An Ill-Advised Appendix to “Patriotism, Secularism, and State

Shinto”
The original draft of my article was 50 pages. 20 of these were spent laying out all the extra research I
did. In the editing process, my advisors and I discovered three things: (1) The material was superfluous.
(2) It was mostly devoted to making fun of scholars I disliked. (3) Nobody was going to read a 50-page
article. With that in mind, I here present the best 10 pages of that overflow, because it is entertaining to
read.

Religious-Secular Dialectic as a Civilizing Tool

In the State Shinto debate, the export of religious-secular dialectic was used by religious

scholars as a similar civilizing tool. As we have seen, scholars were not content to take the Japanese

sect-shrine dialectic at face value. They insisted that the concept of religion provided a more useful

category for understanding Japan, and while such a distinction is of no consequence for the shrinegoers

in a purely academic discussion, these same academics were also intent on taking their own category

back to Japan to bring their thinking "up to date" and apply it to more political concepts such as

obedience to the Emperor. This is exemplified by a series of articles published by scholar-cum-

missionary D.C. Holtom in The Christian Century. While Holtom wrote several books that were cited

in the Shinto Directive study under the pretense of a theoretical and non-political discussion of Shinto,

and which indeed "may have determined" the position of the Occupation (Hylkema-Vos 1990:390), in

this series, which he did not see fit to republish elsewhere, he makes his intent quite clear.

Holtom opens with a bombshell: "Many of the statements regarding this issue, especially those

from Japanese sources, Christian included, represent the propaganda interests of the Japanese

government rather than the conclusions that flow from unbiased historical study." (1942a:11) In other

words, the Japanese themselves, both Christians and scholars, have not recognized the true nature of

Japan or Shinto, whereas Holtom, the superior Western scholar, has seen past the flimsy veil of

"propaganda" and is shortly to present for our edification the "unbiased" truth of the matter. Edward

Said recognized a similar current in Middle Eastern studies: "The Orient and Islam have a kind of
extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the

Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient

could not do was to represent itself." The label "primitive religion", for example, is not something that

can be changed by the priests' own self-identification with secular patriotism. The priests are not in

control of their identity: the Westerners are.

For a more concrete example: Holtom writes that "Japanese apologists in explaining this matter

to Western readers have commonly tried to find an analogy to the state shrines in such Western

institutions as the Lincoln Memorial at Washington, the Pantheon at Paris, the Tomb of the Unknown

Soldier, or most recently the birthplace of President Wilson." His assessment of this argument is that

"there are aspects of the situation that on the surface seem to support this view[, but] a first-hand

examination of what actually goes on at the shrines will show how far it is from indicating all the

pertinent facts." Holtom asks us not to take the Christians for their word but to consider instead his

representation of a shrinegoing experience as indicative of the dirty laundry of Shinto he has so

ruthlessly uncovered. And what a re-imagining it is: "After a ceremonial purification accomplished

sometimes by the magical power of a wand-like device waved over the heads of members of the group

by a priest, but more often by pouring water alternately over the hands and rinsing the mouth, the band

draws up in the shrine enclosure" (emphases added).

The reimagining that occurs here is mostly a production of selective translation. In Japanese, the

word oonusa is not used interchangeably with the phrase "wand-like device" (context suggests sutekki-

teki na shikake as a back-translation), nor does Holtom mean to imply that his "first-hand examination"

reflects how a Japanese Christian would interpret the scene at a shrine. The intended readers are

American Christians versed in the religious-secular dialectic, the "examination" is meant to be a rough

guess at how these outsiders would perceive the shrine through their own lens, and all of the

emphasized translations were obviously chosen for their dialectic value—if their Japanese equivalents

were similarly sectarian, the entire idea of public shrine attendance would be nonsensical. Holtom also
describes how schoolchildren and soldiers often visit memorials, and how groups tend to make a

gesture of respect towards the memorialized figure; how this is meant to differ from Western state

shrines is not made explicit. (1942a:13)

Holtom also expressed his distaste for the oonusa in a 1930 article, writing that “priest and

layman alike before they dare come into the dread presence of the enshrined kami must be purified by

special rites that cleanse from ceremonial defilement” as evidence of the religious nature of shrines.

