Shinto

A religion with no founder, no universal dogma, no canon

The Encyclopædia Britannica presents Shinto as Japan's indigenous religion: no founder, no official scripture in the sense of the Scriptures, no fixed dogma (translation from the English; original in the note)^[11]. This particularity distinguishes Shinto from Christianity (founded by Jesus Christ, sealed by the Gospels, codified in the Councils), from Islam (founded by Muhammad, codified by the Qur'an), from Buddhism (founded by Siddhārtha Gautama, codified by the Pāli Canon), from Confucianism (founded by Confucius). Shinto has no one to confess as founder, no text to confess as infallible, no profession of faith to recite on Sundays.

This does not mean it is without doctrinal content — it has a cosmology, a pantheon, an ethic of purity, a dense ritual orthopraxy, that is, a religion of the right gesture to perform rather than of the creed to profess. But these contents do not bind the conscience as a revealed truth: they are inherited as a culture of the sacred, transmitted by the family, the village community, the local shrine. A Japanese person may take part in the Shinto rites of birth, marriage and the New Year, and in the Buddhist rites of funerals, without any perceived contradiction. Britannica observes that many Japanese declare they have no religion, while taking part in Shinto festivals, Buddhist funerals and Christian weddings (paraphrase; the exact English text was not collated here)^[12]. The greatest exegete of this tradition, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), summed up this universal openness: any being of extraordinary excellence, inspiring a fear mingled with respect, may receive the name of kami (paraphrase from Itō; passage and original in the note)^[13] — including humans, animals, mountains and seas, the noble and the base, the good and the bad. Shinto sacredness is thus more archaic, more morally indifferent, than biblical sacredness.

"Shintō": a late word, forged by contrast

The word Shintō itself is late. It combines two Chinese characters: 神 (shin / kami, "deity") and 道 (tō / michi, "way"). The oldest surviving attestation appears in the Nihon shoki, completed in 720, where the term serves to distinguish the native worship of the kami from the new religion from the continent. Scholars at Tokyo's Kokugakuin Institute — the world academic centre for Shinto studies — observe that the native worship received a proper name only because of Buddhism, to distinguish itself from it^[14]. Before the 6th century, the worship of the kami was not conceived as a religion in the Western sense, but as a body of self-evident usages, integrated into the political life of Yamato.

This "contrastive" origin of the word explains a methodological difficulty: one must resist the Christian projection of categories such as founder, creed, Church, salvation, sin. Shinto does not think in these categories. It thinks in terms of purity (kiyome) as opposed to ritual impurity (kegare), of kami who visit a shrine if they are correctly summoned there, of matsuri (festivals) which punctuate the relationship between the human community and the powers beyond it^[15].

The many faces of Shinto

Britannica distinguishes, following the historian Hirai Naofusa, several strata:

• Jinja shintō (shrine Shinto) — the oldest and most visible form: rites of a local shrine, popular devotion, community festivals.
• Minzoku shintō (popular Shinto) — domestic practices, the family altar (kamidana), amulets, ordinary popular beliefs and practices.
• Kyōha shintō (sectarian Shinto) — a group of thirteen new denominations recognised by the Meiji government between 1882 and 1908, with their own founders, doctrines and scriptures: Tenrikyō, Konkōkyō, Kurozumikyō, etc.^[16].
• Kōshitsu shintō (imperial Shinto) — the rites performed by the emperor himself, especially at the Ise Shrine.
• Kokka shintō (State Shinto) — the ideological construction put in place from 1868 to 1945 to ground imperial authority and national cohesion.

This internal plurality explains why contradictory statements about Shinto can all be true: it is diffuse and organised, popular and imperial, tolerant and nationalist, peaceful and warlike, depending on the stratum considered.

A few orders of magnitude help grasp the scale of the phenomenon:

These figures correct two symmetrical misunderstandings. On the one hand, Shinto is not an active religion in the sense Christianity is: the great majority of Japanese declare no personal religious faith. On the other, it is not a folkloric survival either: some 80,000 shrines and some 20,000 priests — the same priest being able to serve several shrines — attest to a living ritual infrastructure, attended occasionally by a large share of the population^[25].

Motoori Norinaga's classic definition

The concept of kami (神) is the centre of Shinto. Rendering it as "god", "deity", "spirit" or "genius" is everywhere unsatisfactory: the kami is neither the monotheistic absolute nor the mere animist spirit. The most quoted definition is that of the great exegete Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), pillar of the kokugaku movement ("national studies") and author of a monumental commentary on the Kojiki (Kojikiden, in 44 volumes, completed in 1798):

Norinaga explains there that the name of kami is given to whatever strikes by an extraordinary excellence and inspires a sacred awe: the deities of heaven and earth of the classics, the spirits honoured in shrines, but also humans, animals, trees, seas and mountains^[26]. The English summary above is a paraphrase from Itō's presentation (Kojikiden, part 3, II), not a verbatim collated against a Japanese edition of the Kojikiden.

Three traits stand out: partial transcendence — partial only: the kami exceeds the ordinary without being the transcendent, creator God of Christians; it remains immanent to the world —, sacred awe (a mixture of respect, admiration and unease before what exceeds us), and universal diffusion (humans, animals, plants, landscapes can all be kami). Norinaga adds, and this point is crucial for Christian discernment, that the kami include the noble and the base, the strong and the weak, the good and the bad (translation of Itō's English summary; original in the note)^[27]. There is, in classical Shinto thought, no strict moral separation between beneficent kami and demons: Shinto sacredness is more archaic, more morally indifferent, than biblical sacredness.

"Eight million kami"

Tradition speaks of the yaoyorozu no kami (八百万の神), literally the "eight million kami" — where the figure has no arithmetical value but means "an uncountable multitude". The Engi-shiki, the ritual code completed in 927, more precisely lists 3,132 officially recognised kami in 2,861 imperial or national shrines^[28]. Geography itself becomes the receptacle of this multitude: every mountain, every spring, every clearing, every remarkable rock may house a kami, honoured with a braided straw cord (shimenawa) marking the sacred space.

