THE INVENTION OF A NEW RELIGION
BY
B. H. CHAMBERLAIN,
EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF JAPANESE AND PHILOLOGY AT THE IMPERIAL
UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO, JAPAN
1912

The Invention of a New Religion [1]

    [Note 1]  The writer of this pamphlet could but
    skim over a wide subject.  For full information see
    Volume I. of Mr. J. Murdoch's recently-published
    "History of Japan," the only critical work on that
    subject existing in the English language.

Voltaire and the other eighteenth-century philosophers, who
held religions to be the invention of priests, have been
scorned as superficial by later investigators.  But was there
not something in their view, after all?  Have not we, of a
later and more critical day, got into so inveterate a habit of
digging deep that we sometimes fail to see what lies before
our very noses?  Modern Japan is there to furnish an example.
The Japanese are, it is true, commonly said to be an
irreligious people.  They say so themselves.  Writes one
of them, the celebrated Fukuzawa, teacher and type of the
modern educated Japanese man: "I lack a religious nature,
and have never believed in any religion."  A score of like
pronouncements might be quoted from other leading men.  The
average, even educated, European strikes the average educated
Japanese as strangely superstitious, unaccountably occupied
with supra-mundane matters.  The Japanese simply cannot be
brought to comprehend how a "mere parson" such as the Pope, or
even the Archbishop of Canterbury, occupies the place he does
in politics and society.  Yet this same agnostic Japan is
teaching us at this very hour how religions are sometimes
manufactured for a special end--to subserve practical worldly
purposes.

Mikado-worship and Japan-worship--for that is the new
Japanese religion--is, of course, no spontaneously generated
phenomenon.  Every manufacture presupposes a material out of
which it is made, every present a past on which it rests.
But the twentieth-century Japanese religion of loyalty and
patriotism is quite new, for in it pre-existing ideas have
been sifted, altered, freshly compounded, turned to new uses,
and have found a new centre of gravity.  Not only is it new,
it is not yet completed; it is still in process of being
consciously or semi-consciously put together by the official
class, in order to serve the interests of that class, and,
incidentally, the interests of the nation at large.  The
Japanese bureaucracy is a body greatly to be admired.  It
includes most of the foremost men of the nation.  Like the
priesthood in later Judaea, to some extent like the Egyptian
and Indian priesthoods, it not only governs, but aspires to
lead in intellectual matters.  It has before it a complex task.
On the one hand, it must make good to the outer world the new
claim that Japan differs in no essential way from the nations
of the West, unless, indeed, it be by way of superiority.  On
the other hand, it has to manage restive steeds at home, where
ancestral ideas and habits clash with new dangers arising from
an alien material civilisation hastily absorbed.

Down to the year 1888, the line of cleavage between governors
and governed was obscured by the joyful ardour with which all
classes alike devoted themselves to the acquisition of
European, not to say American, ideas.  Everything foreign
was then hailed as perfect--everything old and national was
contemned.  Sentiment grew democratic, in so far (perhaps
it was not very far) as American democratic ideals were
understood.  Love of country seemed likely to yield to a humble
bowing down before foreign models.  Officialdom not unnaturally
took fright at this abdication of national individualism.
Evidently something must be done to turn the tide.
Accordingly, patriotic sentiment was appealed to through the
throne, whose hoary antiquity had ever been a source of pride
to Japanese literati, who loved to dwell on the contrast
between Japan's unique line of absolute monarchs and the
short-lived dynasties of China.  Shinto, a primitive nature
cult, which had fallen into discredit, was taken out of its
cupboard and dusted.  The common people, it is true, continued
to place their affections on Buddhism, the popular festivals
were Buddhist, Buddhist also the temples where they buried
their dead.  The governing class determined to change all this.
They insisted on the Shinto doctrine that the Mikado descends
in direct succession from the native Goddess of the Sun, and
that He himself is a living God on earth who justly claims the
absolute fealty of his subjects.  Such things as laws and
constitutions are but free gifts on His part, not in any sense
popular rights.  Of course, the ministers and officials, high
and low, who carry on His government, are to be regarded not
as public servants, but rather as executants of supreme--one
might say supernatural--authority.  Shinto, because connected
with the Imperial Family, is to be alone honoured.  Therefore,
the important right of burial, never before possessed by it,
was granted to its priests.  Later on, the right of marriage
was granted likewise--an entirely novel departure in a land
where marriage had never been more than a civil contract.  Thus
the Shinto priesthood was encouraged to penetrate into the
intimacy of family life, while in another direction it
encroached on the field of ethics by borrowing bits here and
there from Confucian and even from Christian sources.  Under a
regime of ostensible religious toleration, the attendance of
officials at certain Shinto services was required, and the
practice was established in all schools of bowing down several
times yearly before the Emperor's picture.  Meanwhile Japanese
polities had prospered; her warriors had gained great
victories.  Enormous was the prestige thus accruing to
Imperialism and to the rejuvenated Shinto cult.  All military
successes were ascribed to the miraculous influence of the
Emperor's virtue, and to the virtues of His Imperial and
divine ancestors--that is, of former Emperors and of Shinto
deities.  Imperial envoys were regularly sent after each great
victory to carry the good tidings to the Sun Goddess at her
great shrine at Ise.  Not there alone, but at the other
principal Shinto shrines throughout the land, the cannon
captured from Chinese or Russian foes were officially
installed, with a view to identifying Imperialism, Shinto, and
national glory in the popular mind.  The new legend is enforced
wherever feasible--for instance, by means of a new set of
festivals celebrating Imperial official events.