Again, the words “special” and “ceremonial” serve no purpose here and do not prove anything about

shrines other than that locals treated them with respect. Doubtless Holtom himself attended many

black-tie missionary dinners where he wore special clothing that gave him ceremonial authority in the

dread presence of high society. (Holtom 1930:60)

In his 1942 article, Holtom does not go so far as to claim that Christians recognize all this

offensive paganism in their everyday shrine visits and are heretically leaving their sacred truths at the

door, but rather that they are in a state of "rapprochement" where they are not seeking out any

theological conflict. (1942b:43) And why must that policy be changed? Holtom answers this with

remarkable forwardness in the concluding article of his series:

Enlightened conscience over against the suppression of individuality, courageous moral

challenge against a static uniformity that tolerates neither discussion nor criticism, intelligent
historical investigation over against mythology and state utilitarianism that manufactures 'facts'
to suit convenience, respect for creative and cooperative personality as an educational ideal over
against a regimentation of the soul that inculcates absolute obedience as the supreme virtue,
freedom of worship over the utilization of religion as a mere tool of military and economic
aggrandizement--these are some of the real issues facing Christianity in Japan today.
(1942e:185)

None of these issues, of course, are theological. In fact, it is a rather interesting question

whether it is necessary for a good Christian to prevent the church from inculcating absolute obedience

to God, or whether she is required to subject the Gospels to "intelligent historical investigation" rather

than accepting them as divinely inspired. But Holtom is not really considering these things, because

even though he has written his series on the pretense of proving a theological point, his aim is not
merely to affirm Japanese shrine life as primitive idol worship but, as he readily admits here, to prevent

Christianity from becoming "a mere tool of [the Japanese] military" and use it instead as a righteous

tool for "enlightened conscience": civilizing the pagans.

One may wonder where the line can be drawn in Holtom's "research": that is to say, where in

this ignoble series of articles he abandoned his duty as a scholar and was driven to write the conclusion

above, which might as well end "this is what I would like to see Japanese Christians conform to". The

answer is that as soon as he declared himself a religious scholar he pledged allegiance to a dialectic

foreign to Japan, and that by approaching Japanese politics with the question "is State Shinto a

religion" rather than "is State Shinto sectarian", he was paving the way for a civilizing project of the

sort found both in his conclusion and in the Shinto Directive Staff Study.

Genchi Kato, Man of the Hour

One of the favorite pastimes of religious scholars and missionaries alike in the interwar period

is citing Genchi Kato. Kato authored several books and articles comparing Shinto to religion, which

allowed others to cast Shinto as a religion with the backing of an apparently reliable Japanese scholar.

In the most influential of these, the 1919 Shinto and our Politic (我が国体と神道 Waga Kokutai to

Shinto), he devotes much of the book to discussing the Emperor in comparison to the gods of other

religions. Of course, he was not the only Japanese scholar to draw such a comparison (Iyenaga 1891),

but he was the most prominent. The conservative scholar Nitta Hitoshi, who calls Kato the "author" of

the arahitogami interpretation of Meiji-period Imperial rule, has speculated that his aim may have been

to draw an analogy with cultural symbols that Westerners would find easy to understand. (Nitta

2003:54-57)

Genchi Kato has been called "a neglected pioneer in comparative religion." (Hyklema-Vos

1990) Indeed, Kato was a comparative religionist in the strictest sense: he found the other religions of

the world useful for the purpose of being compared to his own construction of the ideal, Japanese body

politic. "Shinto" was the word for those specific concepts in Japanese culture in which Kato found
parallels with the world's religions. Even though the drawing of such parallels was fairly unique among

both nationalists and Shinto scholars, it drew him into the fold of comparative religion, so he thus

became an authority on Shinto for the West.

