I'm somewhat disappointed by this book. I think that's probably a result of mistaken expectations, though. It would probably be a pretty useful book if you were planning on doing a project on Shinto and had a bunch of other sources, but wanted to check you'd covered all the key events during a certain period. Hardacre also explicitly states that she decided to devote minimal attention to the excitingly-controversial WW2 period, since so much has already been written about it in relation to Shinto. That's a reasonable decision, but the end result was a book which felt quite dry and left me feeling like there were lots of things she'd brought up which I would have liked her to go into more detail about (in particular, the relationship between Shinto and Buddhism).
If I'm reading Hardacre right, then here's a potted summary of Shinto's development over the last couple of centuries. It sounds as though Shinto in the mid-nineteenth century was pretty similar to traditional Chinese polytheism (in the sense that it didn't really exist as a unified entity with its own name or institutions, and ordinary people didn't have any issues about mixing and matching it with Buddhism). At least, they sound pretty similar at a village level- I know virtually nothing about how pre-20th century Chinese religion worked at a government level, so I'm not sure how the comparison holds up in that respect.
Hardacre stresses that up until the late nineteenth-century priests who worshipped the kami (Shinto gods) were markedly low-status compared to Buddhist priests. This was apparently made quite clear by the Japanese system of formal ettiquette (for example, Shinto priests got seated lower than Buddhist clerics at village assemblies- p.15). True, the imperial court patronised both Buddhist and Shinto rituals, but in the Tokugawa era the real power (and hence the money to fund rituals) lay with the Shogunate, who sound as though they didn't hold the kami in particularly high esteem (or at any rate, they don't seem to have stressed the relationship between themselves and the kami in order to legitimate their power, as later Japanese governments have done) (p.11).
Most Shinto shrines were located within Buddhist temples, and only staffed parttime. Shinto priests were also all legally required to register with Buddhist temples and receive Buddhist funeral services when they died. Meanwhile, the kami were referred to as the protectors of Buddhist divinities (and their "phenomenal appearances (suijaku)"- whatever that means), implying that they were lesser beings. Ise (one of the top Shinto shrines) believed it was necessary to chant Buddhist sutras before the kami's altars, so that the kami could attain salvation (which is interesting because it sounds a bit like the way that Jains see the gods as being dependent on the Tirthankars' teachings, since they're otherwise doomed to the cycle of rebirths just like everyone else is). See p.14.
Hardacre remarks that "this situation did not pass entirely without protest, but organised resistance among Shinto priests was virtually unknown before the Meiji Restoration" (p.15). To me, this raises a question: to what extent did Tokugawa Shinto priests actually see this situation as problematic?
Hardacre seems to imply that the average Shinto priest resented being under the thumb of Buddhism and wished that they could operate independently. Obviously Hardacre is an expert on this topic, whereas I've read a grand total of one other book on Shinto (which wasn't primarily focused on Japanese history). So Hardacre's sense of the priests' perspective is going to be much more reliable than mine- I'm just wondering whether the majority of priests necessarily resented the situation. I can imagine a situation where the average Shinto priest saw their lower status as a matter of course (maybe even feeling grateful towards Buddhist temples for being gracious enough to offer their patronage to Shinto shrines). Or maybe you could have a situation where many Shinto priests dreamed of being as high-status as Buddhist priests were- but they mostly aspired to quit their jobs and become Buddhist priests, or something similarly high-status, rather than wishing that their current role could be more prestigious.
I'm having a particularly hard time guessing how Shinto priests felt about the legal requirement that they should have Buddhist funerals. John K. Nelson has given me the impression that Shinto's death taboo renders the concept of Shinto funerals pretty emically problematic (they do happen, but seemingly not that often, even when the deceased was a major patron of a Shinto shrine. See Enduring Identities p.281-2). Under those circumstances, is it possible that most Shinto priests didn't really care what sort of funeral they got (and were happy to delegate the nasty, ritually-impure business of funeral-conducting to someone else)? Again, I'm aware that Hardacre knows more about this topic than I ever will- apart from anything else, there's the fact that greater government support for Shinto would later lead to a brief wave of Shinto priests vandalising Buddhist property, which suggests there must have been some level of latent hostility (see p.63). I just wish she'd go into a bit more detail.
I also have no idea how Buddhist priests felt about Shinto in general- did they see its priests as potential competitors, or as subordinates doing a low-status but necessary job (spiritual janitors, maybe)?
The relationship between Shinto and Buddhism shifted in the Meiji period, due to the influence of a group of nationalist intellectuals known as the National Learning school. They had been around for some time, but the upheaveal of the Meiji period resulted in their radical ideas getting attention from politicians. The National Learning writers believed that Japanese culture needed to be purged of all foreign pollution (including Buddhism, since that had originated outside Japan). The arrival of Perry's fleet in 1853 led some of them to decide that the Japanese people needed to be united under a common ideology- this was the only way to strengthen the nation enough to expel the Western barbarians (p.16-17).
