The Meiji Constitution Enshrines State Shinto as Civic Duty

Twenty one years after the Meiji government established State Shinto in 1868, already recorded here, and nine years before Japanese immigration carried Shinto to Hawaii in 1898, also recorded here, Japan's new constitution fixed the legal position that let the state require shrine worship of every subject while still presenting the country as religiously tolerant. Emperor Meiji promulgated the Constitution of the Empire of Japan on 11 February 1889, and its Article 28 granted Japanese subjects freedom of religious belief within limits not prejudicial to peace and order and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects. The clause read as a genuine liberty, but the government paired it with a position already asserted since the early 1880s, that Shinto shrine worship was not a religion at all but a matter of civic duty and loyalty to the throne binding every subject regardless of private belief, a classification that placed shrine attendance and state ritual outside the freedom Article 28 protected and beyond any subject's right to decline. The arrangement let the Meiji state require Buddhists, Christians and secularists alike to participate in shrine ceremonies while still presenting Japan to the Western powers as a constitutional state tolerant of private religion, and it set the legal architecture State Shinto operated under until Allied occupation authorities dismantled it in 1945, already recorded here in a later event. Helen Hardacre's academic history of Shinto's relationship to the Japanese state treats Article 28's distinction between religion and civic duty as the constitutional device that let a nationalizing, imperial cult of shrine worship coexist with a document Japan's leaders wanted the world to read as liberal.