One not need look very closely at Kato's arguments today to see behind them his inner fantasy.

He makes the Emperor play the roles of both the Jewish God and the Jewish Messiah, creating a

Frankenstein symbol that does not even exist in that religion. The fact that God is an unseen presence

who forbids the sort of idol worship exemplified by the Imperial portrait, or that Jews still await the

Messiah, does not seem to bother him; he says in fact that where Jews only have hope for the future,

the Japanese have the real thing, making one wonder if he is only using God and the Messiah for the

raw power they represent rather than their specific attributes. (Pieters 1920:350)

Even after the conclusion of the Pacific War, Kato was not very picky about the sources he used

to draw these comparisons. In his Historical Study of the Religious Development of Shinto (1973) —

published by UNESCO, who supply a blurb, "a masterful study of Japan's most important religion” —

he makes the remarkable claim that "again in the Talmud, a Jewish Holy Book, it is written follows

[sic]: 'Just as men are superior to any other animal, Jews are superior to any other people. Those who

are not Jews are probably in the inferior position of animals such as dogs and horses.'" (49-50) It is thus

that Japanese culture is like Jewish culture.

Of course, the Talmud says nothing like this whatsoever, and to claim that it does is disparaging

to all Jews. This fabrication appears to have been drawn from an anti-Semitic tract. For our purposes

here, it is more relevant to point out that Kato's analogy here is fairly poor and does not improve one's

understanding of the Emperor or Japan. The same argument was more elegantly made by Hiroyuki

Katou, who was opposed to religion generally, but claimed that the teaching of universal brotherhood

in Christianity and Buddhism in particular “leads to a decay of the nationalistic spirit” among Japanese,

as opposed to Hinduism and Judaism which “confine their attention to the people among whom they

have arisen” and therefore act as separate nations independent of Japan. (Moule 1913:193-4) Genchi
Kato is not saying that the Japanese, like his imagined Jews, should treat foreigners as subhuman

beasts, but is rather creating a parallel between the spiritual nation of Israel led by God and the real

nation of Japan led by the Emperor.

It is possible that Kato did not know the difference between religion and civil religion. In one

article, he writes that the “western peoples all recognize in the flag of one's country an emblem of

national glory, and they love it as such. To a far greater degree do the people of Japan prize and revere

the Shinto shrines of their ancient race as precious crystals of the national spirit.” (Kato 1935:65) It is

rare to see such a good analogy from him, but the contradiction with his other writings is apparent:

shrines cannot be churches and flags at the same time, for churches are sectarian and private, while

flags are (within the context of the state) nonsectarian and public.

This is not the only instance of Kato's theological positions fluctuating. He claims in 1954 that

the whole Emperor thing was just a facade underneath which the transcendental truth was hiding:

During the Meiji Era as a national secular cult dominated and utilized by politicians and
military men for the purposes of political convenience or expediency Shinto, in particular
Shrine Shinto was ostensibly divested of its true religious nature and became a warped and
deformed cult. Since its disestablishment in 1945, however, it has begun to resume its
fundamental religious nature and is groping along the way towards the achievement of a world-
wide, universal nature. (Kato 1954:5)

Has Kato found some previously unknown objective truth about Shinto that he had not yet

learned in 1919? Of course not. He has had a personal change of heart, and accordingly has modified

his definition of “Shinto” so that it no longer has the Emperor at its center of worship. But he continues

to go on the war-path against the Japanese majority opinion, writing that “many people, perhaps the

majority, hold the mistaken view or political bias that Shinto is not religion.” (Kato 1954:10) Given the

influence Kato had on Holtom and other writers, it appears that the term “Shinto” has been his

plaything all along, to be used for contemporary political or soteriological purposes as he alone sees fit.

