Word: shrine
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Methodist Bishop Yoshimune Abe let his words speak louder than silence. Bishop Abe, reported Harold Edward Fey in last week's Christian Century, regularly worships at the great imperial shrine of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami at Ise, the Mecca of Shintoism, declares that "every Japanese should go ... for it is a holy place." When Bishop Abe was raised to the episcopate last October, wrote Mr. Fey, "almost his first act was to visit a pagan shrine for worship...
...When I stand in front of the shrine at Ise, I feel differently from the way I feel at any other place," he reported Bishop Abe as saying. "I feel a great sense of peace, of inexpressible sacredness, of oneness with the Ancestor of my country [Amaterasu Omikami] and my own ancestors. I am moved with a feeling of holiness, of piety. My spirit worships, but this is not religion. It is respect, adoration...
State religion of Japan since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 has been Shintoism ("The Great Way of the Gods"), a native Japanese system of nature and ancestor worship. Shrine Shinto is worship of the Imperial ancestors. Since the invasion of Manchuria Japanese nationalists have emphasized its religio-patriotic importance...
Eight years ago, the Japanese Government demanded that Christian schools and some individual Christians take part in shrine ceremonies. Officially the Government tried to pass this off as a form of politeness to departed heroes, like D. A. R.-ism in the U. S. But Japanese don't fool themselves: Shrine Shinto is a religious rite. The Government pressed Japanese Catholics and Protestants to join "patriotic" ceremonies at Shinto shrines, has been as insistent about it as Red-fearing U. S. school boards are about saluting the flag...
...Korea Presbyterians have closed their schools rather than permit pupils to take part in Shrine Shinto. But elsewhere in the Japanese Empire both Catholics and Protestants, with the sanction of their home mission boards, have paid obeisance at the shrines-thereby, according to many strict believers, taking the first step in apostasy. Early Christians chose martyrdom rather than do the same thing; make a token obeisance to the deified emperor of Rome...