ABSTRACT
The Meiji government’s approach to shrine administration in the 1870s and 1880s was based on the principle that Shinto was ‘not a religion’, but this did not, of itself, lead to the creation of what we have come to know as ‘state Shinto’. State Shinto had its roots in the principle, established in 1871, that shrines were ‘sites for the performance of state ritual’ (jinja no gi wa kokka no sōshi nite), but plans for a special office to administer what might be called Jingi kanga or ‘deity affairs’ continued to be rejected, and government persisted in its policy of cutting shrines adrift from the state. 1 As long as this state of affairs prevailed, state Shinto remained a practicable impossibility. The government’s approach is typified by the State Shrine Preservation Fund scheme (kankokuheisha hozonkin seido). 2 The purpose of the scheme, introduced in March 1887, was to wind down the state’s commitment to the financial upkeep of state shrines. For the next fifteen years, the state would continue its support; thereafter state shrines would, like the vast majority of other shrines, have to fend for themselves. The state was clearly not overly concerned with the fate of shrines other than those at Ise and those within the imperial palace itself. And yet, the government never rescinded that 1871 definition. It became a question of how shrine priests and their sympathisers in the Diet, who insisted that the state distinguish shrines from other religious institutions and grant them special status, might bring about a new direction in government shrine administration. The establishment in 1900 of the Jinjakyoku or Shrine Bureau was a major turning point. 3
