Word: emperors
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...centuries with different Buddhist sects; there is also a Christian minority. But starting in the late 19th cen-tury, an official attempt was made to bring all Japanese under one spiritual roof. The nation was taught to follow the imperial cult, called State Shinto: the belief that the Japanese Emperor is divine, that the Japanese are de-scended from their ancient gods, and that any order from a superior-in the government, in the army, at school-must be obeyed without question. State Shinto turned the Japanese state itself into a cult that reached its most extreme form from...
Much of State Shinto was invented, but like many religious cults, it was based on traditions. The 20th century Emperors, in their role as commander of the Imperial Japanese Army, cut Napoleonic figures, riding white horses in splendid military uniforms, but they were also the high priests of State Shinto, donning traditional ceremonial garb and communing with the Sun Goddess in ancient shrines. If the forms were sometimes very old, the idea of the Emperor as the apex of a modern state religion...
Every Japanese school had a shrine that contained a picture of the Emperor. Every Japanese had to jump to attention at the mere mention of the imperial name. History lessons began with myths told as truth about the divine ancestry of the Emperor and, by extension, the Japanese race. Self-sacrifice was extolled as the highest virtue. When winning the war had become hopeless, the Japanese people were told to prepare for a suicidal last stand...
...Shinto monopolized Japan's spiritual and political life. No wonder that when the cult was abolished by order of the Allies after their victory in 1945, it left a lot of confused Japanese behind. What had been inculcated as religious doctrine was suddenly forbidden as dangerous militaristic propaganda. The Emperor could stay on his throne, but had to renounce his divinity. It was, perhaps, the first time in human history that God had to declare himself dead...
THOSE WHO WOULD MAKE DIVORCE MORE difficult to obtain should know that this approach was tried before with disastrous results. In the middle of the 6th century A.D., the Roman Emperor Justinian I outlawed no-fault divorce in his famous Digest. For hundreds of years before that action, Romans had both divorce for cause and no-fault divorce. Justinian, as a good Christian, felt that it was his duty to curtail the loose practice of divorce and thereby bring law into closer conformity with the Gospels. The Romans, many of whom at that time were not Christians, were so incensed...