The number of missionaries and "religious scholars" who made use of Kato is difficult to

determine, because there is such a wide variety. Albertus Pieters, a missionary in Japan, found Kato
"exceedingly opportune" indeed for silencing the voices of Japanese Christians in the debate over the

religiousness of Shinto. In response to their complaints, he cites Kato as an "authority" and quotes his

analogies to Jehovah and the Messiah at length. (Pieters 1920) The German Japanologist Emil Schiller,

whom the modern historian Klaus Antoni describes as a "kundiger Zeitzeuge" (1998:309), used Kato's

theology to disprove the claim that Shinto was non-religious.

Did any of these expatriates acknowledge the opinionated nature of their source? The

charmingly named Hugh Byas, in his anti-nationalist work Government By Assassination (1942),

retreated from endorsing Kato's theology: "[A]s a layman, speaking only from my long observation of

Japanese life, I must record my own opinion that Dr. Kato's description is an overstatement." (307-309)

It is striking that the "layman" Byas cannot use Kato's work without recognizing the polemical

overstatement, while the "scholars" seem to lack this critical awareness. One complained that when

"those with conscientious scruples quote ... Kato Genchi, as showing that the shrine ceremonies are

religious, they are met with a polite assurance that such ideas are only the private opinions of

individuals, and carry no authority." (Young 1939:136)

D.C. Holtom does recognize that Kato is producing "nationalistic political philosophy", but

rather than concluding that Kato is casting imperial reverence as overly religious, he claims that Kato

and other moderns are politicizing Shinto. (Holtom 1922:118-124) What are we to make of Holtom's

claim that Shinto is something more than an old philosophical term that has been renewed for political

purposes? Presumably this word has a life of its own, and if freed from its standard government use

would be birthed as a full-fledged religion, rather than remaining a "hodge-podge" of folklore,

architecture, and mythology. The word itself has transcendental value, and has a destiny set out for it

after some helpful soul "depoliticizes" it.

Religious Studies and “State Shinto”

The field of religious studies in recent years has been occupied with questions about the

ideological nature of the religious category and its political applications. Timothy Fitzgerald has
famously declared that “there is no coherent non-theological theoretical basis for the study of religion

as a separate academic discipline”. In a 2001 forum on Fitzgerald’s thesis in Religious Studies Review,

the main complaint seems to have been that while religious studies can be put to ideological use, it also

has value as an objective institution. It seems to me that this is not a theoretical but an empirical

question. As a case study in what religious studies can bring to the fields of sociology and history, I will

now examine some recent academics books that have been printed on the shrine question and on the

“Shinto” in the imperial period.

Helen Hardacre’s Shinto and the State (1989) is one book that, while well-researched, cites

Holtom as an objective academic throughout, and is plagued with its own religious troubles. For

example, Hardacre correctly states in the Introduction that “in pre-Meiji Japan there existed no concept

of religion as a general phenomenon” (18) and that “there has been much discussion of whether it is

appropriate to consider Shinto a religion” (10), but in the same short section, referring to brothels,

claims that pre-Meiji visitors “could take in the secular delights of Ise … not all [of the Jingu's

attractions] were of a religious nature”. (16) In doing so, she takes up two ideological positions. First,

she makes an accusation about the nature of Ise's brothels, for there is of course no rule in sociology or

anthropology that brothels cannot be religious. Moreover the Jingu's staff could not have defended

themselves against such an accusation, for there was no concept of religion at the time. Secondly, she

contradicts the supposed neutrality of even this short introduction, for now the Jingu is a primarily

“religious” attraction—simply one that was in the past dirtied by Japan's barbaric mixture of the sacred

and the profane.

We find this contradiction as well in more important statements about the invention of State

Shinto. Again, “when ideas about religion originating in Europe and Asia came to Japan, they entered a

society that had no equivalent concept or term, no idea of a distinct sphere of life that could be called

religious … the Japanese found it necessary to develop their own term for the various Western-

language words for religion.” (63) However, for some reason this functions the beginning rather than
the end of Hardacre's concern with “religion” as a category, and the end rather than the beginning of

her complaint with it. Just a few pages later she cleverly rewrites the Occupation assertion of State

Shinto's religiousness into an apparent non-assertion, stating that “in the Meiji period, for the first time

in Japanese religious history, shrine affiliations became … defined as nonreligious in character.” (83;

emphasis added) According to what she stated herself before, Japan did not have a religious history, so

why is it being brought up here? A parallel statement may put the ideological grounding of this

sentence into perspective: “Following evangelical Christian objections, for the first time in the

religious history of aikido, bowing to one's sensei became defined as nonreligious in character.” Merely

by referencing the category as if it was there all along. the claim of Shinto's secular nature is negated.

