The Shrine Merger Order and the Forests of Kumano

While the gravity of modern ecological destruction has brought renewed attention to Kumano's forests, what visitors see today is in truth only a scarred and degraded landscape surviving in the wake of ruin. The catastrophe was ignited around 1906, in the late Meiji era, when the imperial government issued the Shrine Consolidation Order.

The decree was designed to merge the countless shrines scattered across the Japanese countryside and bring them under centralized bureaucratic control. Targeted above all were the small village shrines that had existed wherever human habitations took root—once said to be as numerous as the hamlets themselves.

Cornered by this impasse, the government sought a breakthrough in the systematic destruction and standardization of faith. Under the direction of the cabinet, it launched a brutal state policy aimed at demolishing countless local sanctuaries.

In plain terms, the state sought to eradicate religious pluralism by decreeing that each town or village was permitted only a single recognized shrine, while every other sanctuary was to be abolished and forcibly merged into it.

To modern eyes this may look like an exercise in rationalization, but from the standpoint of Japanese spiritual tradition, the consequences were devastating. The deities to be enshrined in the newly consolidated sanctuaries were chosen not by the local inhabitants, but by government bureaucrats. Heavily influenced by the doctrines of Ise Jingu, these officials strictly barred the veneration of diverse, indigenous kami.

The devastation went far beyond doctrine: it wiped out the lush natural ecosystems embracing the shrines, destroyed centuries of spiritual diversity, and shattered the distinct folkways of the land. Wakayama Prefecture bore the heaviest brunt of this policy, followed by neighboring Mie.

The government concentrated its campaign on Wakayama and Mie because the rugged mountain fastness of Kumano—spanning Nara, Wakayama, and Mie—harbored some of Japan's most pristine ancient forests, and with them an exceptionally rich constellation of animistic worship.

The Meiji government meant to nullify that regional influence and bring it under the center. Its method was to forbid hereditary succession and so draw faith into the bureaucracy, in the name of creating the national citizenry a modern state requires. Most shrines lost their local influence, and many were pushed out of shrine administration altogether.

These two acts of state destruction left the ancient faiths shaken. Yet without them, something as undefinable as Shinto could not have been installed as the philosophy of the state. In the course of these policies, most shrines had their hereditary priesthoods banned and their priests driven out.