Religious Discourse in Modern Japan

Front matter

Religious Discourse in Modern Japan

Religion, State, and Shinto

BY Isomae Junichi

Contents

Acknowledgements x

Preface xiv Religion, Shinto, and the Emperor System xiv The Modern West and the Concept of Religion xv Shinto and the Emperor System xix

Introduction: The Development of the Concept of Religion and the Discipline of Religious Studies 1

PART 2 The Establishment and Development of Religious Studies n9

4 Discourse on Religion and Social Reality 121 The Tasks of Religious Studies Today 121 Anesaki Masaharu's Religious Studies 122

The Essence of Religion 123 Critique of Power and Authority 128 The National Community Theory 134 Making Discourse Relevant to Society 142 5 State and Religion in Anesaki Masaharu 147 Religion and the State 149 Jodo Shinshü Buddhism and the Imperial House 149

From Comparative Religion to Religious Studies 155 Experience of the West and Representation of Japan 163

The "Yellow Peril" and Opposition to the West 164

Mysticism and Discourse on the Kokutai 166

East-West Harmony and the Representation of Japan 175 The Collapse of Harmony between East and West 182 6 The Process of Development of Religious Studies: From History of Theory to History of Reflective Discourse 199 The Study of the History of Religious Studies in Japan 200 From Academic Theory to History of Scholarly Discourse 206 The Aum Shinrikyo Incident and Theories of Religious Experience 214

PART 3 Establishment of Shinto Studies and the State Shinto System 231

The National Morality Doctrine 233 Student of Inoue Tetsujiro 234 Toward a Japanese Theory of Education 235

Tanaka's Shinto Studies Project 239 The Imperial Way and Shinto 242 Shinto and Scholarship 245

From the National Morality Doctrine to Shinto Studies 247 Shinto Shrines as Not "Religious" 247

CONTENTS

Making Shinto the State Religion 250 Founding “Shinto Studies” 254 Impasse in Shinto Studies 257 8 The Emperor System and “State Shinto”: Dislocation of “Religion” and the “Secular” 264 Theories of Religion in Postcolonial Criticism 265 Theories of State Shinto and the Separation of State and Religion The Fluctuating Concept of Religion 276 The Emperor System as Beyond the Law 289 9 The Interior as the Battleground of Discourse 297

Incomprehensible Interiority 298 Interiority and Religion 298 Equilibrium Lost 302 Marxist Historiography and Religion 305 Russia and the Rise of Marxism 305 Russian Marxism and Literature/Religion 308 Russian Marxism and History 315

Toward the History of Japanese Religion 319 The Merging of Marxist Historiography and Religion 321 From Wartime to the Postwar Period 327 Epilogue: Beyond the Debate on the Concept of “Religion” 336 A Vision for a New Study of Religion 338 Dialogue Under Postcolonial Conditions 340

Reference List 346 Index 441

Acknowledgements

This book is a translation of a text based on my doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology in 2010 under the title Kindai Nihon no shükyo gensetsu to sono keifu: Shükyo, kokka, shinto (The Genealogy of Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, Shinto); some revisions have been added. Some parts of this original manuscript were previously translated and published, but the entire manuscript has been translated or revised newly for this book and edited for a broad readership in religious studies and Japanese studies.

Since my enrollment at Tokyo University in 1988 I have received constant guidance from my dissertation supervisor Shimazono Susumu. Without having met Shimazono, I would probably have not advanced on the path of scholarship, and I am sincerely grateful to him. Critical comments on the dissertation were received during the oral examination from Hayashi Makoto of Aichi Gakuin University (who served on the examining committee), Katsurajima Nobuhiro of Ritsumeikan University, Tsuruoka Yoshio of the graduate school of Tokyo University, and Takagi Hiroshi of Kyoto University: they all provided opportunities for me to deepen my work and chart my way forward as a scholar. I hope to respond to their critiques as I continue to research, write, and teach about religion.

