end their design collapsed almost overnight. What stood in their way was the most powerful force in Japanese Buddhism: Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land Buddhism).

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.

After the Meiji Restoration the edict separating gods and buddhas cut them apart again from their long history of fusion. This essential problem has still not reached a point where it can be called resolved.