Dr. Zubkov

There were many countries on Earth where a religious institution took the complete control over the state, and it never ended well. An influential modern example of a militant theocracy is the Empire of Japan, which was, since the Meiji restoration in 1868, governed by a religion known as Kokka Shinto, in which the emperor was a divine being, god incarnate, direct offspring of Amaterasu.

The growth of Shinto became noticeable already in the 18th century, with Motoori Norinaga’s Kojiki-den (Kojiki commentary), which evolved into the school of philosophy Kokugaku (national study), which actively worked on re-establishing Japanese culture and on rejection of Neo-Confucianism and European thought. The Kokugaku succeeded in becoming a major influence on the Japanese society, and found points of contact with the empire-oriented philosophy of Mitogaku which then turned into Sonno joi, the political movement to restore the rule of the emperor, the major force of the Meiji revolution.

The new 1889 Meiji Constitution gave the emperor full power over the citizens of the country, and restored the old Department of Worship after a thousand years of decline. The shinto priests became government employees, charged with the task of shaping the beliefs of the people, aiming to convert as many as possible into Emperor-worshippers. The principle of saisei itchi, the unity of religion and government, was brought to life. Although the constitution guaranteed religious freedom, it was a patriotic duty of all Japanese to worship at the government-administered Shinto shrines. Shinto moral teaching (shushin) became compulsory in the schools, and the divine status of the emperor was infallible.

This veneration of the Divine Emperor and rejection of all foreign religious influences in favor of the authentic Japanese Shinto combined with the desire of the government to make Japan equal to the Great Powers of the world, to realignment of the Japanese identify from feudal domains to he nation as a whole, these factors combined and supported each other, ushering in the era of Japanese nationalism and then xenophobic ultra-nationalism, and the building of the Japanese Empire began. Starting with the occupation of Korea and Taiwan in 1895 and expanding to all of Manchuria by 1932 (which became known as Manchukuo), and continuing into the “holy war” with the Republic of China and into World War II, the Empire grew, making Emperor Worship and State Shinto the official religion in all of its territories.

As we all know, this ended in 1945, when the Soviet Union annihilated the Japanese army in Manchuria while the Americans used two atomic bombs in Japan, finally forcing emperor Hirohito to surrender and to publicly admit that he was not a living God, in a historic document known as Ningen-sengen. The government subsidy of Shinto shrines was stopped. Of course, I cannot put the blame on Shinto only. As the USSR showed us, theocracy is not the necessary condition for an aggressive totalitarian regime, but as the history shows, it’s very much near sufficient.