State Shinto

昨日はテレビで大学ラグビー選手権の準決勝2試合を3時間たっぷり見ました。いずれも接戦でラグビーらしい良い試合でした。私が見る気のしないサッカーの試合とは本物のスポーツの戦いですね。
さて、Yuval Noah Harariの "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" を読んでいます。
Lesson 8 (Religion)から引用します。　日本の話が出てきます。

Perhaps the best example for the continuing power and importance of traditional religions in the modern world comes from Japan. In 1853 an American fleet forced Japan to open itself to the modern world. In response, the Japanese state embarked on a rapid and extremely successful process of modernisation. Within a few decades, it became a powerful bureaucratic state relying on science, capitalism and the latest military technology to defeat China and Russia, occupy Taiwan and Korea, and ultimately sink the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and destroy the European empire in the Far East. Yet Japan did not copy blindly the Western blueprint. It was fiercely determined to protect its unique identity, and to ensure that modern Japanese will be loyal to Japan rather than to science, to modernity or to some nebulous global community.

To that end, Japan upheld the native religion of Shinto as the cornerstone Japanese identity. In truth, the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodge-podge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favourite spirits and local customs. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Japanese state created an official version of Shinto, while discouraging many local traditions. This 'State Shinto' was fused with very modern ideas of nationality and race, which the Japanese elite picked from the European imperialists. Any element in Buddhism, Confucianism and the samurai feudal ethos that could be helpful in cementing loyalty to the state was added to the mix. To top it all, State Shinto enshrined as its supreme principle the worship of the Japanese emperor, who was considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and himself no less than a living god.

現代のほとんどの日本人は神道や天皇制を宗教とは意識していないようですが、少なくとも天皇制は現在の憲法第一条に見事に 'State Shinto' として残っていると言えるでしょう。

明日から旅行でしばらくブログはお休みします。