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Japan Religion and the State
Article 20 of the 1947 Constitution states, "Freedom of
religion is guaranteed to all. No religious organization
shall
receive any privileges from the State, nor exercise any
political
authority"
(see The Postwar Constitution
, ch. 6).
Contemporary
religious freedom fits well with the tolerant attitude of
most
Japanese toward other religious beliefs and practices.
Separation
of religion and the state, however, is a more difficult
issue.
Historically, there was no distinction between a
scientific and
a religious worldview. In early Japanese history, the
ruling class
was responsible for performing propitiatory rituals, which
later
came to be identified as Shinto, and for the introduction
and
support of Buddhism. Later, religious organization was
used by
regimes for political purposes, as when the Tokugawa
government
required each family to be registered as a member of a
Buddhist
temple for purposes of social control. In the late
nineteenth
century, rightists created State Shinto, requiring that
each family
belong to a shrine parish and that the concepts of emperor
worship
and a national Japanese "family" be taught in the schools.
In the 1980s, the meaning of the separation of state
and
religion again became controversial. The issue came to a
head in
1985 when Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro paid an
official visit
to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war dead,
including
leaders from the militarist period in the 1930s and 1940s
(see The Rise of the Militarists
, ch. 1). Supporters of Nakasone's
action
(mainly on the political right) argued that the visit was
to pay
homage to patriots; others claimed that the visit was an
attempt to
revive State Shinto and nationalistic extremism. The visit
was
protested by China, North Korea, South Korea, and other
countries
occupied by Japan in the first half of the twentieth
century, and
domestically by leftists, intellectuals, and the Japanese
news
media. Similar cases have occurred at local levels, and
courts
increasingly have been asked to clarify the division
between
religion and government. Separating religious elements of
the
Japanese worldview from what is merely "Japanese" is not
easy,
especially given the ambiguous role of the emperor, whose
divinity
was denied in 1945 but who continued to perform functions
of both
state and religion.
Data as of January 1994
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