Japan Enacts the Religious Corporations Law

On 3 April 1951, Japan's National Diet enacted the Religious Corporations Law, Act No. 126, replacing the wartime Religious Organizations Law of 1939 and the occupation's provisional Religious Corporations Ordinance of 1945, five years after the Association of Shinto Shrines organized itself as a private religious body following the Shinto Directive's disestablishment of state support in 1946, already recorded here. The new law let Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, Christian churches and every other religious group register as juridical persons in their own right, with the standing to own and administer their own worship sites, treasuries and other property free of government control, formalizing the separation of religion and state that the occupation had begun. Some eighty thousand Shinto shrines eventually registered as religious corporations under the law's framework, among them the Association of Shinto Shrines itself, giving Shinto's postwar institutional life the settled legal footing it still operates under today, decades before Tsubaki Grand Shrine opened Shinto's first shrine on the American mainland in 1986, already recorded here.