The Chosen Jingu Imperial Shrine Opens in Seoul

In 1925, nineteen years after Japan's Home Ministry ordered the shrine merger policy in 1906, already recorded here, and sixteen years before wartime suspicion suppressed Shinto in America in 1941, also recorded here, Japan's colonial government completed and dedicated the Chosen Jingu, an imperial shrine on Namsan in Seoul enshrining the sun goddess Amaterasu and the deified Emperor Meiji, with an enshrinement ceremony held in October. Ranked among the highest tier in Japan's state shrine hierarchy, Chosen Jingu became the central instrument of State Shinto's extension into colonial Korea. From 1925, Japanese authorities required Korean schoolchildren to attend the shrine, and chief priest Takamatsu Shiro coordinated closely with the colonial school system, distributing moral training textbooks to first graders through an annual Kangakusai ceremony and requiring the children who received them to visit the shrine and offer thanks to the imperial deities, a practice scholarship has shown began years before the compulsory shrine attendance imposed on university students and government employees from 1935. By the time Japan's defeat in 1945 ended State Shinto's establishment, colonial Korea held some eleven hundred forty shrines built on the model Chosen Jingu had set; Korean authorities removed its enshrined deities within hours of the surrender and demolished the building itself the following month.