Amaterasu and the pantheon

At the summit of this multitude reigns Amaterasu Ōmikami (天照大御神), "the great goddess who illuminates heaven", goddess of the sun and mythical ancestress of the Japanese imperial line^[29]. The Kojiki tells how she is born from the left eye of the primordial god Izanagi as he purifies himself after his stay in the underworld. Her brother Tsukuyomi, god of the moon, is born from the right eye; Susano-o, god of storms, is born from his nose^[30].

The Kojiki thus tells how Amaterasu is born from the left eye of Izanagi purifying himself on his return from the underworld, Tsukuyomi from the right eye and the impetuous Susano-o from the nose^[31]. The English summary above is a paraphrase from Britannica's synthesis, not a text collated against a specific edition of the Kojiki.

The shrine of Ise, dedicated to Amaterasu, remains the symbolic centre of Shinto. Rebuilt identically every twenty years since the 7th century (the Shikinen Sengū ceremony, whose first documented transfer dates to 690, under Empress Jitō), it embodies the ritual continuity of the nation. It is there that the emperor, in his priestly function, reports to his divine ancestress the great events of his reign.

Three great families of kami

Scholars traditionally distinguish:

• The amatsukami — kami of Heaven, celestial deities linked to the heavens and the origin myth (Amaterasu, Takamimusubi, Ame-no-Minakanushi).
• The kunitsukami — kami of the soil, genii of mountains, rivers, crops, particular places.
• The hitogami or ujigami — "person-kami" or "clan kami": divinised ancestors, historical heroes, local founders. Emperors themselves become kami after their death; certain samurai, certain military leaders, certain politicians have been divinised. Yasukuni, the controversial Tokyo shrine, thus houses the kami of 2,466,000 who died for the emperor since 1868 — deaths in conflicts from the Boshin War (1868–1869) onwards, registered in this shrine founded in 1869^[32].

This structuring — already attested in the Kojiki and systematised by medieval commentators — shows that Shinto is not a mere diffuse pantheism. There is an order, a hierarchy, lineages, cosmic functions. But there is also an indefinite openness of the pantheon: a human being, an exceptional animal, a mountain, a ritual object may cross the boundary into kami.

The Kojiki (712): founding mythical narrative

The Kojiki (古事記, "Chronicle of Ancient Things") is the oldest preserved Japanese text. Compiled by the official Ō no Yasumaro in 712, at the order of Empress Genmei, it combines three books: the first contains the origin myths (creation of the world, birth of the kami, genealogy of Amaterasu); the second narrates the reigns of the first emperors down to Emperor Ōjin; the third continues this imperial chronicle down to Empress Suiko (628)^[33].

The Kojiki is not a Holy Scripture in the biblical sense. It was not received as "inspired" by a religious authority, it was not the object of conciliar canonisation, its text was not defined by equivalent patristic commentaries. It is rather the Japanese equivalent of the chronicles of Greco-Roman antiquity: a mythological narrative in the service of dynastic legitimacy. Its rereading as a founding religious text is essentially the work of the kokugaku in the 18th century, and above all of State Shinto in the 19th–20th century.

The Nihon shoki (720)

Completed eight years later, in 720, under the direction of Prince Toneri, the Nihon shoki (日本書紀, "Chronicles of Japan") takes up the same material but in a more official Chinese format: thirty volumes, annalistic structure, multiple versions of the same myths presented in parallel. Where the Kojiki is "a mythical narrative meant to legitimise the reigning family", the Nihon shoki is "more a Chinese-style history for official use"^[34].

The Engi-shiki (927)

The Engi-shiki (延喜式, "Procedures of the Engi Era") is of a very different nature. It is a ritual and administrative code in fifty volumes, commissioned in 905 by Emperor Daigo, begun by Fujiwara no Tokihira and completed in 927 by his brother Fujiwara no Tadahira. The first ten volumes, devoted to the affairs of the Department of Divinities (Jingikan), are a mine for the historian of Shinto: they detail the court rites, the prayer formulas (norito), and above all list, in the Jinmyōchō register (books IX–X), 2,861 official shrines housing 3,132 kami, ranked by prestige^[35]. Not to be confused with the Jingiryō (神祇令), which belongs to the Taihō (701) and Yōrō (718) administrative codes.

These listed shrines become the shikinaisha ("shrines of the Engi-shiki"); those absent from it are the shikigesha ("outside the Engi-shiki"). The distinction is still operative in contemporary Shinto: belonging to the 927 list confers a particular dignity.

The shrine (jinja): architecture of the sacred

The Shinto shrine — the jinja — is the basic unit of worship. Its structure follows a stable grammar:

• The torii (鳥居) — vermilion or light-wood portal, marking the boundary between profane and sacred space;
• The sandō — the processional path leading to the shrine;
• The temizuya — the purification pavilion where visitors wash their hands and mouth;
• The haiden — the oratory pavilion, where the faithful leave offerings and prayers;
• The honden — the main pavilion, housing the shintai ("body of the kami"): a material object (sword, mirror, stone) deemed to be the kami's residence. The honden remains closed to the public; only the priest enters it.

Scholars at the Kokugakuin Institute distinguish two states here: in ancient practice, the kami is invited temporarily to the shrine by the rites, and may be absent from it if the rite is neglected or defiled; with the development of permanent shrines, the kami's residence at the shrine, in the shintai of the honden, becomes lasting instead^[36]. The kami is therefore not present at the shrine in the same sense as the Eucharistic presence dwells in the Catholic tabernacle: its presence remains tied to the correct ritual summons.

