Kokutai Ideology and the Zaibatsu War Economy

At the ideological heart of the Japanese state stood the concept of 'kokutai,' or national essence, which held the emperor to be a divine descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. State Shintō functioned as a compulsory civic religion bound to the imperial cult, underpinning a doctrine of indissoluble unity between sovereign and subjects as one extended national family. Official texts such as the 'Kokutai no Hongi,' published in 1937, indoctrinated the population in imperial ideology, and schooling was oriented toward absolute loyalty to the emperor and self-sacrifice for the nation. This worldview rejected Western liberal individualism and promoted the idea of a Japanese civilizing mission in Asia, framed through the concept of the 'Imperial Way' (kōdō), while bushido was reinterpreted as a code of discipline and modern military sacrifice. Shintō shrines such as Yasukuni were used ritually to honor those who died for the emperor, and this state ideology persisted until Japan's defeat and Hirohito's formal renunciation of divinity in 1946.