'Educating' Meaning Out of the People

If I understand correctly, there's a succession taking place in Japan. Old emperor wants to retire, so they need a new emperor. And, in order to become emperor, the new guy has to perform an ancient Shinto rite which consists of bringing a tithe of the nation's rice to the gods at a particular shrine.

The nation's government has funded this rite, which has appeared to set off some people, and I think it is a display of the poverty of mind that having the bureaucrat at the apex of society engenders.

It is a fundamentally error to assume this is a private act of worship for the Emperor and his family. Even so far away as I am from Japan, I can see that this is a public act of worship for the people of Japan.

Now, I am a Christian, but that doesn't make it impossible for me to understand this. It was, in fact, the way public Christian worship worked, until the bureaucrats got into control and started insist that things happen the way they happen in Rome, or wherever. Or the sometimes fashionable Protestant idea that pagan liturgical elements are evidence of evil pagan influence- this is foolishness. The people would incorporate various elements in their public worship because that was how they understood things. There would be similarities to wherever your evangelists came from, but when developing a liturgy in a particular place, you incorporate things well understood by the locals. Otherwise they will be just as confused as if you insisted on speaking a foreign language.

But now, it is completely alien to the minds of bureaucrats, especially their special little pupils, the journalists. They are deaf. If they were not, they would prefer money being spent on some rite, instead of all the horrible things bureaucrats spend money on. If there is theft, or misuse of money, it is clearly on the side of the bureaucrats- both the Emperor and the people have more of a claim on the national budget than the bureaucrats do. Indeed, it is a pity the Emperor cannot hold various people accountable in the government, for we have seen the public seldom can.