ABSTRACT
In his compelling article on ‘Shinto in the history of Japanese religion’, the historian Kuroda Toshio challenges the common view that Shinto is ‘the indigenous religion of Japan, continuing in an unbroken line from prehistoric times down to the present’. Instead, he proposes that
The notion of Shinto as Japan’s indigenous religion finally emerged complete both in name and in fact with the rise of modern nationalism, which evolved from the National Learning school of Motoori Norinaga and the Restoration Shinto movement of the Edo period down to the establishment of State Shinto in the Meiji period. The Meiji separation of Shinto and Buddhism (shinbutsu bunri) and its concomitant suppression of Buddhism (haibutsu kishaku) were coercive and destructive ‘correctives’ pressed forward by the hand of government. With them Shinto achieved for the first time the status of an independent religion, distorted though it was. 1