The torii and sacred space

The torii — literally "bird perch" — is probably the most immediately recognisable symbol of Shinto in the world. Its function is purely liminal: it marks the crossing of a threshold. At Itsukushima, in the Inland Sea, the great floating torii, repainted vermilion since the 12th century, has become a world tourist icon; at Fushimi Inari Taisha, near Kyoto, more than ten thousand vermilion torii arranged in a tunnel mark the climb to the summit of Mount Inari.

These torii are themselves votive offerings: a torii may be given by a private person, a company or a guild in thanks for a grace received or to secure the favour of the kami. The relationship to the sacred is very concrete here, following a votive logic of gift: one gives to the kami to obtain prosperity, health, success in examinations, fertility — humble and clear means of a religion which promises not eternal salvation but well-being here below.

Purity (kiyome) and ritual impurity (kegare)

At the heart of Shinto lies the opposition between purity (kiyome, 清め) and ritual impurity (kegare, 穢れ). This duality is not moral in the Christian sense: kegare does not denote sin, but a ritual defilement caused by contact with death, blood, disease, misfortune, certain foods, certain activities. The distinction is fundamental: "unlike wrongful deeds or 'sins' in other world religions, the concepts of purity (kiyome) and impurity (kegare) are temporary and changeable in Shinto"^[37].

To restore purity, recourse is had to the rites of harae (祓) or misogi (禊). Harae is the general purification: the priest waves above the faithful a great wand of pleated white paper (ōnusa), recites a formula, and the defilement is carried away. Misogi is more demanding: it consists in standing under a cold waterfall while reciting the formula "harai tamae kiyome tamae rokkon shōjō" ("purify us, wash us, may the six elements be pure")^[38]. This practice has survived: it is still performed today, particularly at the Atsuta Shrine and around Mount Fuji.

For the Christian theologian, this opposition between purity and impurity recalls the Levitical legislation of the Old Testament — the distinction of pure and impure — but without the moral threshold introduced by the prophets and completed by Christ. Jesus declares: "It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man" (Mt 15:11). Christian ethics refers to the heart, to intention, to freedom. Shinto ethics remains for the most part an ethic of the well-performed rite.

Matsuri: the community in celebration

Each shrine annually celebrates one or more matsuri (祭) — liturgical festivals which are also civic festivals. The mikoshi (palanquin carrying the kami) is borne in procession through the village; saké, rice, dried fish are offered; there is archery, wrestling, dancing. These festivals structure the rural and urban year, and weld the community around the local shrine. They show that Shinto is less an individual religion than a community religion, rooted in village and town.

Daily practices

At the individual level, Shinto takes the form of simple gestures: drawing an omikuji (paper oracle) at the shrine to learn one's luck; tying an ema (wooden votive tablet) to the rack provided to convey a wish to the kami; buying an omamori (amulet) to protect one's family, ease an examination, prevent a car accident; visiting the shrine for the rites of passage (omiyamairi at one month, Shichi-go-san at three, five and seven years, Seijin no Hi for coming of age). These gestures require no doctrinal adherence: they simply weave a ritual bond with the kami of the place and the moment.

An archaic pre-Buddhist foundation

According to the chronological framework of conventional archaeology, the native cults of the archipelago are far older than any writing. For the Jōmon period (c. 14,000–300 BC in this model), excavations have uncovered ceramic deposits and anthropomorphic figurines (dogū) near springs, in caves or on summits: material discoveries which archaeologists interpret — with varying degrees of certainty — as evidence of fertility or healing rites. The Yayoi period (c. 300 BC–AD 250 in the same model) sees the introduction of irrigated rice cultivation, accompanied by agrarian rites which would remain at the heart of Shinto; the idea that each rice plant carries a spirit (tama) solicited by the farmer belongs to ethnographic reconstruction, not to excavated proof^[39]. It is from these centuries that archaeology identifies the first structures interpreted as built places of worship. The kofun (monumental funerary tumuli, 4th–6th century) then attest to a Yamato kingship which politically organises worship around Amaterasu and prepares the dynastic legitimacy that the 712 Kojiki would codify^[40].

The great syncretism with Buddhism (6th–19th century)

The structuring event of Japanese religious history is the arrival of Buddhism, officially introduced in the mid-6th century — in 538 according to the Gangōji engi, in 552 according to the Nihon shoki, two debated dates — by an embassy from the Korean kingdom of Paekche. The encounter takes the form of successive stages, which Kokugakuin scholars distinguish: first the kami are honoured as protectors of Buddhism, then Buddhist rites are celebrated for their deliverance, and finally — from the Heian period onwards — each kami is identified as the local manifestation of an original buddha^[41]. It is this hybrid regime, shinbutsu-shūgō (神仏習合, "fusion of kami and buddhas"), which takes hold durably. Concretely:

• Buddhist temples (jingū-ji) are built inside Shinto shrines;
• Buddhist monks (shasō) officiate for the kami;
• The honji suijaku theory (本地垂迹) makes the fusion explicit: each kami is in reality the "trace" (suijaku) of an original buddha (honji). Amaterasu is thus identified with Mahāvairocana, the cosmic Buddha^[42].

This regime of coexistence lasts more than a thousand years. It explains why Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples often look alike, why rites overlap, why a Japanese person can still today marry Shinto, pray Buddhist and celebrate Christmas as a cultural festival. This plasticity is typical of the Japanese relationship to religion: not confessional adherence to a single truth, but ritual adjustment to different domains of life.

Kokugaku and the "purification" of Shinto (17th–18th century)

From the 17th century, an intellectual movement — kokugaku (国学, "national studies") — undertakes to strip Shinto of its Buddhist and Confucian sedimentations to recover an original Japanese "essence". The great kokugaku scholars — Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736), Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769), above all Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), then Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) — undertake massive philological work on the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki. Motoori Norinaga's Kojikiden, completed in 1798 after more than thirty years of work, remains the matrix of modern Shinto thought^[43].

This "purification" is also political: it aims to restore centrality to the emperor, descendant of Amaterasu, and to found Japan no longer on the Confucian ethic of duty or on the Buddhist cosmology of illusion, but on the "original Japanese way". It is this that would make the Meiji Restoration possible a century later.

