ABSTRACT
Over the past few years a series of valuable studies in Western languages has heightened our awareness of the implications for religion of the Meiji Restoration. Four are noteworthy. The first of these was Allan Grapard's pioneering essay on Tonomine, a 'shrine-temple multiplex', to use his suggestive term, situated in Sakurai, outside Nara, and dedicated to Fujiwara Kamatari (614-69).1 The focus of early Meiji religious policy fell, in Grapard's words, on 'the disruption of the Shinto-Buddhist discourse and [as such it was] a denial of cultural history.'2 Cultic centres like Tonomine constituted 'a fundamental aspect of Japanese religions and culture', and Grapard invites us to see the early Meiji dissociation of Shinto and Buddhist divinities at Tonomine and elsewhere as 'a major cultural revolution'. 3 If Grapard's interest was in 'shrine-temple multiplexes', Collcutt takes Buddhism, its temples and priests as a distinct entity. Collcutt usefully reminds us that anti-Buddhism was not new with Meiji; that it was a feature rather of the majority of intellectual discourses in the preceding Tokugawa era as wel1.4 Collcutt warns us against too simplistic an explanation for the government's assault on Buddhism, but identifies the promotion of 'Shinto' as an important key to understanding. He surveys incidents from different domains and provides valuable statistical evidence, too, on the extent of Buddhist devastation. Out of an estimated total of 460,000 temples in Tokugawa Japan, some 18,000 were destroyed between 1872 and 1874 (and possibly as many again in the period from 1868-72). Some 56,000 monks were returned to lay life. Buddhism, in Collcutt's view, faced the real threat of eradication. 5
Helen Hardacre has also explored early Meiji religious policy in her book length study of Shinto and the state in modern Japan. What we know as 'state Shinto' began, Hardacre says, 'with the Restoration,' and it was in seeking to raise the status of Shinto that Buddhism suffered mightily. She writes: 'The pent-up resentment of the Shinto priesthood was unleashed in ferocious, vindictive destruction. Buddhist priests were defrocked, lands confiscated, statuary and ritual implements melted down for cannon.'6 Curiously Hardacre
provides little evidence of the involvement of Shinto clergy in these activities, but she offers a much needed and valuable analysis both of institutional change affecting shrines and of ideological change: she discusses the Great Promulgation Campaign, its rise and demise and, most importantly, the implications it had for new religions such as Kurozumikyo and Konkokyo. 7 Finally, there is James Edward Ketelaar's study of Meiji Buddhism. Of heretics and martyrs has certainly done its bit to highlight the dynamics of religion and politics in the new Japan of Meiji. His specific purpose is to chart the modern transformation of Buddhism under the impact of Meiji modernisation. If the Meiji period ended with Buddhists demonstrating the age-old compatibility between their creed and Japanese social and political culture, with Buddhism emerging as a 'national cultural paradigm', it began much more inauspiciously with Buddhism defined, so Ketelaar proposes, as 'heresy', as 'foul and polluted'.8 Herein lies, of course, the explanation for the devastation that Buddhism suffered in early Meiji. Tokugawa ideologues may have provided the 'source books' for this approach, as it were, but it was inherited and implemented by Meiji bureaucrats. Buddhism's devastation in Meiji was quite simply a consequence of its definition as 'decadent and inherently evil.'9