Hardacre again masquerades assertions as statements while discussing the introduction of

religious freedom: “The status of Shinto remained ambiguous, with a growing tendency to separate it

from the sphere of religion and to align it instead with custom and patriotism.” (120) First of all, has

there ever been any doubt that visits to shrines are a Japanese custom? If not, then what is the meaning

of the suggestion that it became “aligned with” custom, and why does it start its journey towards

custom in the “sphere of religion”—a sphere that Hardacre has already twice acknowledged did not

exist in Japan before Western involvement? What she may have meant here is that State Shinto was a

patriotic, or national, custom, and similarly public customs in the West do not involve references to

kami. But to rewrite the sentence in this way would actually change its meaning. State Shinto never left

the sphere of kami, and it was always in the sphere of custom, so there is no ambiguity on this subject

whatsoever except for its conflict with our own categories. The real ambiguity for most Japanese was

that it was implemented as an invented custom, a bottom-up popular tradition that was reinvented by

the state as patriotism and recommunicated from the top down.

Hardacre concludes this section with the statement that “we have seen … that much of Japanese

religiosity, especially shrine life, was in essence liturgical and communal in character.” (121) It is hard

to say what the word “religiosity” and its accompanying generalization adds to this discussion. It
waters down her claim and unnecessarily injects an assertion about religiousness with no small

ideological implications. If this sentence were written “we have seen that Japanese shrine life was

communal in character”, it would be both more specific and more accurate.

Bibliography
Antoni, Claus. (1998). Shinto Und Die Konzeption Des Japanischen Nationalwesens Kokutai: Der
Religiose Traditionalismus in Neuzeit Und Moderne Japans.
Byas, Hugh. (1942) Government By Assassination. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Holtom, D.C. (1923) "Review: The Religions of Japan in the Hastings 'Encyclopaedia'". The Journal
of Religion 3.2.
Holtom, D.C. “Modern Shinto as a State Religion.” In Paul S. Mayer (ed.), The Japan Mission Year
Book, vol. 28. Tokyo: Kyo Bun Kwan, 1930.
Holtom, D.C. “Recent Discussion Regarding State Shinto.” In Luman J. Schafer (ed.), The Japan
Mission Year Book, vol. 29. Tokyo: Kyo Bun Kwan, 1931.
Holtom, D.C. (1947) Modern Japan and Shinto Nationalism. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.
Hylkema-Vos, Naomi. "Kato Genchi –A Neglected Pioneer in Japanese Religion–". Japanese Journal
of Religious Studies 17.4 (1990).
Iyenaga Toyokichi (1891). The Constitutional Development of Japan, 1853-1881.
Kato Genchi and Komazo Mizoguchi (1935). "The Year in Shinto 1934". In Fred D. Gealy (ed.), The
Japan Christian Year Book. Tokyo: Kyo Bun Kwan.
Kato Genchi (1954). Shinto in Essence, As Illustrated By the Faith in a Glorified Personality. Tokyo:
Nogi Shrine.
Kato Genchi (1973). A Historical Study of the Religious Development of Shinto. Tokyo: Monbushou.
Moule, G.H. The Spirit of Japan. London: The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts, 1913.
Nitta Hitoshi (2003). The Illusion of "Arahitogami" "Kokkashintou". Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūjo.
Pieters, Albertus (1920). Emperor Worship in Japan.
Young, Arthur Morgan (1939). The Rise of a Pagan State. New York: William Morrow.