The Meiji Restoration and shinbutsu bunri (1868)

In January 1868, the Meiji Restoration puts an end to more than six centuries of shogunal government and restores the direct authority of the emperor. As early as March 1868, the new government promulgates shinbutsu bunri (神仏判然令, "order of separation of kami and buddhas"): Buddhist monks are driven from Shinto shrines, Buddhist statues removed from them, mixed shrine-temples dismantled^[44]. This administrative measure almost immediately triggers a wave of anti-Buddhist violence of surprising scale: haibutsu kishaku (廃仏毀釈, "abolish the Buddha, destroy Shākyamuni"). Thousands of temples are closed, statues mutilated, libraries pillaged, monks forced into lay life. "Thousands of temples were closed, their lands confiscated, their monks forced to return to lay life or to become Shinto priests, and many Buddhist books, statues and other artefacts destroyed"^[45].

The movement subsides from 1873, but the institutional separation of the two religions is definitively settled. For the first time since the 6th century, Shinto presents itself as an autonomous religion.

State Shinto (1868–1945)

On this basis, the Meiji government builds kokka shintō (国家神道, "State Shinto") — the ideological cornerstone of modern imperial Japan. Its main traits^[46]:

• Hierarchical reorganisation of shrines: imperial shrines (kanpeisha) at the top, then national shrines (kokuheisha), down to local shrines — a modern system not to be confused with the classical register of the Engi-shiki (927), which counts 2,861 official shrines (shikinaisha): the rank of kanpei taisha belongs to the Meiji system, not to the 927 register^[47].
• Bureau of Shrines (Jingi-in) placed under the direct authority of the government.
• Imperial Rescript on Education (1890): Japanese schoolchildren must honour the emperor, presented as sprung from an unbroken divine lineage — paraphrased summary, the exact text of the rescript not being collated here against its edition.
• Yasukuni: shrine founded in 1869 as Tōkyō Shōkonsha, renamed Yasukuni-jinja in 1879, where all soldiers who died for the emperor are divinised — first the Meiji loyalists, then the dead of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the First World War, the invasions of Manchuria and China, and finally the Pacific War.
• Official doctrine: "visits to shrines are of a purely civic character", do not constitute religious worship, and are therefore compatible with any other personal religion.

This last thesis — "the rite is civil, not religious" — is precisely the one that would be central to the Catholic debates of the 1930s. It allowed the government to impose emperor worship on all schoolchildren, including Christians, without appearing to do so.

The dismantling (1945–1946)

The defeat of 1945 brutally ends State Shinto. On 15 December 1945, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Asia, General MacArthur, promulgates directive SCAPIN-448, officially entitled "Abolition of Governmental Sponsorship, Support, Perpetuation, Control, and Dissemination of State Shinto"^[48]. The text is unambiguous: all public funding, all school teaching of Shinto, all official participation of civil servants in shrine rites are forbidden.

A few weeks later, on 1 January 1946, Emperor Hirohito pronounces the Ningen-sengen rescript ("Declaration of Humanity"), an explicit renunciation of the imperial divinity which grounds State Shinto:

"The ties between Us and Our people have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine, and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the world." — Emperor Hirohito, Ningen-sengen rescript, Kanpō (Official Journal of Japan), 1 January 1946 — the article's English rendering from Dower's English^[49]

State Shinto is dead; Shinto becomes again a private religion, organised from 1946 in the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honchō)^[50].

The encounter of Christianity and Japan is one of the most dramatic chapters of missionary history. It begins in enthusiasm, sinks into blood, continues in the silence of the Kakure Kirishitan, and culminates in a series of beatifications and canonisations whose memory remains one of the most striking in the history of mission in Asia.

Saint Francis Xavier lands at Kagoshima (15 August 1549)

It is on 15 August 1549, the feast of the Assumption, that the Jesuit Francis Xavier lands on the beach at Kagoshima, accompanied by Father Cosme de Torres and Brother Juan Fernández — a Jesuit brother, not a priest —, as well as three Japanese converted at Goa^[51]. He comes from an incredible voyage: Lisbon in 1541, Goa in 1542, the Moluccas in 1546, Malacca in 1547 — and it is there, at Malacca, that he meets Anjirō (Yajirō), a fugitive Japanese who tells him of his archipelago. Xavier decides at once to go there.

Xavier writes from Kagoshima, on 5 November 1549, his admiration for the Japanese: a docile, sociable people, eager for knowledge, attached to honour — the best, in his eyes, of all the newly encountered peoples^[52].

For two years and three months, Xavier preaches through Anjirō — his Japanese remains rudimentary: he first designates God as Dainichi, a source of confusion with Shingon Buddhism, before adopting Deusu^[53] —, debates with the Zen and Tendai bonzes, and opens the way for the conversions of Kyūshū daimyō which his successors would reap after his departure in 1551: Ōmura Sumitada, baptised in 1563 by Cosme de Torres, twelve years after Xavier left the archipelago. Xavier leaves to prepare a mission to China; he dies in December 1552 on the island of Shangchuan, within sight of the Chinese coast, without having been able to enter it.

The "Christian century" (1549–1639)

After Xavier's departure, evangelisation continues, carried by the Jesuits (then Franciscans and Dominicans after 1593). Success is rapid: conversions of daimyō in Kyūshū (Ōmura Sumitada in 1563, Arima Yoshisada, Ōtomo Sōrin), foundation of Nagasaki as a Christian port in 1571, embassy of the Christian daimyō to Rome in 1582–1590 (the four young envoys are received by Gregory XIII and Sixtus V), construction of Japanese seminaries. Around 1614, Japanese Christendom counts some 300,000 faithful, while the total population of Japan is estimated at 18 million; it is, proportionally, one of the fastest Christian expansions outside Europe^[54].

