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Shinto Directive

1945 · Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan)

On 15 December 1945 the Allied occupation issued the Shinto Directive, abolishing every state support, supervision, and privilege of the shrines and barring the teaching of the imperial cult in schools. State Shinto ended by order, as it had been built by order. The shrines lost their funding and their public status in a day, and became what the postwar constitution would confirm them to be: private religious bodies, free of the state and cut off from it, to live on the offerings of their parishioners.

Tagged: Jinja Shinto Shinto State Shinto

The Event

Date
1945 (exact)
Era
Postwar Jinja Shinto; Standard periodization of Shinto history
Location
Tokyo; today Tokyo, Japan
Traditions
Shinto
Streams
State Shinto, Jinja Shinto
Key texts
Shinto Directive (SCAPIN-448)

How the Tradition Tells It

The Directive freed the shrines and beggared them in the same act. Some priests remember 1945 as liberation from state control of the rites; others as the loss of the public standing the shrines had held for a millennium. Both memories are carried inside Jinja Shinto today.

Connections

Illustration for State Shinto History Event State Shinto 1868-1945 follows from

Primary Sources

  • The Shinto Directive of 15 December 1945.

Secondary Sources

  • Hardacre, Helen. Shinto: A History. Oxford University Press, 2017.
  • Breen, John, and Mark Teeuwen. A New History of Shinto. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Provenance: HIST-0914; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-28.

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