Shinto

The Jinja Shinto stream of the Shinto timeline.

Streams: All of Shinto Folk Shinto Jinja Shinto Yoshida Shinto Kokugaku State Shinto

Ancient Kami Worship

538

Buddhism introduced to Japan

In 538, by the usual reckoning, the king of Baekje sent the Yamato court a statue of the Buddha, sutras, and a letter praising the teaching as the finest of doctrines. The court divided: the Mononobe and Nakatomi, guardians of the kami rites, warned that foreign gods would anger the native kami, while the Soga argued for adoption. The argument, settled by plague, politics, and time in Buddhism's favour, set the terms on which the kami and the buddhas would share Japan for the next thirteen centuries.

The Yamato court

701

Taihō Code; Jingikan established

The Taihō Code of 701, the great law code on the Chinese model, placed the Jingikan, the Council of Kami Affairs, at the head of the state, ranked in protocol above the Council of State itself. The Jingikan governed the court's rites, the great festivals, and the official shrines, and the code fixed the calendar of offerings by which the emperor served the kami on the realm's behalf. Kami worship thereby became an organ of the Japanese state at the moment the state itself was codified.

Fujiwara-kyō, the imperial capital

712

Kojiki completed

The Kojiki, the Record of Ancient Matters, was presented to the throne in 712. Recited by the court memorizer Hieda no Are and written down by Ō no Yasumaro, it tells of the age of the kami, of Izanagi and Izanami stirring the brine to form the islands, of Amaterasu the sun kami and her unruly brother Susanoo, and of the descent of her grandson to rule the land, down to the emperors of recorded time. It is the oldest surviving book of Japan and the charter myth of the imperial line.

Nara, the imperial capital

720

Nihon Shoki completed

The Nihon Shoki, the Chronicles of Japan, followed the Kojiki in 720: thirty books in classical Chinese, written for the record and for foreign eyes, covering the same ground from the age of the kami to the reigning empress. Where the Kojiki gives one telling, the Nihon Shoki preserves variants side by side, noting where the accounts differ. Together the two books fixed the myths of the kami in writing, and every later account of the early shrines and the imperial descent works from them.

Nara, the imperial capital

The Heian Synthesis

794-1185

Heian; shinbutsu-shūgō

In the Heian centuries the kami and the buddhas were not rivals but partners. Shrines housed sutra readings, temples enshrined kami as their protectors, and the doctrine of honji suijaku taught that the kami are the local traces of universal buddhas, manifest in Japan to save its people. This fusion, shinbutsu-shūgō, was the ordinary religion of Japan for a thousand years: a villager saw no seam where later ages would insist on cutting one, and the great shrine-temples, like Kasuga with its temple Kōfukuji, embodied the union.

Heian-kyō

Edo and Kokugaku

1603-1868

Edo period

Under the Tokugawa shogunate the shrines lived inside a settled order. The shogunate issued regulations for shrines and priests in 1665, the Yoshida and Shirakawa houses competed to license the country's shrines, and the great cults drew mass pilgrimages: to Ise above all, where in peak years millions walked to the shrine of Amaterasu in carnival journeys the authorities could barely contain. Thinkers of the age, from Yamazaki Ansai to the Mito historians, gave the kami new philosophical and national meanings.

Edo

Postwar Jinja Shinto

1945

Shinto Directive

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.

Tokyo

1951

Jinja Honchō established

The Association of Shinto Shrines, Jinja Honchō, was formed in 1946 from the shrine world's own wartime bodies to represent the shrines in their new private standing, and by 1951, as the occupation drew to its end, it stood established as the national body of some eighty thousand shrines. From its office near Yoyogi it trains and certifies priests, publishes the shrines' teaching, and speaks for Jinja Shinto to the state and the public, while each member shrine keeps its own rites, its own kami, and its own parishioners.

Tokyo

1990s-present

Shrine culture revival

From the 1990s the shrines found new publics. Young visitors came in growing numbers for festivals, for the calligraphy of shrine stamps collected in goshuin books, for weddings and blessings in shrine form, and for the forests and festivals of local shrines newly valued as heritage. Jinja Honchō promoted the shrine as the heart of its community, and the rebuilding of shrine halls and the return of lapsed festivals marked the decade. The revival is cultural before it is doctrinal: the kami are honoured as the form of belonging itself.

Japan