I. SHINTŌ AND POLITICS

In May 2000, the then Prime Minister of Japan, Mori Yoshirō, caused a storm of protest, both domestically and internationally, with his declaration before a meeting of lawmakers belonging to the Shintō Seiji Renmei (Shintō Political League), that: ‘We [have to make efforts to] make the public realize that Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor. It's been thirty years since we started our activities based on this thought’. Although some foreign observers may have been genuinely shocked by Mori's reactionary, ‘atavistic’ stance, no one who knew Japan or Japanese politics well was particularly surprised. Indeed, members of his own party generally did not challenge the validity of his remark; they merely regretted its indiscretion as a public pronouncement. As the unintentionally revealing excuse offered by the Secretary General of the party explained: ‘the comment was probably a platitude for the religious group’. In other words, in the circles in which Mori and his colleagues moved, the belief that ‘Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor’ was merely an accepted truism, so that nothing much should be read into the Prime Minister's remark – in the context in which it was given, it certainly did not represent any revolutionary departure from the norm. As Klaus Antoni points out, despite Emperor Hirohito's renunciation of his ‘divine status’ in 1946, ‘the Japanese emperorship receives its whole spiritual and religious authority, now as before, from the religious-political ideology of Shintō’.

Some analysts have presented Mori's ‘gaffe’ as yet another symptom of Japan's ‘move to the right’ in the late twentieth century – and, more specifically, as yet another challenge to the strict separation of church and state mandated by Japan's (American-imposed) postwar Constitution. There may be some truth in their contention that the economic doldrums of the 1990s made the Japanese public more receptive to open expressions of nationalistic sentiments and resentments. But, as Mori's own comment makes clear, throughout the postwar period such sentiments have never been far from the mainstream of Japanese political life. Indeed, the ‘thought’ on which Mori had based his political actions for thirty years is a good deal older than that: it has been at the heart of the Japanese polity since Japan first became a nation some sixteen centuries ago.