Also included in this book are various shorter articles written in parallel with my project of organizing the archives of the old Shinto studies research center of Tokyo Imperial University, including its documentation on Anesaki Masaharu, who was the first senior professor in the department of religion at that university. I began this work in 1994 when I was an assistant at the research center. In the process I received a great deal of cooperation from Professor Shimazono and many other people. My reports on the results of this work were published as Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku Shinto Kenkyüshitsu kyüzosho mokuroku oyobi kaisetsu [A Catalog and Commentary on the Archives of the Tokyo Imperial University Shinto Studies Research Center] and Kindai Nihon ni okeru chishikijin to shükyo: Anesaki Masaharu no kiseki [Intellectuals and Religion in Modern Japan: The Work of Anesaki Masaharu]. Later some of this material was included in my books Kindai Nihon no shikyo gensetsu to sono keifu: Shükyo, kokka, shinto [The Genealogy of Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, and Shinto] and Soshitsu to nosutarujia: Kindai Nihon no yohaku e [Sense of Loss and Nostalgia: Towards the Margins of Modern Japan]. I would like to express my thanks to those who assisted in the publication, Kobayashi Eitaro (formerly of Tokyodo Publishing, now of Akiyama Books), Kojima Kiyoshi (Iwanami Shoten), and Hamada Masaru (Misuzu Shobo). My research developed into a critical discourse on scholarship. These pieces were given a rather cold shoulder in Japanese academia at the time. Nevertheless, while maintaining that critical stance towards

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XI the scholarly authorities, I was able to continue my work thanks to the understanding of the editors of these publications. They unfailingly encouraged me to pursue my research according to a field of vision that included ordinary society, not one closed up within the narrow confines of scholarship.

In the process of preparing this book, I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Department of History of the Japan Women's University, where I taught as an assistant professor, and in my current workplace, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken). I am extremely fortunate that both these institutions understood the necessity of my various one-year research stints overseas. Nichibunken's contribution has been immense, for it fully funded the translation and editing of this volume. I am also especially indebted to the Reischauer Institute at Harvard University, SOAS at the University of London, Tübingen University, and the Káte Hamburger Kolleg “Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe" project at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany) among the places where I stayed as visiting researcher or visiting professor. At the Káte Hamburger Kolleg institute, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, I received support from a great number of colleagues including Volkhard Krech, Marion Steinicke, Lucian Hólscher, Marion Eggert, Jorg Plassen, Hans Martin Kramer, Gesche Linde, Jang Sukman, Arie Molendijk, and Peter van Rooden. The publication of this monograph has been made possible through their strong encouragement. I am truly delighted that this book will be published as a volume in the series “Dynamics of History of Religions” from the Kate Hamburger Kolleg project.

At the Reischauer Institute I was aided by Helen Hardacre, Andrew Gordon, and Ruiko Connor; at soas by Brian Bocking and Lucia Dolce; and at Tübingen by Klaus Antoni. When I had the opportunity to reside in Europe and the United States I enjoyed close contact and exchange with Timothy Fitzgerald, Russell McCutcheon, Tomoko Masuzawa, David Chidester, Richard King, and Hent de Vries, all people who have wanted to reconsider religious studies from the perspective of critical theory. I am deeply grateful for the good counsel of Gary Ebersole and Jacqueline Stone about maintaining balance in my research.

During my residence at those research institutions, the highlight was getting to know leaders of postcolonial and post-secular scholarship, namely Naoki Sakai, Talal Asad, Homi Bhabha, Gauri Viswanathan, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Although my own research concerns modern Japan, in order to assimilate their writings in ways that revealed my commonalities with scholars from differing fields, I had to accumulate broader familiarity with theory. Through introductions from Naoki Sakai, I was able to develop warm friendships with Yun Hae-Dong, Lim Jie-Hyun, Kim Chul, and Hwang Ho-Dok, with other South Koreans who were joined in the Korean intellectual network called Research Machine Suyu+Trans, and with Sun Ge from China. The exchanges provided a rare opportunity to think about the claw-wounds of the Japanese empire in

XII ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

East Asia. Now it has become possible to publish an English version of my dissertation following the publication of Japanese and Korean editions.

