The Origin of Modern Shinto in Japan by Yijiang Zhong;

Author:Yijiang Zhong;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Vanquished Gods of Izumo
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ritual, Doctrine, and the Meiji Polity, 1868–1871

The ostensibly restored Meiji polity was given public form in a series of promulgations starting from the “Great Command of Imperial Restoration” (ōsei fukko no daigōrei) on the ninth of the twelfth month of 1867, announcing the “renewal of ancient practices established by Emperor Jimmu.”29 Four months later, on the fourteenth of the third month of 1868, the thesis of the Unity of Ritual and Rule (saisei itchi) was declared as the basis of the restored polity.30 The new government-in-formation simultaneously announced the reestablishment of the Department of Divinity (jingikan), which materialized a month later, albeit in a form quite different from its counterpart during the Heian period. The nature of the Meiji polity as one grounded upon the agency of the kami was even more explicitly expressed in a carefully orchestrated ritual performed in the imperial palace in Kyoto on the same day. Called the Charter Oath, this rite involved domain lords and courtiers expressing an explicit testimony of loyalty to the restored imperial authority so as to avoid punishment by the Heavenly and Earthly Gods (tenjin chigi), whose divine power underpinned the ritual.31 This was just part of a series of promulgations enacted as ritual performances. The theologically and politically loaded signifier “ritual” (sai or saishi) functioned as the nexus connecting the kami and its legitimating power to the creation of a new order of things in the human world.

Indeed, as indicated by the slogan of the Unity of Ritual and Rule, ritual was constitutive of imperial authority itself.32 This slogan originated from earlier Shinto discourses, but its meaning changed over time. Aizawa Seishisai read Confucian values into the imperial polity—divine ancestors and human descendants were united through ritual performance; Hirata and Mutobe saw in the performance of imperial rituals a kind of purification, a life-generating process of interaction and unity between the kami and humans. Containing these different meanings, the Meiji slogan of the Unity of Ritual and Rule served as an ideological tool designed to “create, articulate, and manifest an ‘alliance’ extending from the myriad deities (jingi) through the figure of the Emperor and the mediation of his ministers ‘even unto the least persons under heaven.’”33 In other words, the Meiji leadership employed the slogan to claim the construction of a unity of the people and the nation based on the formation of what amounted to a “universal ontological totality,” that is, an ideological formation encompassing state and society, this life and the one beyond, and the world of humans and that of the kami.34 The Department of Divinity provided the institutional form wherein the Invisible World of the kami and the Visible World of humans could be joined by way of ritual to constitute an ontological unity: a Shinto nation. The construction of this Shinto nation, then, started from the nationalization of Shinto—shrines, priests, and the kami.

It was Shinto shrines that provided the institutional channel for producing this ontological unity via ritual performance. Enabling the channeling function of Shinto

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