The Nikujiku Saitai Decree of 1872

The text of the proclamation is one sentence. From now on, it says, Buddhist clergy are at liberty to eat meat, to marry, to grow their hair, and so forth; and when they are not engaged in religious observances they may wear ordinary clothing. A separate decree of 1873 extended the liberty to nuns.

Everything turns on the difference between permitting and requiring. Under the Tokugawa shogunate the precepts of the Buddhist orders had been matters of state law. A priest found to have broken celibacy could be exiled or paraded in public, and temples had been made instruments of population registration, so the clergy were a supervised class. The Meiji government withdrew that supervision. It did not tell monks to marry; it stopped punishing them for it, and simultaneously removed the legal privileges of the clerical status.

The reaction inside the orders was not gratitude. Several denominations petitioned against the decree, arguing that the state had no business dissolving vows it had not administered, and that a permission from outside the tradition was as much an interference as a prohibition had been. Some sects continued to discipline married clergy internally for decades. The Jodo Shinshu tradition was the exception with nothing to change: its clergy had married openly since Shinran in the thirteenth century, and the decree simply made the rest of Japanese Buddhism resemble it.

The proclamation was one measure in a general reordering of Japanese religion after 1868, and it reads differently beside the others.

Four years earlier the new government had ordered shinbutsu bunri, the separation of kami worship from Buddhism, which had been fused in practice for a thousand years. Buddhist images were removed from shrines, Buddhist clergy attached to shrines were laicised or expelled, and in some domains the order was taken as licence for haibutsu kishaku, the destruction of Buddhist property. Thousands of temples were closed or amalgamated, images were melted for their metal, and monastic landholdings were confiscated.

Against that background the 1872 decree looks less like a liberalisation than a further step in reclassifying Buddhism as a private matter with no public standing. Contemporaries in the orders read it that way, and Richard Jaffe has argued that the government's intent included making the clergy taxable, conscriptable subjects like anyone else.

The long consequence was a Buddhism organised around households. A priest with a wife and children needs an income and a successor, and the temple provides both, so temples pass from father to son, funerary services become the economic base, and the training period shortens. Whether that is a decline from monasticism or an adaptation that kept Japanese Buddhism alive through modernisation is argued in Japan and outside it, and the atlas records the instrument and the outcome rather than the verdict.