Over a period of ten years in Japan, together with Shimazono, Hayashi, Professor Emeritus Yasumaru Yoshio of Hitotsubashi University, and Professor Emeritus Kiyasu Akira of Japan Women's University, we were able to host a research group on “the people, religion, and history" As I pursued my research in my thirties and into my forties, it was this group that stimulated and nourished my work. Originally, Yasumaru and Kiyasu, who specialized in popular history (minshüshi), could not be easily assimilated within the academy because these scholars' consciousness of themselves as intellectuals was open to society in general. Yet they did not slavishly cater to the notion of “the people" (minshi) either. They taught that intellectuals must have the courage to suspend themselves midair, as it were, between the academy and general society. By engaging productively with the isolation that is essential to such scholarship, I hope that I, too, can henceforth develop a genuinely critical expressive activity that will enable me to make a contribution to general society.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to Galen Amstutz, who undertook the draft translation of this work. I became acquainted with Amstutz at Harvard University, and we have maintained a deepening friendship that is stimulating and broadening to each other's research. While Amstutz was in Japan, I organized a reading group on modern Japanese Buddhism, sustained along with Silvio Vita, which served as a jumping off point for my ideas about how Japanese religion is positioned in Western modernization, and Amstutz's knowledge of the field of modern Japanese religious history and my thinking guided the further work on the translation. I am also indebted to Lynne E. Riggs, who took the draft translation of my difficult prose to a higher level of readability in English. Her understanding of Japanese, supported by veteran translators Minamitani Akimasa and Takechi Manabu with whom she consulted, along with editorial guidance and collaboration with Amstutz, transformed the initial draft into a translation. I am also grateful Imoto Chikako for her meticulous work in compiling the book's immense list of references.

I also wish to thankfully acknowledge the special help with details of the translation that were provided by Takahashi Hara of Tokyo University, and by several of my graduate students including Nagaoka Takashi and Nishida Shoichi. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, particularly Patricia Fister, who has played a key role as coordinating editor and consultant, and Shiraishi Eri, who supported the editing process, for shepherding my work to the final stage of this publication in English as one volume in the Nichibunken Monograph Series.

Religious Discourse in Modern Japan is a work that takes Japanese religion as a case study: its readers should not be confined to researchers on Japan, for it is logically

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XIII structured to be open to everyone who has an interest in how modernization developed in the clash between Western and non-Western cultures. I earnestly hope that through translation into the international language of English, this book will reach interested readers throughout the world. Reaching out beyond the image of Japan as a particularistic society, I hope it will contribute to a universal scholarly domain for articulating the process of modernity.

Preface

Religion, Shinto, and the Emperor System

For a long time, right up to the present, outsiders have often stated that Japanese are not religious. As a result, today even the Japanese consider themselves “not religious.” Certainly it is the case that many Japanese do not follow one specific religion and are not members of any particular religious organization. However, various practices can be called religious, such as going to a shrine before a school examination in order to pray for a passing grade or tending the offerings on a household kamidana shelf. In this sense, even though belief in specific anthropomorphic deities or gods may be absent, and even though the person may not be conscious of it, belief—or desire to believe— in the operation of things that may be referred to as invisible, overriding powers is widespread in Japan.

The English word “religion,” transmitted to Japan after the opening of the country in the middle of the nineteenth century, was translated into Japanese using the word shükyo 74k, and has acquired its particular meaning today because of how the word was adopted. Many Japanese are hesitant to say, for example, “Watashi wa shükyo o shinjite iru" (I believe in a religion), because shükyo was a word coined with its core referring to Christianity and does not match the way they practice religion, which involves going to temples or shrines and performing various rituals in the home. "Religion" in the Western sense of the word had the connotation of belonging to a church, that is, to a community of followers gathered together by personal convictions, or believing in a sacred text with a written doctrine providing the nucleus of certain teachings.

Thus there is a discrepancy between the concept of *shükyo" imported from the West and Japan's indigenous forms of religious activity. From the standpoint of the Christian concept of religion, to even call Japanese religiosity by the term *shukyo" may seem incongruous. Nevertheless, Japanese do believe in the workings of unseen presences. If that belief is called “religion,” then Japanese society has its own way of being religious, though it might differ from the Western way. So, because Japanese are uncomfortable in using the word "religion," with its connotations connected with Christianity, they often want to assert that they do not believe in "a religion," and end up expressing the difference by saying “Japanese are not religious.” By referring to “religion” in this negative manner Japanese can assert their own, non-Western, religiosity.

Even though Japanese may be "non-religious" from a Western perspective, the term shükyo is still included among the concepts referred to in contemplating their own existence, and it is part of the language that articulates their understanding of the world. It is on the basis of that language that the observer becomes aware of Japan's

PREFACE XV particular approach to religiosity, which does not fit into the Christian concept of religion, but occupies a kind of marginal space. Yet this does not mean that Japanese religiosity should be fixed as ahistorical and somehow uniquely Japanese. Indeed, the concept of religion has layered implications, including both Western meanings and non-Western connotations. Like the Western concept of religion, too, Japanese religion is a metaphor, empty of essential content, which becomes articulated only in the contingent, discursive formations that come to surround the concept.

