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about Asia Buzz
Letter from Japan: History Lesson
Straight from the horse's mouth
By PETER McKILLOP
June
2, 2000
Web posted at 1:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 1:30 a.m. EDT
When deadline-driven columnists used to the wa(r)p speed of the Internet briskly
surf over such weighty topics as religion in Japan, we do our readers a grave
injustice. Given that the role of Shinto has become a key issue in the upcoming
Japanese parliamentary election, I felt it was important to turn to an expert to
explain the Shinto legacy in Japan.
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Robin Radin is an associate director of the Harvard Law School's Program on
International Financial System, as well as a respected corporate lawyer and
former professor of Japanese history. Having worked in Japan and studied
Japanese history, art and culture for more than 35 years, he is one of the
world's leading Japan experts.
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This is his take on Shinto:
"Your condemnation of Shinto is too sweeping. There are many different forms of
Shinto, some of which have no political or even metaphysical content. Folk
Shinto, the native religion practiced in local shrines all over the country, has
no nationalist or militarist character whatsoever. It mainly involves forms of
shamanism and nature worship that celebrate localized spirits exhibited in
exceptional forms of nature, animate and inanimate.
"Then there is Clan Shinto that worshipped the mythical ancestor (and
successors) of an aristocratic clan as a tutelary deity, such as the Moon God
Susanoo, enshrined at Izumo Taisha, and the Sun Goddess of the Yamato clan
(later the imperial clan), enshrined at Ise. When the Yamato clan achieved
hegemony in about the 5th century, it elevated its leader to become emperor (or
empress) and institutionalized its clan cult as a national religion, involving a
network of state shrines headed by the chief priest of the Sun cult, aka the
emperor.
"In the Edo period, the Tokugawa leaders forced an amalgamation of most Shinto
and Buddhist establishments, largely to dampen the use of religion by competing
interests. But with the restoration of the emperor, the Meiji government
emancipated Shinto from Buddhism and sponsored the development of Shinto, and
particularly "state" or "imperial" Shinto as a unifying nationalist religious
ideology and organization. This is when all children and others were inculcated
with the principle that Japan was "a divine country (or a country of gods
[kami]) centered on the emperor." In the '30s, after a period of relative
liberalism in politics, culture and thought, ultranationalist and militarist
interests backing colonialist expansion and continental military adventure in
Asia promoted this religious formula as a militant orthodoxy.
"It is this formula, with all of its frightening associations and its hostility
to Japan's current constitution, that [Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro] Mori
enunciated to set off a firestorm. The combination of the two clauses is
inevitably explosive.
"In summary, Shinto (as Christianity) has many different forms. Some are quite
innocent and others not at all."
Thank you Professor Radin...
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