Inventing a Church for Shinto

By Avery Morrow

Around 1872, Shishino Nakaba, a young samurai and aspiring bureaucrat, encountered loosely organized village societies or confraternities that worshiped Mount Fuji as a god and practiced healing through hand-copied paper talismans rubbed on people’s backs or swallowed with water. Japanese elites and framers of the new Meiji government sneered at such groups, considering this independent faith rooted in traditions of mountain-centered asceticism and resembling Chinese folk beliefs to be the superstitions of simple-minded farmers ignorant of Buddhism or Shinto. Shishino alone saw the potential for these independent Fuji confraternities to be reformed into kyōkai, a Shinto “church,” using the same Japanese term he used to refer to Christian churches. These Shinto churches, he argued, would shape Japanese identity and function as a bulwark against Christianity.

Through creating and imposing nationwide rituals, symbols, and teachings, the makers of Japan’s new national government during this period sought to foster national identity and prevent allegiance to foreign beliefs, like Christianity, which were considered incompatible with Japanese patriotism. In a 1873 manifesto, Shishino wrote, “The religions of Western countries succeed or fail according to the efforts of their churches . . . Accordingly, we unite the churches of every side of Mount Fuji and dedicate them to our great work, so that a century from now, our churches may reach even into foreign realms.” Years ahead of Western scholars, Shishino contended that religion is not devotion to deities or spiritual beings but an institution rising and falling according to social appeal. 

Shishino aimed to reform the Fuji faith’s confraternities into just such an institution. Despite the confraternities being considered “magical” or “superstitious” due to their secretive transmission of healing practices, ungrammatical writings, and lack of organization or systematic doctrine, Shishino deemed them to be already “churches,” but they needed a few changes and regulations to become a true Church of Shinto. 

For those who lived around the mountain, Fuji was a place to encounter Buddhist imagery, numinous natural phenomena, and relics of legendary ascetics. Shishino organized a survey of all the neighborhood Fuji faith meetings in homes and at miniature “Fuji mounds” around East-Central Japan and used his administrative clout to place these meetings under his control. He summited Fuji, smashed and confiscated its Buddha statues, and renamed its peaks after locations in Japan, wiping away centuries-old Buddhist symbolism. His removals and name changes persist today.

Shishino’s regulations were not limited to altering the sacred geography. He ordered the Fuji churches, remade according to his own Shinto liking, to face Ise Jingū, the imperial Shinto shrine, during prayer, to monthly celebrate Emperor Jimmu, the mythical founder of Japan, and to host weddings and funerals, totally novel functions for these meetings. The Fuji confraternities had been convivial places where alcohol was often shared; Shishino banned members from partaking in luxury goods, drunkenness, gluttony, and sexual indulgence. He attempted to altogether ban healing practices, rejecting them as unscientific, but his initial attempt failed, so he forged and circulated a liturgy, falsely ascribed to a Fuji ascetic hundreds of years dead, which urged believers to consult a doctor before performing a healing. The prayer caught on, but its medical admonitions were cooly received.

Shishino’s new Fuji church directed members towards a Puritan-style work ethic, enforcing biopolitical norms and maximizing the functionality of members within a globalizing society. His reforms, however heavy-handed, anticipate the modern era where such functions were said to be the chief purpose of religion. However, Shishino almost immediately ran into a serious problem when an outspoken ascetic emerged from one of the Fuji confraternities that he attempted to subsume into his new Shinto church, a classic challenge of charisma to institutional authority. 

The charismatic Itō Rokurōbei declared that he had become a conduit for the divine Fuji mountain. Reviving painful ascetic trials long dormant, Rokurōbei fasted for weeks, performed healings, and offered innovative rituals that affirmed the powers of the sacred mountain. Shishino offered to include Rokurōbei in the Fuji Church, but his offers were rejected, and Fuji faithful flocked from far and wide to Rokurōbei’s home. Placed under police surveillance, Rokurōbei responded with life-threatening hunger strikes. Finally, Rokurōbei reluctantly agreed to join the Fuji church, but this produced constant internal discord, and the longed-for national church eventually split into two present-day religious groups: Fusōkyō for Shishino’s party and Maruyamakyō for Rokurōbei’s.

All models of religions inevitably meet their limits when human agents escape what the models predict. Shishino Nakaba’s attempt to fashion local meetings of Mount Fuji confraternities into a highly functional, productive “religion” depended on his model of religion as a legally regulated institution. Rokurōbei considered his mission of healing and direct revelation opposed to the new system. We should consider how our own definitions of religion both predict certain results and encounter certain limits.