Here it is worthwhile to pause and survey the development of Shinto
consciousness. Although very ancient, Shinto was always a sidelight to the
main intellectual action, and never was able to sustain any independent devel-
opment in the networks until it was finally adopted by a branch of the
Tokugawa intellectuals. The reason for this was fundamentally organizational.
Shinto was not one church but a rubric covering thousands of local shrines
with their particularistic deities. Its material endowments were simple; there
were no distinctive cult objects, no representations which could sustain an
artistic network, no body of textual doctrines on which an educational system
could be built in the fashion of the Buddhists. Shinto priests descended from
particular clans, and each local shrine was inherited within a family; hence
there was no wide network of recruitment or universalistic system of training
as in the Buddhist monasteries. Shinto was carried through the centuries largely
by the favorable policies of Buddhists, at first because Buddhists penetrating
the countryside made use of indigenous shrines as material bases and local
legitimation, then more generally by the policy of maintaining favorable con-
nections with the imperial court, which owed its ceremonial position above all
to its connection with a few of the most famous Shinto shrines. Buddhism
helped give the Shinto kami (indigenous gods) a wider intellectual significance,
at first by interpreting them as allies or manifestations of the Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas. At periods of political upheaval affecting the religious estab-
lishment, Shinto downplayed its particularism and portrayed its doctrine as
having larger moral and metaphysical significance.^41 As a generalized doctrine,
Shinto was parasitical upon Buddhism. Such organizational dependence pro-
motes doctrinal syncretism or at best thinly disguised borrowings.
In the early Tokugawa, the anti-Christian regulation requiring every family
to register with a Buddhist sect was applied to Shinto priests as well. Although
this wounded the status claims of the Shintoists, it also vastly improved their
organizational connections. Shinto shrines were put under the same regulatory
office as Buddhism, and brought into contact with the maneuverings of shogu-
nal administration as well as realignments of the intellectual networks. When
Buddhism suffered a drop in its upper-class patronage as a result of the
Neo-Confucian revolt, Shinto suddenly had an opportunity to claim its place.
The Watarai family of Ise now began to criticize Buddhism as a worse evil
than Christianity, and proposed instead a Shinto-Confucian alliance. A more
policy-oriented nationalist Shinto began in the Mito school, the most militant
antagonist of Buddhism. Lord Mito’s cousin and rival, Lord Aizu, promoted
his protégé Yoshikawa Koretaru to be the bakufu official in charge of Shinto,
and attempted to elevate the latter’s Yoshida branch of Shinto into a national
orthodoxy within Shinto. Shinto-Buddhist philosophical syncretism was re-
jected.^42 In its place Koretaru interpreted the kami as Neo-Confucian li, per-
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 365