One of the most striking photographs of the twentieth century—a kamikaze plane crashing headlong into an Allied ship during the last year of the Pacific war—illustrates dramatically an extreme version of the collusion of religion and politics in Japan. The ideal of dying valiantly to defend or preserve one's sacred homeland is of course found in societies all over the world. However, few societies have combined diverse religious traditions, political will, educational curricula, and coercive social controls to elevate and sustain an ideology of personal self-sacrifice to the extent once found in Japan. Moreover all of these twentieth-century characteristics can be traced to earlier precedents within Japanese social and political history.

The practice of using religious traditions to enhance political power in Japan has a momentum of over eighteen hundred years. And yet the concepts of religion and politics have...