Hirohito

The text issued on 1 January 1946 was not, on the face of it, a theological document. It opened by reprinting the Charter Oath of 1868, argued that the foundations of Japanese government had been laid down in that document rather than in wartime doctrine, and urged a people living in ruins to rebuild. The passage that made it famous came near the end, where the emperor described as a false conception the idea that the ties between throne and people rest on the belief that the emperor is a living god and the Japanese a race superior to others and destined to rule the world.

What that sentence renounced has been argued over ever since, because the Japanese wording is precise and narrow. The emperor denied being an akitsumikami, a manifest deity present in the world. He did not deny the descent of the imperial house from Amaterasu, and the genealogy set out in the eighth century chronicles was left untouched. Some readers therefore treat the rescript as a limited abdication of one claim rather than a wholesale abandonment of the sacred character of the throne. Others point out that the narrow claim was exactly the one on which the wartime state had rested.

The document was drafted under occupation conditions, with input from an English tutor and a senior education official, and its English text circulated before its Japanese one. The emperor himself said many years later that his purpose had been to put the Charter Oath at the head of the new order rather than to make a statement about his own nature. Whatever the intention, the effect was decisive: within a year a new constitution described him as the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people, deriving that position from the will of the people and holding no powers of government.

What the occupation called State Shinto was less a religion than an administrative arrangement built after 1868. Shrines were graded, funded and staffed through government offices, priests were treated as officials rather than clergy, and the whole system was declared to be not a religion at all but a civic observance owed by every subject regardless of what else they believed. That fiction allowed the state to require attendance from Buddhists and Christians while formally guaranteeing freedom of belief, and it made the emperor the living centre of a national rite.

The directive issued by the occupation authorities on 15 December 1945 dismantled the arrangement in a single stroke. It ordered the end of all official sponsorship, support, perpetuation, control and dissemination of Shinto, removed shrine affairs from government departments, banned the doctrines of imperial divinity and Japanese racial superiority from schools, and required that shrines be treated exactly as any other religious body. Shrines reorganized themselves within months as a private association, and the imperial house rites continued as the private observances of a family rather than acts of state.

Hirohito outlived that settlement by more than forty years and never publicly reopened it. One consequence surfaced only after his death: he had made no visit to Yasukuni Shrine since 1975, and a memorandum by a former grand steward published in 2006 was widely read as recording his displeasure at the 1978 enshrinement there of men convicted as war leaders. Historians differ on how much weight the note can carry, but no emperor has visited the shrine since.