History
In the late Edo period, numerous scholars of kokugaku believed that Shintō could become a unifying agent to center the country around the Emperor while a process of modernization was undertaken. After the Meiji Restoration, the new imperial government needed to rapidly modernize the politics and economy of Japan, and the Meiji oligarchy felt that those goals could only be accomplished through a strong sense of national unity and cultural identity.
In 1868, the new Meiji government established a government bureau, the Shintō Worship Bureau (神祇事務局, Jingi Jimukyoku?) to oversee religious affairs and to administer the government-ordered separation of Buddhism from Shintō.
Read more about this topic: State Shinto
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“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
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—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)