Chapter 318: The Same Footing

On the fifteenth of December, 1945, in Tokyo, The headquarters of the supreme commander Sent a memorandum to the imperial government. Its number was 448. Its subject was the abolition of the state's Sponsorship, support, perpetuation, control, and dissemination Of State Shinto. The sponsorship by the national government, By the prefectures, and by the towns, And by any official acting as an official, Was to cease at once. Public money was to cease at once. A gift that a person gave, and gave freely, Could still be received. The ground of a park might still be kept by the city. The shrine standing on it was to take nothing From the public purse. An official was not to go, in his office, To report that he had taken the post, Or to stand at a rite as the government. He could go as a man. The order forbade militarist teaching In the rites of Shinto and in the rites of every other religion, The same prohibition, the same hour. Its stated aim was to separate religion from the state And to set every religion on the same legal footing. It did not order a shrine closed. It did not order a building pulled down. On the twenty-eighth of December An ordinance opened a corporation To the sects, the temples, and the churches. A shrine was not yet named in it. On the first of January, 1946, The newspapers printed a rescript of the emperor Hirohito. Its title was the construction of a new Japan. What people called it was the declaration That he was human. It was not the recorded voice of the fifteenth of August. It began by taking up the five clauses Of the Charter Oath Meiji had proclaimed. Then it said the tie between him and the people Had always stood on mutual trust and affection. It did not depend on mere legends and myths. The English that went with the rescript Says the tie is not predicated on a false conception: That the emperor is divine, And that the Japanese are superior to other races And fated to rule the world. The rescript's own word is akitsumikami, A manifest kami. The English says divine. They are not the same word. The sentence refuses a conception of the bond. It does not say what a shrine may still hold, And it does not delete the stories. On the twenty-third of January three bodies, Which had been private already, The institute for the imperial classics, The great association of the rites, And the association for the service of the grand shrine, Declared they would form one association Under the inner shrine at Ise, Which they looked to as the source, For the shrines of the country, To carry the shrines' own charge And to contribute to the construction of a new Japan. The rescript had used that aim in its title. The declaration used it as the work. The office that had held the shrines for the state Was the Jingiin, set inside the Home Ministry In November of 1940. The memorandum had required the separation. The end was first set for the last day of January. On the second of February the office was ended, And the shrines on the register Were deemed religious corporations. On the third of February the association was established. Its name was Jinja Honchō, The main office of the shrines. The shrines that came under it Were a religious corporation's shrines, Not a ministry's. Not every shrine came under it. Yasukuni was deemed a religious corporation In its own right, and is not written here as theirs. Ise was the source they named. It was not a hall the office owned. Do not say the memorandum ended the kami. It ended a budget and an official attendance. Do not say the English word divine Is the whole of the word he used. Do not say the new office was the ministry, renamed. A voluntary gift is not a tax. A rite without the government's representative Is still a rite. Hold that. The stories are not what the rescript rested the bond on. The stories are not thereby made nothing. The separation was a loss. The shrines lost the state that kept them, And an office looking to Ise has not restored the state that paid. The striving is to restore it: A religion the state keeps, established, under the source it still names. The law can order the purse to stop. It cannot order the visit, made as a person, to be nothing. Count the memorandum on the fifteenth of December. Count the rescript on the first of January. Count the office on the third of February. The kami are not an article in any of the three.