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tury. In 1868 a new regime, known as the Meiji [5], overthrew the 300-year
old Tokugawa [6] military government (called the bakufu [7]), opened
Japan to the West, and began the rapid modernization and transformation
of all aspects of society, especially religion and martial arts. Meiji leaders
initiated a cultural revolution in which they attempted to destroy Japan’s
religious traditions and to create a new state cult, eventually known as
Shintô [8], to take its place. They commanded obedience by identifying
their government with a divine emperor who claimed descent from the ancient
gods who supposedly had created Japan. To more closely link the
gods to Japan, Meiji leaders ordered their dissociation from Buddhism. In
other words, all worship halls for gods were stripped of their Buddhist
names, art, and symbols and given new native identities. This policy caused
the destruction of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Buddhist temples
and the loss of immeasurable quantities of Buddhist artifacts. In 1872,
Buddhist monks were forced to register on the census as ordinary subjects
with secular names and encouraged to eat meat and raise families. No one
knows how many Buddhist monks and nuns were laicized immediately following
1868, but their numbers fell from a nationwide total of 82,000 in
1872 (the year of Japan’s first modern census) to 21,000 in 1876.
Next, the Meiji government began to strip the newly independent
Shintô institutions of their ties to popular (i.e., nongovernmental) religious
practices. Beginning in 1873 a wide variety of folk religious traditions were
officially banned. Shintô shrines came to be defined as civic centers at
which all citizens were required to participate in state-sanctioned rituals.
When Western nations demanded freedom of religion, Meiji leaders exploited
that concept’s lack of definition. They maintained the fiction that
State Shintô was not a religion (i.e., not individual faith) but merely a social
expression of patriotism, and in 1882 they forbade Shintô celebrants
at government-supported shrines to discuss doctrine or officiate at private
religious functions such as funerals. To more easily control Shintô activities,
in 1906 the government initiated a nationwide program of shrine
“mergers,” a euphemism for the destruction of shrines that were too small
for direct government supervision. In Mie Prefecture, for example, the total
number of smaller shrines was reduced from 8,763 to 519. Nationwide
more than 52 percent of Shintô shrines were destroyed, thereby depriving
rural villagers of local worship halls.
The vast dismantling of Buddhist temples, laicization of Buddhist
monks and nuns, and destruction of Shintô shrines had immediate and farreaching
consequences. First, they rapidly accelerated the forces of secularization
that accompanied Japan’s industrialization. Common people were
led by the government to reject previous religious practices as corrupt, feudal,
and superstitious. Second, because it left ordinary people alienated
Religion and Spiritual Development: Japan 475