The real nature of the religious life of Japan has been and still is predominantly communal.  Individualism has had a place, but, as we have repeatedly seen, only a minor place in forming the nation.  From the communo-individualistic standpoint, in the study of Japan’s religious and social evolution, not only can we see clearly that the three religions of Japan are real religions, but we can also understand the nature of the relations of these three religions to each other and the reasons why they have had such relations.  Japanese religious history and its main phenomena become luminous in the light of communo-individualistic social principles.

Shinto, the primitive religion of Japan, corresponded well with the needs of primitive times, when the development of strong communal life was the prime problem and necessity.  It furnished the religious sanctions for the social order in its customs of worshiping not only the gods, but also the Emperor and ancestors.  It gave the highest possible justification of the national social order in its deification of the supreme ruler.  Shinto was so completely communal in its nature that the individual aspect of religion was utterly ignored.  It developed no specific moral code, no eschatological and soteriological systems, no comprehensive view of nature or of the gods.  These deficiencies, however, are no proofs that it was not a religion in the proper sense of the term.  The real question is, did it furnish any supra-mundane, supra-legal, supra-communal sanctions both for the conduct of the individual in his social relations and for the fact and the right of the social order.  Of this there can be no doubt.  Those who deny it the name of a religion do so because they judge religion only from the point of view of a highly developed individualistic religion.

In view of this undoubted fact, it is a strange commentary on the failure of Shinto leaders to realize the real function of the faith they profess that they have sought and obtained from the government the right to be considered and classified no longer as a religion, but only as a society for preserving the memories and shrines of the ancestors of the race.  Thus has modern Shinto, so far as it is organized and has a mouth with which to speak, following the abdicating proclivities of the ancient social order, excommunicated itself from its religious heritage, aspiring to be nothing more than a gate-keeper of cemeteries.

The sources of the power of the Shinto sanctions lies in the nature of its conception of the universe.  Although it attempted no interpretation of the universe as a whole, it conceived of the origin of the country and people of Japan as due to the direct creative energy of the gods.  Japan was accordingly conceived as a divine land and the people a divine people.  The Emperor was thought to have descended in direct line from the gods and thus to be a visible representative of the gods to the people, and to possess divine power