The Shinto Directive

The Meiji government had, from the 1870s, drawn a formal line between State Shinto, administered by the government as a matter of civic ritual and national ideology to which subjects of every religion were expected to conform, and Sect Shinto, treated as one religion among others. State Shinto funded and staffed shrines through the Shrine Bureau, mandated shrine attendance and reverence for the emperor as a living deity in the school curriculum, and provided much of the ideological infrastructure the wartime government drew on to mobilize the population.

Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers General Douglas MacArthur's occupation administration issued the Shinto Directive on 15 December 1945, ordering the Japanese government to end all of this: state funding and sponsorship of shrines, the Shrine Bureau itself, compulsory shrine visits, and the teaching of State Shinto doctrine, including the divinity of the emperor, in public schools. Shrines were required to reorganize as private religious corporations, competing on the same legal footing as Buddhist temples, Christian churches and every other religious body, a change the directive framed as guaranteeing the freedom of religion the new constitutional order was meant to secure rather than as an attack on Shinto belief or practice as such.

Less than three weeks after the directive, on 1 January 1946, Emperor Hirohito issued the Ningen Sengen, a New Year rescript in which he affirmed that the ties between himself and the Japanese people did not depend on the false conception that the emperor is a living god, or that the Japanese people are superior to other races and destined to rule the world. The rescript did not use the word divinity directly and was phrased, in the manner of an imperial document, obliquely enough that its precise scope was debated at the time, but it was widely read both in Japan and abroad as the emperor personally renouncing the claim to divine status that State Shinto ideology had built around the throne.

Occupation authorities and Japanese officials had corresponded over the rescript's wording in the weeks between the two documents, and most historians treat the declaration as a direct response to the Shinto Directive's demand that religion be separated from the machinery of the state, rather than as an independent act of imperial conscience. Together the two documents dismantled, within a matter of weeks, an ideological structure the Meiji and wartime governments had spent more than seventy years building around shrine Shinto and the imperial institution.