Phase One of Operation Expel The Western Barbarians seems to have involved a lot of fighting fire with fire. The plan basically seems to have been: let's capture Christianity, clone it, drain off all the theological content, and then shove Shinto into the vacant structure, bending it into whatever shape it needs to be in order to fit (the result looking maybe kind of like
I can't imagine that many religions would survive this process well, but Shinto seems like a particularly stupid choice. The National Learning goal was to end up with a belief system that was very focused on doctrine- specifically, on an integrated set of doctrines under central control, and phrased in such a way as to make them sound militaristic and authoritarian (in the sense of focusing attention on the national government and its Strong Leader). In particular, they were expected to exalt the virtues of Japanese soldiers who had died in war. The priests of this new religion were also expected to adopt a pastoral role, moulding the lives of ordinary Japanese subjects (as well as preaching the standard theology to their congregations).
In other words, Shinto priests were expected to adopt a role which they were almost uniquely ill-suited to. Most of them had very little experience in public speaking, pastoral work, or disseminating doctrine to the public. This was the sort of thing that Buddhist priests specialised in- and Buddhist priests abandoned the Great Promulgation in droves as soon as it became apparent that the endgoal was to render them obsolete (although there were some who stuck around, using their superior preaching experience to subtly insert Buddhist doctrines into campaign sermons and so convert government-backed projects into stealth Buddhist evangelism drives. It didn't help that preachers were expected to fund these programmes themselves- the Buddhist clergy could depend on generous donations from long-standing parishioners, while the smaller Shinto shrines seriously struggled to fund their speakers. See p.45-6).
This is all in addition to the fact that Shinto priests were now suddenly supposed to be actively competing with Buddhists for the right to conduct funerals, and thus were effectively expected to ignore Shinto death taboos in order to perform rituals which many felt were beneath their dignity (although apparently the fact that funerals were a good source of income helped soften the blow for some. See p.47, 35). The general upshot seems to have been that the Campaign got mocked a lot for fermenting religious tension while trying to make Shinto priests do Buddhism's job (p.44). This impression was presumably not improved by bizarre incidents like the one where the Campaign's Great Teaching Institute moved into a building which had previously been a Buddhist temple patronised by the Tokugawa family. For some reason which I'm still struggling to grasp, the installation ceremony involved getting Buddhist priests to do a Shinto ritual while disguised as Shinto priests (using wigs and robes). The Institute itself soon came to be known as the Bureau of Indecision, or the Siesta Office (p.44).
The whole thing seems particularly badly-planned since it doesn't even seem to have made a serious attempt to capitalise on Shinto's existing support base. The Japanese public seems to have viewed Shinto priests as people whose job was performing a set of necessary rituals which required a certain amount of specialist liturgical knowledge. The exact form which these rituals took varied fairly widely from shrine to shrine. If you were really intent on turning Japan into an industrialised authoritarian state, then I'm sure there must have been SOME way to convert these familiar local rituals into a propaganda tool. Instead, Great Promulgation tried to abolish variation in favour of a nationally standardised system which most priests and worshippers seem to have found shallow, dull and confusing.
For example, the new state pantheon emphasised the role of the Three Deities of Creation. Only one of these deities (Amaterasu, in the form of Tenshōdaijin) had any kind of popular following. There was also a kind of official creed, in the form of the Three Great Teachings (which were apparently meant to reassure Buddhist priests that the Campaign had a solid doctrinal basis and hence was worth their participation). The three tenets were:
- patriotism and respect for the gods
- "making clear the principles of the Way of Heaven and the Way of Man"
- reverence for the emperor and obedience towards the imperial court
Which is fair enough, but if you're trying to indoctrinate people en masse, it helps NOT to try using an ideology which has no existing basis in popular thought. This is especially true if you really suck at explaining the ideology to the people who are expected to be propagating it. It doesn't help that the whole philosophical system seems to have boiled down fairly quickly into a list of religious duties for the pious citizen (including exciting responsibilities like paying your taxes, supporting conscription and accepting various aspects of Western culture in the name of "civilisation"). See p.43-4.
As a final added bonus, the Campaign succeeded in pissing off the priests at Izumo shrine (one of the nation's most important Shinto centres) by refusing to include their patron deity in the new core pantheon (as the official god of the underworld). This sparked off a row which split Shinto into factions and ended up encouraging most priests to believe that they should be trying as hard as possible to avoid discussing theology (since it only seemed to cause trouble). In the end, the Great Teaching Institute wussed out of making a formal decision on whether Izumo's god (Ōkuninushi no Mikoto) should be made official lord of the underworld or not. They just announced that Shinto priests above a certain rank were henceforth banned from ministering directly to parishioners. This meant that people like Izumo's top priests were now officially prevented from conducting funerals. The logic was apparently that if they weren't conducting funerals, they'd have no opportunity to make public pronouncements on which deity (if any) was in charge of the underworld. See p.49.
It's apparently incidents like this one which have led some Shinto-supporters to argue that Shinto is not a religion (since they feel that 'religion' implies a focus on doctrine, plus undignified stuff like funerals and prayers for the this-worldly benefit of parishioners). The argument seems to be that Shinto is, by contrast, a system of necessary rituals which transcends mere religion. Priests, it seems, should be striving to limit their performance of mere religious rituals to the bare minimum necessary to secure enough support from parishioners to keep the shrine running and funded (see p.34-5).
This is interesting, because it suggests a worldview very different to the one which drives the tension that sometimes gets described by Western theologians as doctrine vs praxis. It also suggests a big difference from the argument (often voiced by Western humanists) that various East Asian belief systems are not really 'religions' since they don't prioritise god-appeasing rituals clearly enough (thus making them secular philosophies by default). I'll have to see if I can find anything that elaborates further on the issue.
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