In what time period did this Japanese word shukyo, standing for “religion” and becoming a part of the everyday modern Japanese language, acquire the meanings so familiar to us? And why is it that even though they use the word so frequently, Japanese came to be thought of as possessing a worldview that has been non-religious in the Western sense? First I would like to clarify the relationship between Japanese and the word shükyo.

The Modern West and the Concept of Religion

Shiikyo 73 as a term can be found since early times in Japan's Chinese-character Buddhist dictionaries. In the Edo period (1615-1868), it normally conveyed the meaning of “the true teaching, which is Buddhism.’ In the society of that time Buddhism was recognized by the government through the temple membership system (danka seido) requiring that every individual be registered with a Buddhist temple, and the word shükyo was not used in the context of other aspects of religious life, especially in the word's modern sense referring to a larger truth that transcends any one specific tradition of belief. At the end of the Edo period, with the signing of the Japan- United States Treaty of Amity and Commerce (also known as Treaty of Friendship and Trade, or Harris Treaty) in 1858, Japanese society was opened up to the Western world. Christianity flowed in and a new situation arose in which three different religions existed side by side: Buddhism, Christianity, and the practice of indigenous traditions, which eventually emerged as something called Shinto as those traditions were separated from their syncretic relationship with Buddhism in the late nineteenth century and reconstituted.

The Harris Treaty was not concerned with individual religious freedom, and at first the old prohibitions on Christianity in Japan were not dissolved. Under the terms of the treaty, the Tokugawa shogunate agreed not to interfere in the practice of Christianity among Americans and the American government agreed not to meddle with the shogunate's policy prohibiting Christianity. In 1873, however, the government notice boards that had proclaimed the official prohibition since the seventeenth century were removed, signaling tacit approval of the Christian faith among Japanese. When that moment came, for the first time Japanese needed to be able to compare

XVI PREFACE the multiple religions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Shinto (indigenous belief). The word shükyo was used as the concept under which they could be viewed as commensurate and on an equal plane. The meaning attached to the term was not, however, that found in the old Buddhist dictionaries; it was recoined as a translation for the Western word “religion.”

From this point in time shükyo—religion—expanded its meaning from that of Buddhist teachings to mean “teachings about common truths that exist beyond the frameworks of specific religions.” Such religions had become accessible to Japanese after contact with the modern Western world. But this was not a change in people's epistemological thinking that occurred without cause; it was a change triggered by the shifts in social systems that took place in the modern context of competition among several religions that accompanied the opening of the country.

A new language of gods and buddhas as *religion" was born, with Buddhism and Shinto intertwined around the axis of Christianity! In the sense that "religion" took as its premise an individualism in which personal interiority was considered supreme— the universal concept of "freedom of individual belief" of the modern West—it was something extremely Protestant, having absorbed especially the influence of the American brand of Christianity brought by the Protestant vanguard of missionaries coming to Japan. In contrast to Catholicism, which was deeply tied to this-worldly benefits and the folk beliefs of the masses, Protestantism aimed to build communities of faith on the basis of individual interiority alone. Its faith belonged to the private realm and was not to be brought into the public space of politics. Since the public space of society consisted of people from differing religious institutions and traditions, it ought to bea neutral, secular arena not biased towards any particular religious interest.

Catholicism did notseparate public and private in thesame wayas did Protestantism; rather, in the fashion of Islam or large parts of premodern Buddhism, religion permeated the public sphere. Because Catholicism was adapted to indigenous patterns of belief and practice, by spreading into the public space the Catholic tradition became firmly rooted in the everyday life of the general population.

From the standpoint of comparative religious studies, Protestantism's confinement of religion to private space and understanding of it as separated from secularized public space are rather rare in world history; these features can even be considered peculiar to Protestantism. However, as the westernization of Japan progressed, Japanese society happened to come under the influence of Protestantism as it had evolved in the United States, and out of that influence emerged an understanding of religion premised on separation from the secular sphere.