Hideyoshi's edict (1587) and the 26 martyrs of Nagasaki (5 February 1597)

This growth causes alarm. In 1587, the regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi promulgates a first edict expelling missionaries (Bateren tsuihōrei), accusing the missionaries of "corrupting the popular classes" and of serving as the vanguard of a European conquest. The edict is loosely applied for ten years. In 1596, the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Felipe on the coast of Tosa, and the clumsy words of its pilot about Madrid's colonial ambitions, trigger the reaction.

On 5 February 1597, on the hill of Nishizaka overlooking the port of Nagasaki, twenty-six Christians — four Spaniards, one Mexican, one Portuguese from the Indies, all Franciscans; three Japanese of the Society of Jesus, including Brother Paul Miki, a scholastic not yet a priest; and seventeen Japanese laypeople of the Third Order of Saint Francis, including three young boys, whose exact ages, given differently according to the accounts, are not stated here as figures — are crucified simultaneously, then pierced with lances^[55]. They had been arrested at Kyoto and Osaka in January, had an earlobe cut off as a mark of infamy, then were made to walk more than 900 kilometres on foot to Nagasaki, in the depths of winter.

From atop his cross, Paul Miki declares, according to the Jesuit chroniclers, that he dies for having taught the law of Christ, that he forgives the emperor and his executioners, and that he invites them to receive baptism^[56].

The 26 martyrs are beatified by Urban VIII in 1627 and canonised by Pius IX on 8 June 1862. Their feast is celebrated on 6 February in the Roman calendar. The Nishizaka shrine, at Nagasaki, has housed since 1962^[57] the museum and monument of the 26 martyrs, before which Pope Francis prayed on 24 November 2019^[58].

The Tokugawa Hidetada edict (1614) and generalised martyrdom

In 1614, after a few years of calm, the shōgun Tokugawa Hidetada (2nd shōgun, in office since 1605) promulgates the edict of total expulsion of Christianity — which his successor Tokugawa Iemitsu (shōgun from 1623) would then apply with growing rigour. Missionaries are driven from the country, the faithful ordered to apostatise, the kirishitan (Christians) who refuse are executed by crucifixion, burning, drowning, or by the "pits" (ana-tsurushi) — the torment of suspension head-down in a hole filled with excrement, which could last for days. The Japanese martyrology of the years 1614–1639 counts several thousand victims; 188 of them were beatified as a group by Benedict XVI on 24 November 2008 at Nagasaki, under the name "Petrus Kibe Kasui and his 187 companions"^[59]. Sixteen others — including the first Filipino saint, Lorenzo Ruiz of Manila, a layman in the service of the Dominicans, tortured at Nagasaki in September 1637 — were canonised by Saint John Paul II on 18 October 1987^[60].

Justo Takayama Ukon: the martyred daimyō (d. 1615, beatified 2017)

Among the figures of the first wave of persecutions, Justo Takayama Ukon (1552–1615) deserves particular attention. Converted as a child by his father around 1563, daimyō of Takatsuki then of Akashi, he is one of the most influential Christian lords of the second half of the 16th century. His exceptional faith earns him the friendship of Father Luís Fróis and the esteem of the Jesuit visitor Alessandro Valignano. On several occasions, the authorities offer to let him keep his domains if he apostatises; each time, he refuses and hands back his sword^[61].

In 1587, Hideyoshi's edict obliges him to abandon his fiefs. In 1614, under the expulsion edict promulgated in the name of the shōgun Tokugawa Hidetada at the instigation of his father Ieyasu — retired under the title of ōgosho but still the real master of power —, Takayama Ukon is definitively banished from Japan with some 300 other Japanese Christians^[62]. Takayama Ukon goes into exile in the Philippines at the age of sixty-two. He lands at Manila, welcomed by the population and the Spanish authorities; exhausted by the crossing, he dies a few weeks after his arrival, in the night of 3–4 February 1615 (3 February on the Japanese calendar). Without having undergone physical execution, he gave up everything rather than betray his faith: his fiefs, his native country, his possessions.

He is beatified on 7 February 2017 at Osaka-jō Hall, Osaka, in a ceremony presided over by Cardinal Angelo Amato in the name of Pope Francis, before a large crowd — a Japanese Christian daimyō raised to the altars, recognised as a martyr in hatred of the faith (in odium fidei). His liturgical memorial is celebrated on 3 February (Japanese calendar).

The Shimabara revolt (1637–1638) and the sakoku

The year 1637 sees the drama culminate in the Shimabara revolt: led by the young Amakusa Shirō, presented as a new Christian messiah, some 37,000 peasants, mostly Catholics, rise against Lord Matsukura Katsuie, crushed by taxes and religious persecution. They entrench themselves in Hara fortress, in the south of the Shimabara peninsula. The shogunate mobilises more than 125,000 soldiers and even obtains the help of a Dutch East India Company ship to bombard the fortress. When Hara falls in April 1638, the thirty-seven thousand participants — including women and children — are, according to the sources, massacred by the shōgun's forces^[63].

The repression of Shimabara leads to the locking of Japan. In 1639, the shogunate imposes sakoku (鎖国, "closed country"): no one may enter or leave Japan, the Portuguese are expelled. The Dutch, transferred to the artificial islet of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour in 1641, keep a strictly controlled trading post, and Chinese trade continues too: the restriction targets relations with Catholic Europe, not the whole of external trade. For more than two centuries, Japan is officially closed to any Catholic presence.

The Kakure Kirishitan: two hundred and fifty years of hidden faith

What then happens is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of Christian history: the clandestine survival of Christian communities with no resident priest — thus deprived of the sacraments requiring his ministry, except baptism handed down from generation to generation —, with no accessible Scriptures and no contact with Rome, for more than two centuries. The Kakure Kirishitan (隠れキリシタン, "hidden Christians"), gathered mainly around Nagasaki, Urakami, Gotō and Hirado, secretly transmit baptism and certain prayers (orashio, a phonetic deformation of oratio) from generation to generation^[64].

