Haibutsu Kishaku, Abolish Buddhism, Destroy Its Images

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

From 1868 the new Meiji government's policy of shinbutsu bunri, forcibly separating Shinto from the syncretic Buddhist-Shinto religious system Japan had practiced for over a millennium in order to establish State Shinto, triggered a wave of official and popular violence against Buddhist institutions across Japan known as haibutsu kishaku, "abolish Buddhism, destroy Buddhist images." Temples were closed, their lands confiscated, monks laicized or conscripted, and images, bells and sutras melted down or burned, before the government moved to curb the movement's more extreme local excesses in the mid-1870s.

The government's policy was enforced by state officials and licensed waves of popular local violence carried out by domain authorities and mobs rather than by Shinto priests acting as a tradition on their own initiative; this is a bureaucratic-decree persecution, so no perpetrator-tradition edge is written to Shinto. It stands as the sharpest reversal in the thirteen centuries of Buddhism's presence in Japan since its arrival in 538.