Word: shintoism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Maebashi, a crumbling provincial capital near Tokyo, Handa spent just enough time at his little bicycle shop to keep his wife and two children in rice and modest clothes; the rest of his time he fribbled away in an aimless search for a milder spiritual refuge than the stern Shintoism of his ancestors...
Civil liberties were decreed-freedom -of press, speech, worship, assembly. Terroristic secret societies were ferreted out and abolished. The titles of the peerage were removed. Shintoism was dislodged as the state religion, although the people were permitted to practice it privately. The Emperor was reduced from the status of a god to a symbol of the state and of national unity. Streetcars passing the Imperial Palace no longer stopped so that the conductors could get out and bow. Young Prince Akihito might soon be asking his father what it had been like...
...Premier Hideki Tojo, still on trial as a war criminal, got a rather wistful new name, now that he had junked Shintoism for Buddhism. The name, to be chiseled on his tombstone: Eishoin Shakuji Komyoro Koji. Approximate English translation: "By Buddha's grace, all sins committed while living are absolved...
During the next ten years, the Maryknollers will concentrate hardest on Christianizing Japan. Because defeat discredited Buddhism and Shintoism, the Japanese are turning to Christianity, "the religion of the victors." But the Japanese have other reasons with which the Maryknoll missionaries sympathize and on which they intend to capitalize. Explained one of them last week: "The Japanese think now that the only real danger to their progress toward becoming a stable power is Communism, and they know that the Catholic Church is the implacable enemy of Communism...
...Allied order, Shintoism had been disclaimed as Japan's state religion. Hirohito now carried the process a revolutionary step farther. He threw overboard the whole fantastic doctrine that the Japanese people and their ruler are divine, and that they have a divine mission of world conquest. This doctrine, as zealously inculcated as Nazi ideas in Nazi Germany, had been the mainspring for half a century of Kamikaze fanaticism and grandiose visions...