That understanding of the new word shükyo for religion was of course a trend mainly among intellectuals who came into contact with the West. Among ordinary

1 Ketelaar1990, chapters 4 and 5.

PREFACE XVII people who had little connection with the outside world, shükyo remained an unfamiliar word right up through the end of the World War II. The term for religiosity in familiar parlance that went back to the Edo period was the character compound 144, not pronounced shinko as in current Japanese but shingyo. But the establishment of the word shükyo as a matter of the inner life of the individual was not to be limited purely to a trend among intellectuals. In 1889, as was apparent in the words of Article 28 of the new Meiji Constitution, shukyo was adopted in the legal system as the object of free choice (shinkyo no jiyü {3 Fi E) founded on the will of the individual?

Thus although the general public may not have had a clear idea of the concept of religion in the Western sense, their speech and behavior regarding the term shinkyo in the Constitution was surrounded by the new legal system and strictly censored under the authority of the state. Even though the new word for religion did not enter directly into the everyday conversations of ordinary people, their very existence was incorporated as a kind of *uncivilized" dimension of the intellectual and legal hegemony in which intellectuals and the state authority occupied the uppermost levels.

Moreover, the notion of religious freedom the Meiji leaders had in mind did not arise from the aspiration to protect the human rights of the people; it was a concept developed to prove, as demanded in the conditions for implementing revisions to the unequal treaties that the Western great powers had coerced the Japanese state into signing, that Japan was a “civilized country" according to the Western definition. In reality, therefore, "freedom of religion" was no more than a means employed by the Western world to implant Christianity, which saw itself as the religion of universal civilization, in Japanese society.?

In short, religion—shükyo—was not familiar in Japanese society before the twentieth century and was not the expression of something spontaneous rising out of the lives of ordinary people. The concept arose from contact with the West and the external pressure of demands from the Western Great Powers for freedom on behalf of Christianity. "Religion" that revolved around Christianity was brought in from the outside, and Japanese felt a discrepancy between that concept and what they had thought of as the realm of the religious.*

Many Japanese intellectuals, except for those who converted to Christianity, felt estranged and discomfited by the new notion of shukyo, and they responded to those feelings in two ways. One was to modify their own religious beliefs in accordance with the Western concept of religion. Typical of this response were developments in

2 Article 28: "Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief" (as translated in the Encyclopedia of Japan, vol. 2).

3 Paramore 2009, chapter 6.

4 Asad 1993, chapter 1.

XVIII PREFACE

Buddhism. Under the temple registration system of the Edo period, Buddhism had offered little more than ritual—mainly funeral—services. After the Meiji Restoration (1868), the various schools of Buddhism tried to reform themselves, shifting towards teachings about relief from individual suffering and equipping themselves with the trappings of “modern” religions so as to be a match for Christianity with its churches, texts, and founder. The same was true for the popular new religions Konkokyo and Tenrikyo.5 These religions responded by sending their children and principal members to study at the Western-style religious studies departments of the imperial universities, and then proceeded to transform themselves from being mainly providers of physical healing into authorities on doctrine, emphasizing the inward conversion experiences of individuals.

Then Buddhist intellectuals, based on the ideas about evolution of Herbert Spencer being introduced to Japan around 1877-1886, began to emphasize that their religion had been rationalized and evolved into a philosophy using the term tetsugaku #47. These forays illustrate the attempt by Buddhist intellectuals to develop a polemic asserting that Christianity was just one of many religions but that Buddhism was instead a rational philosophical tradition on a higher plane. Here the reform of Buddhism was not being modeled after a concept of religion based on traditional Christianity; rather, it involved mobilizing the latest theoretical frameworks from the West to overturn the existing hegemony of the Western notion of “religion.” Yet the way that overthrow was eventually achieved not through Buddhism, but through the modernization of the Shinto religion, which was the second form of intellectual response to the emergence of “religion.”

At the time the concept of "religion" was first introduced to Japan, the *way of the kami” was called shinkyo (“kami teaching" #4), among other terms, in an attempt to liken it to the Western concept of religion. However, because it became embroiled in the competition for membership with Christianity and Buddhism—the other two main ^religions"—the Meiji government became concerned that the indigenous religious tradition might lose out in the process. So in the early 1880s, the government stipulated that the term Shinto (lit., kami way #5) be adopted. From that point it was emphasized in public declarations by the government and Shinto institutions that Shinto was not to be considered in the category of religion. This naming, changing the second character of the compound to to (way), sought to set it apart from the “religions,” which were denoted by the character kyo.

