Word: shinto
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Upstairs, I switch on the Shinto Weather Channel and the priests at the map show me the next wave--white swirls and eddies over Indiana, heading ominously east...
...apolitical. The weather in its mirabilis mode can, of course, be dragged onto the op-ed page to start a macro-argument about global warming or a micro-spat over a mayor's fecklessness in deploying snowplows. Otherwise, traumas of weather do not admit of political interpretation. The snow Shinto reintroduces an element of what is almost charmingly uncontrollable in life. And, as shown last week, surprising, even as the priests predict it. This is welcome--a kind of ideological relief--in a rather stupidly politicized society living under the delusion that everything in life (and death) is arguable, political...
...stands on the side of the common people, it has always been criticized and persecuted by the authorities. Its first president, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, a renowned educator, died in prison during World War II because he was against the militaristic Japanese government of that time, which used the state religion, Shinto, for the purpose of unifying Japan. The members of Soka Gakkai simply want to learn how to practice to be good Buddhists: to be kind, merciful and warm to the sick and poor, and not to yield to evil authority...
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 believed in the imperial cult, but for nearly two decades State 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...