Japan's Home Ministry Orders the Shrine Merger Policy

In December 1906, Japan's Home Ministry issued an imperial edict ordering the merger of Shinto shrines nationwide, empowering local and prefectural officials to consolidate the country's roughly two hundred thousand shrines toward a policy of one shrine per administrative village. Land surrendered by merged shrines could be taken without compensation, and the Home Ministry's own Bureau of Shrines, created in 1900, administered the campaign alongside a broader local improvement movement following the costly Russo-Japanese War. Enforcement varied sharply by prefecture: Mie and Wakayama carried out especially rigorous programs that abolished the great majority of local shrines, while Kyoto abolished only about one in ten. By 1914, roughly seventy thousand of Japan's shrines had been eliminated, folding countless village and hamlet shrines into larger regional ones under closer state supervision. The stated aim was to deepen popular reverence and revitalize shrine worship, but the underlying goals were consolidating emperor centered nationalism, reinforcing household and village hierarchy, and tightening administrative control at the grassroots, a use of religious institutions for state centralization that intellectuals and Diet members increasingly opposed, eventually pushing the government to abandon its most forcible merger tactics.