To escape detection — each family was obliged annually to trample an image of Christ or the Virgin (fumi-e) to prove it was not Christian —, they conceal their devotions under a Buddhist appearance: statues of the Virgin disguised as Kannon (the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, called "Maria-Kannon"); rosaries hidden in Buddhist altars; Latin prayers transmitted phonetically, whose understanding varied between communities. All this, without knowing whether other Christians still survived anywhere else in the world.

17 March 1865: the "Urakami discovery"

On 17 March 1865, an astonishing event takes place at Nagasaki. The previous year, Father Bernard Petitjean, a missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, had completed in 1864 the building of the little Ōura church, dedicated to the 26 martyrs^[65]. That day, around noon, some fifteen villagers from the hamlet of Urakami furtively enter the church. According to the account preserved by the MEP, they first tell the priest that their hearts are with him, then question him on the common faith and on the Virgin Mary, honoured as Maria-sama^[66]. Petitjean understands, overwhelmed, that he has just found the descendants of the 16th-century Christians. In the following months, thousands of Kakure Kirishitan progressively emerge from hiding. But persecution resumes: from 1867, the Christians of Urakami suffer arrests and deportations, from which many would never return^[67].

Only in 1873 does the Meiji government lift the anti-Catholic edicts, under international pressure. For the first time since 1614, the public practice of Christianity becomes legal again in Japan — the exact legal detail of this lifting remaining to be precisely documented.

Yasukuni: a State shrine, two million military kami

Founded in 1869 as Tōkyō Shōkonsha and renamed Yasukuni-jinja ("shrine of the pacified nation") in 1879, Yasukuni is no ordinary shrine. It divinises the dead of the Imperial Japanese Army, transformed into eirei ("heroic souls") by an explicit religious rite, the shōkonsai. In total, 2,466,000 eirei are registered there: those who died in Japan's service since the Boshin War (1868–1869). Among them, 1,068 Japanese military leaders condemned as war criminals by the Allied tribunals after 1945, including 14 "Class-A war criminals" — those responsible for crimes against peace — secretly enshrined in 1978^[68].

This explicit religious character of Yasukuni matters: a soldier who died for the emperor is not merely honoured; he becomes kami. Yet according to Shinto theology, the kami is then invoked by the living. Yasukuni is therefore not a secular memorial — it is a place of worship of dead servicemen, including those who committed crimes of mass murder.

The Sophia University incident (May 1932)

This ambivalence crystallises in 1932 in an event that would overturn the Catholic position. In May 1932, the military attaché of Sophia University — the Jesuit university of Tokyo founded in 1913 by the German Jesuits on the mandate of Pope Pius X — leads a group of students to Yasukuni and orders them to salute the dead ritually. Two Catholic students — two or three according to the accounts — refuse, on the grounds that this homage constitutes an act of worship incompatible with their faith. The incident, played up by the Yomiuri newspaper, becomes a national scandal: the university is accused of anti-patriotism, there is talk of closing it, the army withdraws its attaché from the institution^[69].

The Archbishop of Tokyo, Jean-Baptiste Chambon, of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, consults his Japanese confreres: the Japanese authorities then maintain that the rites performed in shrines have only civic value^[70]. The immediate crisis is defused.

The Pluries Instanterque instruction (26 May 1936)

But the doctrinal question remains open. Rome must decide: are the Yasukuni rites religious rites, hence incompatible with the Catholic faith, or civil rites, hence tolerable? After four years of consultations with the Japanese episcopate and the Society of the Divine Word (which works in Japan), the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), then led by Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni-Biondi, publishes on 26 May 1936 the instruction Pluries Instanterque^[71].

The text retains the reading proposed by the Japanese episcopate and admitted by the imperial government: insofar as the civil authority itself recognises in these ceremonies a merely civil value — honouring the fatherland, ancestors and meritorious men of the nation — and not a religious character, Catholics may attend them and behave there as other citizens do, making their Catholic intention explicit if necessary^[72]. The distinction is fragile but workable: the rites are received as civil by declaration of the State; so the Church accepts this qualification. The English summary above is a paraphrase of the mechanism of the instruction, whose Latin text remains to be collated against the Acta edition.

This decision has been the object of lively historiographical debate. The historian John Breen analyses it as a concession extracted by the pressure of the militarist Japanese State; others see in it a legitimate application of the principle distinguishing religious from civil acts, already mobilised in the Chinese rites controversy of the 17th–18th centuries^[73]. Be that as it may, Pluries Instanterque allowed Japanese Catholic schoolchildren and civil servants to avoid persecution, and probably saved Sophia University. After the war, the stages must be distinguished: the Allied directive of 15 December 1945 abolishes public patronage of State Shinto, and shrines become private religious institutions; from then on, the 1936 civil qualification no longer holds automatically. For the contemporary assessment, the article relies on the Japanese bishops' declaration of 21 February 2007, the latest state of the episcopal position reported by Breen^[74].

Nostra aetate (28 October 1965)

The great conciliar text that changes the situation is the declaration Nostra aetate, "On the Church's attitude to non-Christian religions", promulgated by Paul VI on 28 October 1965 at the close of the Second Vatican Council. Although the text explicitly mentions Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism, Shinto does not appear in it by name — it falls under the "other religions found in the world" mentioned in paragraph 2. But the application of the general principle is immediate:

"The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ 'the way, the truth, and the life' (Jn 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of the religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself." — Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate, §2, 28 October 1965^[75]

The twofold movement of Nostra aetate — sincere esteem for non-Christian religious traditions and uninterrupted proclamation of Christ as the unique mediator of salvation — applies perfectly to Shinto. The Church may admire the sense of purity, respect for nature, piety towards ancestors, the aesthetic quality of Japanese rites. She can neither worship the kami, nor recognise a divine dignity in Amaterasu, nor accept the identification of the sacred with natural powers.

