Shintō, the disenchanter

Abstract

In 1920 Emperor Meiji (1867-1912) was venerated as a god at a Shintō shrine in central Tokyo: was this an archaic cult for the hero of modernity? While nothing suggests that religion cannot play a role in the modernisation process, the evolution of Shintō in the modern era took the form of a destruction of syncretic traditions, and thus a kind of secularisation, all under the pretext of a return to Japan’s ancient origins. Denying the recent past reinforced a linear conception of time and allowed the solar calendar to be rapidly adopted. Furthermore, reactivating the mythical past enabled the deification of the country – the Japanese version of Western nationalism and its attachment to the land of the ancestors. The sacred royalty invoked in order to restore imperial rule paved the way for a deification of the sovereign, which was the Shintō version of the providential man of twentieth-century dictatorships. The official Meiji Shintō, far from being a minor phenomenon, can thus be considered a major part of Japanese modernity.