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 pursued shinbutsu bunri, a policy separating Shinto from the Buddhism it had been intertwined with for centuries, in order to establish Shinto as Japan's own state religion. The separation did not stay administrative. It set off haibutsu kishaku, "abolish Buddhism, destroy Buddhist images," a wave of popular and official violence against Buddhist institutions that swept the country in the years that followed, reaching temples that had stood for generations.
The destruction fell on temples themselves rather than on doctrine or belief. An estimated 40,000 temples were destroyed nationwide, and some provinces lost four out of every five temples they had held, before the government moved to rein in the movement's most extreme local excesses and the campaign gradually subsided.
What haibutsu kishaku changed for Buddhism's standing in Japan was its sharpest reversal since the religion had first arrived there in 538. Thirteen centuries of established presence did not protect the tradition's buildings and images once state policy turned deliberately against the framework that had let Buddhism and Shinto coexist side by side, and the physical toll of those few short years has had no equal since anywhere in Japanese Buddhist history.