From 1868 the Meiji government built what scholars call State Shinto, and the mechanism was a definitional trick: shrine attendance was reclassified as a non-religious civic duty, so that it could be required of Christians and Buddhists without formally violating the constitutional grant of religious freedom. The state ranked and funded shrines, made priests officials, and in the shrine merger policy of 1906–1912 consolidated or destroyed tens of thousands of village shrines — the folklorist Minakata Kumagusu campaigned bitterly against it as ecological and cultural vandalism. Imperial descent from Amaterasu was taught as history, and the apparatus was central to wartime mobilisation. The 1945 Shinto Directive dissolved the system and cut off state funding. The unresolved part is Yasukuni, which enshrines some 2.46 million war dead as kami, and which in 1978 secretly added fourteen Class A war criminals; the Emperor Shōwa stopped visiting after learning of it and no emperor has visited since. Prime ministerial visits produce diplomatic crises with China and Korea, and litigation in Japan over whether official visits breach the constitution has run for decades. Families of the enshrined, including Christians and Taiwanese and Korean conscripts, have sued unsuccessfully to have relatives removed; the shrine's position is that enshrinement cannot be undone.