Separating the Kami From the Buddhas

For more than a thousand years, Japanese religion was a single fabric in which kami and buddhas were understood as aspects of one another. Temples stood inside shrine precincts and shrines inside temple grounds; Buddhist priests conducted rites for kami; the theory of honji suijaku identified particular kami as local manifestations of particular buddhas. An ordinary worshipper was not required to decide which religion a rite belonged to, and mostly the question did not arise.

In 1868 the new Meiji government issued orders separating the two. Buddhist clergy serving at shrines were required to leave or to be laicised, Buddhist images, sutras, bells and fittings were to be removed from shrine precincts, and Buddhist terminology was to be stripped from the names of kami and of shrines.

The policy was an act of state with several purposes. It elevated shrine worship into an instrument of national unity around the restored emperor, whose descent was traced from the kami. It reduced the institutional power of a Buddhist establishment that had been embedded in the previous regime's system of household registration. And it answered decades of nativist scholarship arguing that an authentically Japanese way had been overlaid by a foreign religion.