Norinaga, State Shinto, and the Trouble with "Religion"

The kami are as old as the earliest Japanese texts, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki of the eighth century narrate their generation and their descent into the imperial line, but the idea of "Shinto" as a distinct religion with kami at its centre is in important respects a later construction. For most of Japanese history kami were venerated alongside, and thoroughly mixed with, Buddhism; the sharp separation of the two was a deliberate policy of the modern state.

The nativist scholarship (kokugaku) of the eighteenth century, and Norinaga above all, worked to recover an idea of the kami and of Japanese antiquity purified of Buddhist and Chinese overlay. In the modern period this fed something more consequential: from 1868 the Meiji government forcibly separated kami-worship from Buddhism and built what is usually called State Shinto, in which shrine rites and the divine descent of the emperor were made instruments of national ideology up to 1945, when the postwar settlement disestablished it and the emperor renounced any claim to divinity. The atlas treats this history carefully: the veneration of kami is far older and far broader than the state cult that briefly harnessed it, and reducing kami to that episode would misdescribe the wider tradition.