The purpose of this paper is to examine an action which was brought in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1973.
The plaintiff is a wife whose husband was a member of the Self-Defence Forces. He was killed in a traffic accident while on duty. The defendant is the Self-Defence Forces and Taiyukai, an organization allegedly made up only of the retired members of the Self-Defence Forces.
The plaintiff, who is a devout Christian, asserts that it was a violation of constitutional principle of separation of religion and state and the freedom of religion that the defendant, disregarding the plaintiff's will, performed her husband's funeral in accordance with Shintoist codes within the confine of Gokoku Shrine in Yamaguchi Prefecture.
The defendant asserts that it was Taiyukai that performed it, that the Self-Defence Forces only helped Taiyukai, and that, since Taiyukai is not a state, no constitutional violation has been committeed.
The present paper examines the following points:
First, Is the conduct of the Self-Defence Forces against the constitutional principle of separation of religion and state, or not?
Second, When a husband's funeral is to be performed, whose religion is to be followed and respected: his religion, his wife's, or a third party's? and how are the three interrelated
Finally, The real social background of these problems will be claried indiscussing the religious activities of those who are affiliated with Yamaguchi prefectural and municipal administration and Shintoism.

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This article analyzes the Self Defense Forces Enshrinement case filed in 1973. It focuses on the relation between reconstruction process of the plaintiff woman's religious identity and process of the litigation as a social movement, from A. Melucci's theoretical perspective of 'new social movements'. As a result of analysis it clarifies the following points. 1) The litigation functioned as the process through which the symbolic issue of challenging the State Shinto by the movement was legally defined. Thereby the issue was disclosed as the legal problem. 2) The needs of forming autonomous individual identities were subject to the litigation as a political action. Consequently the plaintiff's religious identity was reconstructed heteronomously by the movement as a counter power. 3) In the movement, the orientation to 'freedom of conscience', which could be 'freedom of autonomous forming individual identities', was subject to the orientation to the anti-war and anti-political power struggle. From the theoretical point of view, the case has a serious limit and indicates an important task: how the needs of autonomous forming individual identities can be made compatible with critics of war and political power.

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