The Rethinking of “State Shinto” in Japanese Academia After World War II

The Shinto Directive, the official source of the term “State Shinto”, on the one hand defines the concept of “State Shinto” in a narrow sense, and on the other hand reveals its profound connotation and generalized extension. In 1945, after the Allied Forces issued the Shinto Directive, Japanese academia carried out in-depth research around “State Shinto”, and gradually formed the “two camps” consisting of scholars who advocated the theory of “State Shinto in a Broad Sense” and insisted on the theory of “State Shinto in a Narrow Sense”. In the process of promoting the democratic reform, the theory of “State Shinto in a Broad Sense” gradually developed into the general theory of “State Shinto” after the war; With the continuous advancement of empirical research, the “State Shinto in a Narrow Sense” gradually rose. While enriching the post-war research of “State Shinto”, it also provided a theoretical basis for historical revisionists to distort and cover up history. Finally, under the situation that the trend of Japanese political right deviation is increasingly intensified, the limitations of the “broad sense” and “narrow sense” camps are broken, and the study of “State Shinto” has entered a new stage.