Introduction: Politics and Religion in Japan

Abstract

In May 2000, at the very dawn of the twenty-first century, the then Prime Minister of Japan, Mori Yoshirō, caused a storm of protest, both domestically and internationally, with his declaration before a meeting of lawmakers belonging to the Shintō Seiji Renmei (Shinto Political League) that ‘We [have to make efforts to] make the public realize that Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor. It’s been thirty years since we started our activities based on this thought’.1 Although some foreign observers may have been genuinely shocked by Mori’s reactionary, ‘atavistic’ stance, no one who knew Japan or Japanese politics well was particularly surprised. Indeed, members of his own party generally did not challenge the validity of his remark; they merely regretted its indiscretion as a public pronouncement. As the unintentionally revealing excuse offered by the Secretary General of the party explained: ‘the comment was probably a platitude for the religious group’.2 In other words, in the circles in which Mori and his colleagues moved, the belief that ‘Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor’ was merely an accepted truism, so that nothing much should be read into the Prime Minister’s remark – in the context in which it was given, it certainly did not represent any revolutionary departure from the norm. As Klaus Antoni has pointed out, despite the Emperor Hirohito’s renunciation of his ‘divine status’ in 1946, ‘the Japanese emperorship receives its whole spiritual and religious authority, now as before, from the religious-political ideology of Shintō’.3KeywordsDivine NationJapanese HistoryYasukuni ShrineKyoto SchoolMeiji GovernmentThese 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.