Manufacturing a State Cult

State Shinto names the system the Meiji government constructed from 1868 onward, reorganizing existing shrine practice into a centralized apparatus of civic ritual centered on emperor veneration and national mythology, administered through a government bureau rather than left to independent religious institutions. A key legal and rhetorical move classified State Shinto's shrine rites as non-religious civic ceremony, a matter of patriotism and public duty rather than religion in the constitutional sense, which allowed the Meiji constitution of 1889 to guarantee religious freedom on paper while still requiring all subjects, including Buddhists, Christians and adherents of other faiths, to participate in shrine rites presented as expressions of national loyalty rather than as belonging to any one religion.

The system drew on and reshaped older shrine Shinto practice and imperial mythology, particularly the claimed unbroken imperial line descending from the sun goddess Amaterasu, into a coherent ideological support for the modern Japanese state, with Ise Grand Shrine and the newly built Yasukuni Shrine, commemorating the war dead, serving as central institutions within the reorganized system.