| Calling into question the status of Shinto as the progression of a religious nationalism that culminated inexorably in the creation of the deified modern monarchy in Meiji Japan, this dissertation recovers the untold history of a Shinto god, Ookuninushi or "the Great Pillar of the Land," which both compromised and exposes the contingent nature of the constructions of the imperial authority. Examined in the context of trans-regional flow of knowledge, early modern commercialization, and European colonialism in Asia, the rise of Ookuninushi to the apex of the Shinto pantheon as a god of creation, blessing and judgment in the Tokugawa period (1600-1867) resulted from both active proselytization by the Izumo Shrine where the god was enshrined, and from efforts of Nativists (Kokugakusha) in constructing Shinto into a supreme form of knowledge to overcome the epistemological and social crisis, a crisis intensified by knowledge of Christianity, Western astronomy, and Russian expansion from the north. The building of the modern state in early Meiji period (1868--1912) was threatened from within by the contestations between the Izumo Shrine and the Ise Shrine the latter of which enshrined the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, the ancestor of the imperial house, over the authority to define the nascent state itself. When the Meiji state re-categorized the competing claims of Ookuninushi into a religion (Sect Shinto) and distinguished it from the nationalized shrine ritual system centering on the imperial ancestor (Shrine Shinto), the state in effect elevated the mythic claims of the Sun Goddess above competitions between private, religious beliefs, thereby constructing the divine imperial genealogy into an uncontested public, political authority for grounding the "civilized," modern nation-state. This study eventually argues that Ookuninushi's displacement by the Sun Goddess manifests essentially the Meiji government's domestication of both the modern category of religion and the heterogeneous Shinto discourse for constructing a modern mode of political rule. Thus reconstructed, indigenous narrative models give way to a history of Shinto that is constitutive of a global process in which construction of modern political authority was based on the mutually constituted categories of the secular and the religious, rather than on a teleological replacement of religion by the secular nation-state. |