Another term used contrastingly vis-à-vis religion was dótoku Xt (morality). Dotoku shared the character i with Shinto but was also completely distinct from the new word shükyo. The new government terminology thus sought, through the choice of characters, to set apart for “Shinto” a semantic and social field completely separate from the concept of “religion.”

5 Shimazono 2004, part 3.

PREFACE XIX

By the early 1880s, the word shükyo had become established for the purposes of the individual, private realm of belief and for referring to the legal-rights question of religious freedom; the word dotoku (morality) was now invoked in the public realm of Japanese people or nation and came to be understood as relating to the public duty of subjects of the state. From that time, the terms shükyo and dotoku would be treated as dichotomous, dividing human activity into the private and the public spheres. The older terms Kyo (teaching) or taikyo (great teaching), which had been inherited from the Edo period and had not previously distinguished between public and private, also remained in use in the early years (1870s-1890s) of the Meiji era (1868-1912). The dichotomy between public and private, which accompanied the word shükyo from the West and which was tied to the inner realm and the dichotomous conception of the religious and the secular, was thus formed in the face of the threat of colonization by a Western country. This was part of a trend in Japan to establish, over and above affairs of the private realm, the priority of outer behavior in the public realm.

The premise of such a dichotomy of the religious and the secular was the establishment of a public realm that was secular and separate from religion, which was considered to be a private realm. It was because of this idea of separation of church and state—as represented particularly by Protestantism—in which the non-religious character of the public realm had been established, that the idea existed that religious activity in the individual private sphere—at least to the extent that it did not obstruct the public good— could be guaranteed. Modern Shinto, premised on this Western idea of the separation of the religious and secular, was placed not in the private realm of religion, but made instead to overlap with the public realm of the secular. By this means, Shinto succeeded in prescribing its acts of religiosity as the public duty of all the people of the state regardless of what beliefs they might hold as private individuals. Even though Shinto belonged in the category of religion in the sense that it held festivals for kami, its observances were officially defined as a non-religious public moral obligation. Thus Shinto activities could be required as a duty of any subject of the state. Under these circumstances, Shinto was redefined more as a rational form of dotoku than a religion, giving it a position of precedence. This was the path of modernization taken by Shinto.

Shinto and the Emperor System

Shinto, which had emerged in such a way as to avoid the competition for followers in the realm of religion with Christianity and Buddhism, had no doctrine of personal salvation, no founder, and no sacred texts. It conspicuously lacked the character of a religion that offered solutions for problems faced in the inner life of the individual.

XX PREFACE

Furthermore, its traditional ritual events were rooted in the everyday life of rural local communities and were intimately tied to people's activities in the public arena. Even today, in the carrying of mikoshi portable shrines at summer festivals one recognizes a dynamic, physical experience tied to the local community. For that reason it was quite understandable that Meiji-era politicians and bureaucrats thought that the most appropriate way to regulate Shinto was to link it to moral behavior in the public sphere. However, since Shinto was originally the ritual celebration of kami, they could not say that it was completely disconnected from religion. The problem was that, in the process of defining Shinto as a code of public morality, the public realm itself might be infused with religious character. Here arose the issue of what exactly would be the nature of the kami that Shinto would celebrate.

The majority of the kami celebrated in Shinto festivals can be traced back to the family lineage of the emperors. At the same time, Shinto today is composed of diverse elements: shrines, royal family rituals, Shinto-derived popular religions such as Tenrikyo, and popular folk beliefs. Some shrines, like Yasukuni Shrine are closely associated with the rituals of the modern state, and others that are guardian or tutelary shrines (ubusunagami) rooted in local communities. Imperial court rituals are generally related to ancient ceremonies for worshipping the gods of the emperor's ancestors, especially the emperor's performance of rituals for the deities of heaven and earth (tenchi no kamigami otf &). Shinto-derived popular religions like Tenrikyo or Konkokyo have doctrinal and ritual structures that incorporate veneration of the emperors along with the mythology of the Kojiki, Nihonshoki, and other ancient records. Until the end of World War II these latter groups were in a legal category called "Sect Shinto” or “Denominational Shinto.” Unlike the rest of Shinto, although similar to Christianity in the sense of being formed out of a community of belief based on their own doctrines, these groups alone were treated as "religions." "Shinto" also refers to popular folk beliefs enmeshed in the fabric of everyday life, such as kitchen gods