The Ningen Sengen

On the first day of 1946, four months after the surrender, the Showa emperor issued a rescript on the construction of a new Japan. Most of it concerns national reconstruction, and it opens by quoting the Charter Oath of 1868. Near the end comes the passage that gave it its popular name: that the ties between the throne and the people do not depend upon mere legends and myths, and are not predicated on the false conception that the emperor is a manifest deity and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and destined to rule the world.

It was issued during the American occupation and its drafting involved occupation officials as well as Japanese ministers, with an English version prepared alongside the Japanese. Two weeks earlier the occupation had issued the directive ending state support, supervision and propagation of Shinto, removing the financial and administrative basis of the shrine system. The rescript and the directive belong together as the dismantling of the pre-war arrangement.

The popular name, ningen sengen, declaration of humanity, is not the document's title and was applied by the press. That matters, because the label states something broader and cleaner than the text, and most people who know of the declaration know the label rather than the words.

The wording is more careful than its reputation. It denies that the relationship between throne and people rests on a false conception, specifying that conception as the emperor being a manifest deity and the Japanese being a race destined to rule others. It does not address the traditional claim of descent from Amaterasu, and it does not use the ordinary word for god in the crucial sentence, employing instead the archaic term for a deity manifest in the world.

Scholars accordingly disagree about the scope. Some read it as a comprehensive renunciation of imperial divinity. Others hold that it denies a specific ideological construction of the 1930s and 1940s while leaving the older mythological claim untouched, and note that the passage sits in a document mostly about reconstruction rather than standing alone.

The emperor added his own complication. Speaking many years later, he said that the rescript's main purpose had been the Charter Oath quoted at its head, showing that democratic principles were not a foreign import, and that the denial of divinity had been a secondary matter to which he had given little weight, his chief concern being to repudiate the idea of Japanese racial superiority.

The atlas records the text, the popular name, the occupation context and the disagreement, and does not decide, because what the document renounced is genuinely a question about which informed people differ.