John Paul II to the representatives of Buddhism and Shinto (20 February 1980)

It is precisely this balance that Saint John Paul II implements on 20 February 1980, at the Vatican, when he receives in audience the representatives of the principal Japanese Buddhist and Shinto confessions and addresses to them a carefully weighed discourse:

"The Catholic Church expresses her esteem for your religions and for your high spiritual values, such as purity, detachment of heart, love for the beauty of nature, as well as benevolence and compassion for all that lives. […] We are all, on this earth, pilgrims towards the Absolute and the Eternal, who alone can save and satisfy the heart of the human person." — Saint John Paul II, audience with the representatives of Japanese Buddhism and Shinto, Rome, 20 February 1980^[76]

The expression "pilgrims towards the Absolute and the Eternal" is characteristic: John Paul II refuses both syncretism (all religions would be equally true) and contempt (non-Christian religions would have nothing to offer). He situates Buddhism and Shinto as journeys towards God, which become fullness only in Jesus Christ, but which are not unrelated to grace.

Pope Francis at Nagasaki (24 November 2019)

Thirty-nine years later, on 24 November 2019, Pope Francis goes on pilgrimage to Nishizaka hill, before the monument of the 26 martyrs. In the rain, he pays tribute not only to Paul Miki and his companions of 1597, but to all those persecuted for their faith in Christ through the centuries^[77]. There he launches a solemn appeal to guarantee religious freedom everywhere in the world. In the afternoon, he celebrates Mass at Nagasaki before a large crowd — the exact number of participants not being established here.

Three radical dividing lines

Beyond tributes and esteem, three central doctrinal differences separate Christianity and Shinto:

Polytheism and creatureliness

The gravest distinction concerns the relationship between the divine and creation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church recalls in §198 that "our profession of faith begins with God, for God is the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End of everything; the Creed begins with God the Father, for the Father is the First divine Person of the Most Holy Trinity". To worship a particular kami — a mountain, an ancestor, a hero — as if it shared in divinity itself, is to render to the creature what belongs to the Creator alone. This is precisely what biblical Revelation forbids as idolatry: "You shall not make for yourself any graven image […] you shall not bow down to them" (Ex 20:4–5).

Saint Paul, at Athens, before the altar "to the unknown god", articulates this discernment positively:

"The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made by human hands. […] It is he who gives to all life and breath and all things. […] For in him we live and move and have our being, as some of your poets have said: 'We too are his offspring.'" — Saint Paul, discourse at the Areopagus of Athens, Acts of the Apostles 17:24–28^[79]

There is in the religious quest of peoples — including in the Japanese sense of the sacred — a true preparation for the Gospel (praeparatio evangelica), that is, an expectation which Revelation comes to fulfil. But this quest is not itself Revelation.

Here we find the classic teaching of Catholic natural theology: men can, by reason alone, know God's existence from created things (Rom 1:20; Saint Thomas, I, q. 2, a. 2) — a question distinct from the natural desire to see God face to face (I, q. 12, a. 1 and 4). Shinto expresses in its own way this presentiment of the sacred — but disperses it among multiple immanent kami, for lack of having received the Revelation of a personal and transcendent God.

Ritual purity and purity of heart

Shinto spirituality of purity — this attention to ablution, to the threshold, to space set apart from the ordinary world — is one of the finest expressions of natural religiosity. But Christ radically shifts the axis of purity:

"It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man. […] For out of the heart come evil thoughts: murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 15:11,19 (AELF translation)^[80]

This rupture is fundamental. Where Shinto kegare is an outward defilement — contact with death, blood, disease — which the harae rite can erase by a liturgical gesture, the Christian vision of sin is an inward wound, a rupture of free will with the Good. Healing comes not through ablutions, but through conversion of heart and the grace of the sacraments. Saint Augustine grasped with unequalled precision this difference between ritual and interior purification:

"Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book I, chapter 1, §1 (classic reference: I, 1, 1)^[81]

The purity Christianity awaits is not a ritual absence of defilement, but a purification of the heart by grace, in faith and charity. Christian rites — baptism, confession, Eucharist, liturgical fasts — serve this interior transformation; they are not its substitute. That is why a Catholic may admire the beauty of harae as a sign of a universal desire for purity, while knowing that only Christ can purify what the Shinto rite can only sketch.

Salvation as personal communion

Finally, where Shinto offers harmony with the kami, Christianity proclaims a personal communion with a triune God. The ultimate goal of human life, says the Catechism, is "eternal life" (CCC §1024): to see God as He is and to live with Him for ever — the vision of God face to face set out in §1028. This hope has no Shinto equivalent. Shinto offers a religion of this world, of clan, of prosperity, of natural beauty; Christianity offers a religion of the Kingdom, of salvation, of resurrection, of heaven.

Jesus formulates it in burning terms in the priestly prayer of the Gospel of John:

"And this is eternal life, that they know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." — Gospel according to Saint John, 17:3 (AELF translation)^[82]

This knowledge is not intellectual learning but intimate communion — that of the Son with the Father in the Holy Spirit, in which every baptised person is called to share. No kami promises this. No matsuri prepares this union. Shinto wonderfully fulfils religio naturalis — this bond of man with what exceeds him — but remains short of revelatio: the free and personal decision of God to give Himself to man, in the incarnate Word^[83].

Objection 1 — Shinto is only a culture, not a religion

This objection underestimates what Shinto is. It has gods (kami), precise rites (matsuri, harae, misogi), consecrated shrines (about 80,000), a professional clergy (about 20,000 priests), a normative literature (Kojiki, Engi-shiki), a limited but real eschatology (the dead become kami), and a history of instrumentalisation by the State (State Shinto, Yasukuni). Reducing it to "folklore" is as inaccurate as it is needlessly condescending — and it also ignores that State Shinto was the ideology of an Empire whose wars in Asia-Pacific caused tens of millions of deaths^[84].

