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:
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)