The Directive Behind the Emperor's Declaration

Less than three weeks after the directive, on 1 January 1946, Emperor Hirohito issued the Ningen Sengen, a New Year rescript in which he affirmed that the ties between himself and the Japanese people did not depend on the false conception that the emperor is a living god, or that the Japanese people are superior to other races and destined to rule the world. The rescript did not use the word divinity directly and was phrased, in the manner of an imperial document, obliquely enough that its precise scope was debated at the time, but it was widely read both in Japan and abroad as the emperor personally renouncing the claim to divine status that State Shinto ideology had built around the throne.

Occupation authorities and Japanese officials had corresponded over the rescript's wording in the weeks between the two documents, and most historians treat the declaration as a direct response to the Shinto Directive's demand that religion be separated from the machinery of the state, rather than as an independent act of imperial conscience. Together the two documents dismantled, within a matter of weeks, an ideological structure the Meiji and wartime governments had spent more than seventy years building around shrine Shinto and the imperial institution.