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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)