ABSTRACT
On New Year’s Day, 1946, Emperor Hirohito complied with orders from Allied occupation forces and made a radio broadcast to the Japanese people denying his divinity as a descendant of the Shinto gods. According to Shinto tradition, Hirohito and his imperial ancestors were descended from Amaterasu O¯mikami, the Sun Goddess. The Sun line, as the imperial family was known, represented an unbroken link to the founding of Japan and the very creation of the world. Yet that tradition – identifying the Japanese nation with the Shinto religion – was in fact quite recent, a product of the Meiji Restoration in the midnineteenth century that “restored” imperial rule and legitimized the emperor as a descendant of the gods. In the twentieth century, Shinto was officially adopted as the state religion by the wartime government, intensifying the identification of the Japanese nation with Shinto. Despite the fact that relatively few Japanese still believed in the divine descent of the emperor, the symbolic power of this idea as a cornerstone of state Shinto was sufficient to convince occupation authorities after the Second World War to demand a public renunciation by Emperor Hirohito. From the perspective of the Allied occupation, the union of state and religion in wartime Japan had contributed to militarism and fascism and therefore had to be dissolved.
