Notoriously boring

This is part 7 of my series on Shinto as a civil religion, you can find the other parts here. The word Kokutai is translated to national politics or national structure. The term was first used by Aizawa Seishisai (1782-1863). He was a Confucian scholar of the Mito school, which focused on isolationism, nativism, and… Continue reading

This is part 6 of my series on Shinto as a civil religion, you can find the other parts here. The genre of Kokugaku which starts with Hirata Atsutane and his later followers Sato Nobuhiro and Okuni Takamasa would speak of “The Divine Age”. “The Divine Age” was a time when the Japanese lived after… Continue reading

This is part 5 of my series on Shinto as a civil religion, you can find the other parts here. Kokugaku, roughly translated as national teaching, was a kind of Japanese philology focusing on analyzing and philosophizing old Japanese texts, to return to a historical Japanese teaching. Phew! Before Kokugaku the study of Japanese history… Continue reading

This is part 4 of my series on Shinto as a civil religion, you can find the rest of the series here. Restoration Shinto’s influence on the new Meiji government was immediately evident when Shinto was successfully separated from Buddhism. A few months after the overthrowing of the shogunate, Okuni Takamasa, Fukuba Bisei, and Kamei… Continue reading

This is part 3 of my series on Shinto as a civil religion, you can find the other parts here. The Meiji Restoration was one of the biggest upheavals of Japanese culture in 200 years when it occurred in 1868. At the beginning of the 1800s, the Americans, the British and the Russians started to… Continue reading

This is Part Two in my series on Shinto as a civil religion, which you can find here! Shinto between 1600-1868 (also known as the Tokugawa period), mainly existed in three different versions. All these were in relation to Buddhism. The most known about for many is the ritual practices of the Japanese Emperor and… Continue reading

I would like to start this first part of my series on Shinto with an apology! This post will be very heavy on the definitions. It might be a somewhat hard start to the series, but it is, unfortunately, necessary. To understand State Shinto, as is the focus of this series, we must understand civil… Continue reading

I have always been fascinated by Shinto, so much so that I wrote my masters about it and its role in Japan during the years until World War II. This is the foundation for my new series on Shinto. And so I set out not only to translate the 75 pages into English but also… Continue reading