The Sacred Spaces and Secular Subjects of the Postwar Japanese Public School

• In Event: What Isn't Shinto?

Abstract

When the American-led Allied forces occupied Japan in early September 1945, they were ordered to ensure that Japanese ultranationalism did not “hide behind the cloak of religion.” By December of that year the occupiers had already promulgated the famed Shinto Directive that disaggregated Shinto from statecraft, but a long-term project remained in the need to eradicate ostensibly Shinto-derived ideals from public school education. This was not simply a matter of censoring textbooks or removing small shrines from school grounds, although those things did happen. A more fundamental question—what is not Shinto—demanded attention. The resulting reform project proceeded in fits and starts. Members of the aptly named United States Education Mission to Japan struggled to separate their own Christian sympathies from their professional assessments and recommendations. The Occupation Civil Information and Education Section had to determine where the boundary lay between “religion” and “morality” in Japan’s traditional classes on self-cultivation (shūshin). Teachers and pupils struggled to keep pace with the dizzying changes that resulted from the occupiers’ material reconstruction of public school space and conceptual reformation of the curriculum. And all of these challenges were exacerbated by the fact that Shinto had always been ambiguously defined and its status as “religion” repeatedly questioned. Few of the occupiers or their Japanese counterparts could definitively say what Shinto was beyond a vague “we know it when we see it.” But their determinations about what Shinto was not had immediate pedagogical impact and lasting, if somewhat unexpected, political consequences.

Author

• Jolyon Thomas, University of Pennsylvania