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 Tōnomine 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 well. 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
