Word: shinto
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When the future emperor was ten years old, Emperor Meiji died and General Nogi dramatized the most important element in the boy's education-Shinto-by an act that startled the world and can scarcely have failed to impress the child...
When the aging General and his wife learned of Meiji's death, they purified themselves by Shinto rites. Then according to the old Shinto practice of junshi (servants following masters in death), they knelt before their household shrine and with ceremonial swords committed hara-kiri by eviscerating themselves. Later, Americans, shocked and baffled when trapped Japanese soldiers blew themselves to bits with hand grenades, or Japanese civilians drowned themselves rather than surrender, might recall General Nogi's act, with a shudder...
...greatest glory, that unquestioning obedience is his chief purpose in life, that the utter denial of the individual is his greatest peace-a spiritual totalitarianism more primeval and more potent than anything Naziism ever dreamed of. The Way of the Gods. For 1,300 years Shinto (The Way of the Gods) was challenged and eclipsed by Buddhism as the imperial dynasty was eclipsed by the shogunate. But in 1868 it became Japan's state religion, a cult of the dead based on ancestor worship, and resumed its interrupted task of molding the Japanese people for their divine mission...
With Meiktila gone, Mandalay had lost military importance, but the Japs fought last week as though it were a Shinto shrine. In 130-degree heat, in swirls of white dust, dashing, diminutive (5 ft. 4 in.) General Thomas Wynford Rees led his turbaned Punjabis into the city from the north. From the west came another Allied force. Mandalay's defenders were trapped...
Religion. Camp Susupe's makeshift Buddhist "temple" has a tin roof, no front wall, but its priest has all his trappings. Shinto (Emperor worship) poses more of a problem in religious freedom-thus far, U.S. authorities have made no attempt to stop Shintoism, but no facilities have been set up to encourage...