This is part 14 of my series on Shinto as a civil religion, you can find the rest of the series here.
In 1889, the leaders of the Meiji Restoration completed what became known as the Meiji Constitution. Article 3 of the constitution states:
“The sacred Throne was established at the time when the heavens and the earth became separated. The Emperor is Heaven-descended, divine and sacred; he is preeminent above all his subjects. He must be reverenced and is inviolable. He has indeed to pay due respect to the law, but the law has no power to hold him accountable to it. Not only shall there be no irreverence for the Emperor’s person, but also He shall not be made topic of derogatory comment nor one of discussion.”
This article formally enshrined the emperor’s divinity in law. While the emperor is expected to follow the law, the language of the article makes it clear that he cannot be held accountable for breaking it, as he is placed above the law. Furthermore, it became illegal to criticize or discuss the emperor in a negative way. This likely meant that questioning his divinity or challenging his decisions was prohibited.
By including these ideas in the constitution, kokugaku ideology (which emphasized Japan’s divine nature and the emperor’s sacred role) was made a part of the legal framework. As a result, all government decision-making had to consider the emperor’s divine authority. Additionally, the law prevented the public from openly expressing doubts about the emperor’s divinity. Newspapers, for example, were not allowed to criticize him or share negative information about him, which helped suppress what might be called “corrosive discourse.”
This approach was a powerful way to maintain authority. While the government couldn’t fully control private conversations among the public, the lack of criticism from authoritative sources, such as newspapers, made it easier to keep dissent in check. Including the emperor’s divinity in the constitution was therefore a deliberate move to solidify and maintain his authority.
This legal recognition of the emperor’s divinity also became a key element of the emerging top-down civil religion. The religiosity of the state was now embedded in the constitution, and the next step was to spread this belief system to the people. This was one of the goals of The Great Promulgation Campaign, which, as previously discussed, had mixed results. However, as the next source will suggest, this objective may have been achieved in other ways.
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Sources
Theodore De Bary, William(ed.). Sources of Japanese Tradition: Volume Two 1600-2000. Colombia University Press: New York, 2005. Print. Pp. 1144-1145.
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