Emperor Akihito Performs the First Daijosai Since State Shinto's Disestablishment

Four years after Yukitaka Yamamoto founded the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America in 1986, already recorded here, and twenty three years before Mount Fuji joined UNESCO's World Heritage List in 2013, also recorded here, Japan's Imperial Household performed a rite it had not performed since the Second World War ended State Shinto. Emperor Akihito's Sokuirei Seiden no Gi, the State Ceremony proclaiming his enthronement, was held at the Imperial Palace on 12 November 1990; ten days later, on 22 and 23 November, he performed the Daijosai, the Great Thanksgiving rite in which the emperor offers newly harvested rice to the sun goddess Amaterasu and the deities of heaven and earth. It was the first Daijosai performed since GHQ's 1945 Shinto Directive disestablished State Shinto, already recorded here, and the government funded it as an Imperial House ceremony rather than a state act, a classification that drew lawsuits from citizens arguing it breached the postwar constitution's separation of religion and state. The Imperial Household Agency's own record of the accession ceremonies gives the Daijokyu no Gi's dates. Thomas Makoto Naruse's peer reviewed study of the Daijosai and the separation of religion and state situates the 1990 rite within the same unresolved constitutional tension Emperor Naruhito's 2019 Daijosai, already recorded here, later inherited.