Objection 2 — All religions say the same thing

No. Shinto and Christianity diverge radically on:

• God: one transcendent Creator vs a multitude of immanent kami.
• Creation: ex nihilo by a free act vs emergence from chaos.
• Sin: personal offence of a free will against the Good vs temporary ritual defilement.
• Salvation: grace of Christ and eternal life vs harmony and community prosperity.
• Revelation: Word of God addressed historically to Israel and fulfilled in Jesus Christ vs myths of the Kojiki with no strictly revelatory claim.

Recognising these differences is not contempt: it is respect. Making Shinto say that it "believes in God as we do" does violence to the reality of the Shinto tradition, which does not think in terms of a unique God.

Objection 3 — The Catholic Church despises traditional religions

The history of the Jesuit mission in Japan proves exactly the opposite. Alessandro Valignano, visitor of the Society of Jesus in East Asia (1573–1606), devised a method of inculturation of remarkable finesse: the Jesuits learn Japanese to a high level, study Zen Buddhism, adopt a modified Zen costume, build Japanese seminaries, have the catechism translated into classical Japanese^[85]. This inculturation does not renounce the truth of Christ, but it takes seriously the culture receiving this Christ. The same attitude is found in Nostra aetate (1965), in the papal visits of 1981 and 2019, and in contemporary interreligious dialogue.

The beauty of Shinto rites — the kagura dances of the miko, the sober architecture of shrines, the procession of the mikoshi through the streets — is recognised and respected in the Catholic tradition of contemplating the true and the beautiful as "traces of God" in human cultures. This respect is not condescension: it is the recognition, with Christ's word on the Spirit who blows where He wills (cf. Jn 3:8), that no human tradition is entirely empty of that aspiration towards the sacred which marks the spiritual creature.

Objection 4 — The Yasukuni rites are purely civil; the Church accepted them

The 1936 Pluries Instanterque instruction accepted this qualification for its time: Catholics could attend the ceremonies and behave there as other citizens, making their intention explicit if necessary, for as long as the civil authority itself maintained the civil qualification. Yet since 1945–1946, the Japanese State no longer maintains this status: the Shinto directive reclassified shrines as private religious institutions, and the shōkonsai ceremony at Yasukuni is a religious rite which divinises the dead as kami. The 1936 position therefore no longer holds automatically: the rite is religious today, and a Catholic cannot take part in it as in a mere civic ceremony — a position confirmed by the Japanese bishops' declaration of 21 February 2007^[86]. This holds especially insofar as Yasukuni also divinises war criminals condemned for crimes of mass murder^[87].

Objection 5 — The Kakure Kirishitan kept the faith without priests, so the sacraments are unnecessary

The opposite is more accurate. The Kakure Kirishitan kept the impetus of the faith — the memory of prayers, baptism, the sense of Christ — but progressively lost the other sacraments and much of the doctrine. When Father Petitjean meets them in 1865, many no longer know the meaning of the orashio they recite in phonetic Latin, and certain syncretistic elements (Maria-Kannon, fusion with Buddhist elements) distorted the transmission. Some descendants of the Kakure Kirishitan, after 1865, would even refuse to rejoin the Catholic Church, having formed a separate religion, Hanare Kirishitan ("separated Christianity"). Their heroism proves that faith can cross a sacramental desert; it does not prove that this desert is normal or desirable.

Objection 6 — Japanese Christianity failed to inculturate; that is why it is a minority

The argument is partial. Valignano's Jesuit method is one of the summits of missionary inculturation, and Japanese Christianity counted some 300,000 faithful around 1614^[88]. Its later diminution is explained at least in part by two and a half centuries of systematic persecution, the closing of the country under sakoku and the pressure of State Shinto between 1868 and 1945. But for lack of identified comparative series here — notably with Korea — and of a precise study of the respective weight of causes, making persecution the dominant explanation of the low present percentage remains a hypothesis, not a demonstrated conclusion.

Shinto is the religious expression of a people, a geography, a history. It offers authentic riches — a sense of the sacred in nature, gratitude towards ancestors, care for purity, liturgical beauty, community cohesion — which the Catholic Church expressly recognises in the line of Nostra aetate and recent pontifical discourses. The Japanese Catholic or the respectful visitor may pause before a torii with reverence, admire the ritual dance of a miko, contemplate the great Ise Shrine rebuilt identically for thirteen centuries.

But respecting is not dissolving. Shinto does not teach that there is a single Creator God, personal and transcendent; it does not proclaim that this God revealed Himself in the history of Israel and became flesh in Jesus Christ; it offers neither the resurrection of bodies nor eternal life. What it offers is precious but partial — "a ray of the Truth which enlightens all men", says Nostra aetate — awaiting fulfilment by the full proclamation of Christ.

The history of Christian Japan — from Saint Francis Xavier in 1549 to the 26 martyrs of Nagasaki in 1597, from the 188 beatified in 2008 to Justo Takayama Ukon in 2017 — shows that this respect is no lukewarm compromise. The 16th-century Jesuits inculturated the Gospel into Japanese culture with unequalled finesse, and many died for it. The Kakure Kirishitan kept the faith without priests for two hundred and fifty years rather than renounce it. It is this memory that enlightens today's dialogue: neither dilution nor contempt, but the firm and loving proclamation of Christ, "the one mediator between God and men" (1 Tim 2:5).

• Hinduism — another great non-Christian tradition of Asia: pantheon, spiritual paths, encounter with Christianity.
• Buddhism — Shinto's sister religion in Japan, partner of shinbutsu-shūgō for twelve centuries.
• Why Catholicism is the true religion — a positive exposition of the foundations of the Catholic faith.
• Can there be miracles in other religions? — Catholic discernment on the supernatural outside Christianity.
• Reincarnation: a false belief — the Catholic answer to the doctrine inherited from Buddhism and present in Japan.