Ritual, Purity, and Power: Rethinking Shinto in Restoration Japan

Ever since the Japanese religious historian Murakami Shigeyoshi (1928–1991) published his groundbreaking Kokka Shintō (State Shinto) in 1970, the work has remained the basic point of reference for post-war studies on modern Shinto. 1 Murakami argues that modern Shinto from 1868 to 1945 was a state religion created by the authoritarian ‘emperor system state’ ( tennōsei kokka ) to indoctrinate the Japanese people for imperialist expansion and Fascism. 2 While his analysis has since been challenged by scholars of different orientations, almost all the major works have to frame their arguments with the basic categories and concerns articulated first by Murakami. 3 Temporally, State Shinto is defined in this schema as specifically a post-Meiji Restoration (1868) phenomenon. The lack of attention to pre-Restoration history may have been reinforced by the methodological assumption that State Shinto is fundamentally an ‘invented tradition’ by the modern Japanese state for the purpose of building a centralized imperial nation-state. 4 In that sense, State Shinto as an interpretive paradigm is concerned primarily with the state rather than with Shinto, whatever the term means. As a political invention, ‘Shinto,’ then, is part of the modern state whose life starts in 1868. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.