But the schools are the great strongholds of the new
propaganda.  History is so taught to the young as to focus
everything upon Imperialism, and to diminish as far as
possible the contrast between ancient and modern conditions.
The same is true of the instruction given to army and navy
recruits.  Thus, though Shinto is put in the forefront, little
stress is laid on its mythology, which would be apt to shock
even the Japanese mind at the present day.  To this extent,
where a purpose useful to the ruling class is to be served,
criticism is practised, though not avowedly.  Far different
is the case with so-called "historical facts," such as the
alleged foundation of the Monarchy in 660 B.C. and similar
statements paralleled only for absurdity by what passed for
history in mediaeval Europe, when King Lear, Brute, King of
Britain, etc., etc., were accepted as authentic personages.
For the truth, known to all critical investigators, is that,
instead of going back to a remote antiquity, the origins of
Japanese history are recent as compared with that of European
countries.  The first glimmer of genuine Japanese history
dates from the fifth century AFTER Christ, and even the
accounts of what happened in the sixth century must be
received with caution.  Japanese scholars know this as well as
we do; it is one of the certain results of investigation.  But
the Japanese bureaucracy does not desire to have the light
let in on this inconvenient circumstance.  While granting a
dispensation re the national mythology, properly so called, it
exacts belief in every iota of the national historic legends.
Woe to the native professor who strays from the path of
orthodoxy.  His wife and children (and in Japan every man,
however young, has a wife and children) will starve.  From
the late Prince Ito's grossly misleading "Commentary on the
Japanese Constitution" down to school compendiums, the absurd
dates are everywhere insisted upon.  This despite the fact
that the mythology and the so-called early history are
recorded in the same works, and are characterised by like
miraculous impossibilities; that the chronology is palpably
fraudulent; that the speeches put into the mouths of ancient
Mikados are centos culled from the Chinese classics; that
their names are in some cases derived from Chinese sources;
and that the earliest Japanese historical narratives, the
earliest known social usages, and even the centralised
Imperial form of Government itself, are all stained through
and through with a Chinese dye, so much so that it is no
longer possible to determine what percentage of old native
thought may still linger on in fragments here and there.  In
the face of all this, moral ideals, which were of common
knowledge derived from the teaching of the Chinese sages, are
now arbitrarily referred to the "Imperial Ancestors."  Such,
in particular, are loyalty and filial piety--the two virtues
on which, in the Far-Eastern world, all the others rest.  It
is, furthermore, officially taught that, from the earliest
ages, perfect concord has always subsisted in Japan between
beneficent sovereigns on the one hand, and a gratefully loyal
people on the other.  Never, it is alleged, has Japan been
soiled by the disobedient and rebellious acts common in other
countries; while at the same time the Japanese nation, sharing
to some extent in the supernatural virtues of its rulers, has
been distinguished by a high-minded chivalry called Bushido,
unknown in inferior lands.

Such is the fabric of ideas which the official class is
busy building up by every means in its power, including the
punishment of those who presume to stickle for historic truth.

                    *     *     *

The sober fact is that no nation probably has ever treated its
sovereigns more cavalierly than the Japanese have done, from
the beginning of authentic history down to within the memory
of living men.  Emperors have been deposed, emperors have been
assassinated; for centuries every succession to the throne was
the signal for intrigues and sanguinary broils.  Emperors have
been exiled; some have been murdered in exile.  From the
remote island to which he had been relegated one managed to
escape, hidden under a load of dried fish.  In the fourteenth
century, things came to such a pass that two rival Imperial
lines defied each other for the space of fifty-eight years--
the so-called Northern and Southern Courts; and it was the