The Association of Shinto Shrines Wins Reinstatement of National Foundation Day

On 9 December 1966, Japan's National Diet promulgated a revision to the Public Holiday Law establishing 11 February as Kenkoku Kinen no Hi, National Foundation Day, first observed in 1967, sixteen years after Japan enacted the Religious Corporations Law in 1951, already recorded here, and nineteen years before Tsubaki Grand Shrine opened Shinto's first shrine on the US mainland in 1986, also recorded here. The holiday commemorated the legendary accession of Emperor Jimmu, traditionally dated to 11 February 660 BCE, and had stood as Kigensetsu from 1872 until the Allied occupation abolished it in 1948, judging its Shinto ritual and its ties to imperial mythology incompatible with the reforms that followed GHQ's 1945 Shinto Directive. Its return followed roughly fourteen years of organized advocacy led by the Association of Shinto Shrines, the postwar umbrella body that had organized itself as a private religious body in 1946, already recorded here, once the Religious Corporations Law gave it and every other shrine standing to act in its own right. The Association led an eighty organization coalition that petitioned and held public demonstrations rather than pursuing direct government pressure, building the grassroots support that eventually persuaded a reluctant Diet, over sustained opposition from the political left, to reinstate the observance under a new, religiously neutral name. Prime Minister Eisaku Sato's government issued the enabling Cabinet Order the same December day the law was promulgated, and Japan marked the holiday for the first time in nineteen years the following February.