THE MEIJI CONSTITUTIONAL REGIME AS A SECULARIST SYSTEM

If the "Shinto" of the proponents [of making Shinto the national religion] indicates the Great Divine Way [kannagara no daido], then it is neither a national religion [kokkyo] nor a popular religion [minkyo]. As long as one is a Japanese citizen, it [the Great Divine Way] is one's conviction, the object of one's respect, and the inexhaustible article of faith. However, what we must understand is that the Great Divine Way is not a religion. If it was a religion, because belief is free [under the constitution], then that article of faith and that respect [characteristic of the Great Divine Way] would be circumscribed. The general meaning of the Great Divine Way is different; it is the supreme directive to Japanese people. More than a supreme directive, it is the same as [being] "Japanese." From the moment we are born, it suffuses the bodies and spirits of us Japanese. In contrast to this, Sect Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity are religions. Because they are religions, according to the point established by the constitution, "Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief." Therefore the arguments for national and popular religions enter into the problem of constitutional revision, and should not be taken lightly.

Ando Masazumi (1942)

In an 1872 open letter penned in English and submitted to Japanese prime minister Sanjo Saneyoshi (1837–91), famed statesman Mori Arinori (1847–89) wrote the following:

Among many important human concerns, the one respecting our religious faith appears to be the most vital. In all the enlightened nations of the earth, the liberty of conscience, especially in matters of religious faith, is sacredly regarded as not only an inherent right of man, but also as a most fundamental element to advance all human interests.

It is a strange and grievous fact that we fail to find in the whole history of the long and glorious continuance of our intelligent race, a trace of the recognition in any form of this sacred right. It is even more remarkable, amid the wonderful progress we now behold, that our people are not as yet quite earnest and thorough in their consideration of this important subject.

Mori went on to propose that the Japanese government establish proper laws "by which all the proper rights of man shall be recognized and protected from violence," and that it establish an educational system "by which the whole condition of our people shall be so elevated that their moral strength will sufficiently protect their rights, even without the additional dry and unsatisfactory shield of the written law of the state."

The problem that Mori aimed to address was epistemological as much as it was legal. To think of religious freedom as a right that needed to be protected, one needed the modern concept of religion: exclusivist, private, belief-centric, a universal genus of which there were many competing species. To think of religious freedom as an "inherent right of man," one needed to think of rights as inalienable (even as one also thought of them as endangered). As Japan's first ambassador to the United States, Mori was keenly aware of these issues. He knew that solving some of Japan's most pressing diplomatic concerns, such as revising unequal treaties, hinged on them (hence the simultaneous publication of his missive in both English and Japanese).

By the time Japanese oligarchs promulgated the Meiji Constitution in the name of the emperor in February 1889, Mori and his colleague Ito Hirobumi (1841–1909) had successfully made the case that incorporating a provision for religious freedom in the national charter would definitively mark Japan as one of the few "civilized" nations of the world. But Mori was stabbed on the very day that the new constitution was promulgated, and he died the following day. The assassination of one of Japan's foremost champions of religious freedom at the hands of an ultranationalist who was purportedly enraged by Mori's alleged disrespectful comportment at the Ise Shrines could easily seem to presage the demise of religious freedom in Japan.

Indeed, although the Meiji Constitution incorporated a clause guaranteeing freedom of religious belief that was similar in wording and scope to the constitutions of many contemporaneous European constitutional monarchies, scholars writing in the postwar period have frequently suggested that the Japanese clause was inherently flawed. Some have argued that the architects of the Meiji state failed to understand "real" religious freedom and therefore unnecessarily circumscribed this crucial civil liberty through the language of civic duties. They also claim that the constitutional clause proved to be ineffective at protecting the rights of marginal groups such as Christians or members of the many religious confraternities, sects, and movements that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many have also argued that the small degree of religious freedom the constitution guaranteed was attenuated, and then wholly abandoned, in the years following its promulgation.

For example, the "clash of education and religion" debates that followed the Christian educator Uchimura Kanzo's (1861–1930) principled refusal to bow before the imperial portrait in 1891 revealed significant disagreements about how to balance the "duties of subjects" with the provision for religious liberty. Subsequent police crackdowns on marginal movements such as Renmonkyo (late 1890s) and Omotokyo (1921 and 1935) seemed to confirm that "real" religious liberty in Japan breathed its last breath along with its former champion Mori in 1889. When Japan lost the Pacific War and the Allied Occupation began, the occupiers in charge of religions policy repeatedly claimed that Japan had no genuine tradition of religious freedom. Japanese modernizers made similar claims in support of their own reformist projects. In these postwar accounts, Japanese religious freedom was born with Mori's 1872 missive and died with him the day after the Meiji Constitution was promulgated. Religious freedom, the story goes, only returned to life when the benevolent American occupiers swooped in to Japan at the close of the war, liberating Japan's citizens from their oppressive and theocratic government.

There are very good reasons to question this pat narrative, particularly because it clearly served the political purpose of justifying Occupation...