The Allied Occupation of Japan, Religious Freedom, and Japanese Public Schools

Conventional wisdom has it that the U.S.-led Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–52) brought religious freedom to a theocratic empire. But this tidy narrative overlooks the fact that Japanese people had been refining understandings of their constitutional religious freedom guarantee for decades before the occupiers arrived. By treating the Americans as magnanimous bringers of religious freedom, the conventional story also downplays the fact that the occupiers vehemently disagreed about what counted as religion and how to free it. My alternative account shows that the occupiers and their Japanese interlocutors solved pressing administrative and conceptual problems by treating religious freedom not as a civil liberty granted to citizens by their state, but as a universal human right. This newly capacious understanding of personal liberties was rhetorically effective and politically inspiring, but it unfortunately introduced confusion about citizens’ social obligations. The confusion was particularly acute in public schools. The postwar constitution prohibited religious instruction, but moral panics about wayward children convinced many observers that schools desperately needed the aid of religion. These longstanding debates over the propriety of morality training and religious instruction constitute an awkward legacy of Occupation-era policy that still impacts education policy in Japan today.    

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