A torii gateway under snow at the Shintō shrine on Mount Iimori, Aizu-Wakamatsu.
The worship of the kami was practised for centuries before other religions entered the Japanese scene, and even to the most casual visitor to Japan today, ‘the way of the gods’ appears to have very ancient and deep-rooted foundations. The proliferation of Shintō shrines in Japan, their presence usually indicated by the presence of a torii (a gateway in the shape of the Greek letter ‘pi’), leads any visitor to think that the religion kami represent is a long-established, crucial element of Japanese culture, providing it with a distinctive religious system found nowhere else on earth. Just as in the example of Matsuura Shigenobu, the kami are prayed to so that they will provide blessings of a this-world variety, such as success in exams and easy childbirth.1 On visiting a Shintō shrine people wash their hands and rinse their mouths in a sacred fountain. Coins are thrown into a box as an offering, and the bell is rung to summon the kami. Hands are clapped and heads are bowed.
Further observation, particularly of festival rites, suggests that Shintō bears some of the characteristics of primitive animistic belief. The worship of nature, the offering of food to the kami, the avoidance of impurity and the observance of rituals to correct a failure in this regard are its stock in trade. Shintō also appears to incorporate the worship of thousands of gods who are not necessarily either immortal or omnipotent. It has a pronounced local flavour, yet possesses powerful features associated otherwise with organized religion, such as a central organization, an ordained priesthood and numerous festivals on its calendar that are observed in similar ways across the nation. Kannushi (Shintō priests) wear striking traditional costumes of black eboshi hats and white robes, and project a dignity that is universally respected. Most importantly to the casual observer, Shintō gives the overriding impression of being somehow very, very Japanese.2
A brief examination of the literature available strengthens the initial impression that Shintō is Japan’s ‘national religion’. Its mythology seems to be concerned exclusively with the Japanese people and their environment, and the lively Shintō creation myths deal only with the creation of Japan, not any wider world. When sociological surveys are taken virtually all Japanese identify themselves with Shintō, so to some meaningful extent Shintō and being Japanese are synonymous. These casual impressions also appear to be confirmed by the official presentation of Shintō to the curious outsider. For example, a pamphlet published many years ago by the Jinja Honchō (the Association of Shintō Shrines, to which 75 per cent of all shrines belong),3 sums up the origin of Shintō for English-speaking visitors as follows:
Shinto is a general term for the activities of the Japanese people to worship all the deities of heaven and earth, and its origin is as old as the history of the Japanese. It was towards the end of the sixth century when the Japanese were conscious of these activities and called them ‘Way of the Kami’. It coincides with the time when the 31st Emperor Yomei prayed before an image of the Buddha [for] the first time as an emperor for recovery of his illness. Thus accepting Buddhism, a foreign religion, the Japanese realised [the] existence of a tradition of their own faith.4
The famous ‘floating torii’ of the Itsukushima shrine on the island of Miyajima, shown at low tide.
This paragraph is very interesting, because it states that it was only necessary to give a name to this supposedly indigenous belief system when there was a pressing need to distinguish it from the recently imported religion of Buddhism. Also, even though no less a person than the emperor chose to pray before an image of the Buddha, he was not thereby renouncing the existing religious tradition of Shintō. This would have been impossible, because he was its most important living symbol, a status that had come about because of the existence of a complex mythology that linked the imperial line to the kami. This is a vitally important topic in Shintō studies which this book will address. For now we may note that as the descendant of kami, Emperor Yomei (who is supposed to have reigned between 585 and 587) was in the distinguished, if somewhat bewildering, company of tens of thousands of deified spirits. Their vast range was neatly summed up by the scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), who provided this classic definition of kami:
first of all, deities of heaven and earth and spirits venerated at shrines, as well as humans, birds and beasts, plants and trees, oceans and mountains that have exceptional powers and ought to be revered. Kami include not only mysterious beings that are noble and good but also malignant spirits that are extraordinary and deserve veneration.5
A strangely shaped rock formation could therefore indicate the presence of a kami, while thunder was known as ‘the kami that rumbles’. Yet not all spiritual entities were kami. Tama (souls) and oni (demons), among other things, had a spiritual existence, and out of the vast crowd of spiritual possibilities certain entities were chosen and elevated in rank to a position where they were regarded as having power over other spirits. So the kami of a particular mountain was believed to control the animal and spiritual life of its locality. Mount Omiwa in Nara Prefecture, for example, is still venerated as the abode of a kami, and, unlike most Shintō shrines, there is no main hall for enshrining the kami because the mountain itself is its home. Its status as a ‘holy mountain’ is therefore broadly understandable to a foreign visitor, even though the practical expression of its veneration is more extreme than, say, Egypt’s Mount Sinai:
It is not very big in scale, but has kept up its pure figure through the vicissitudes of its long history. To this day, people… have never tried to step into the mountain, because it is a holy site, though Mt. Miwa is not enclosed by fence or palisades. Therefore, the trees are never cut down and the whole mountain is covered by virgin woods.6
Similar respect for other ‘holy sites’ is often remarked upon by foreign visitors and extends to small wayside shrines where there is a noticeable absence of graffiti and vandalism.
A Shintō shrine has somehow been fitted into this urban landscape next to an office block.
In a later stage of historical development some powerful kami were given names and adopted as tutelary deities by important families. In this way Hachiman, with his clear military connections, became the kami to be associated in particular with the powerful Minamoto family, whose son Yoritomo was to become Japan’s first hereditary sei-i-taishõgun (military dictator or ‘Shogun’) in 1192. But the Minamoto were not alone in their adoption of Hachiman. Matsuura Shigenobu clearly had a personal affinity towards him, while Okochi Hidemoto, another participant in Hideyoshi’s Korean invasion, shared Hachiman as his family’s personal kami. In a break from the fighting to capture the Korean town of Namweon in 1597, Okochi Hidemoto took a moment to honour Hachiman:
Graciously calling to mind that this day was the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, the day dedicated to his tutelary kami Hachiman Daibosatsu, he put down his bloodstained blade and, pressing his crimson stained palms, bowed in veneration towards far-off Japan.7
THE IMPERIAL CONNECTION
Out of all the tutelary kami adopted and revered by various families and their descendants, no connection is more important than the link made between Amaterasu, Japan’s ‘Sun-Goddess’, and the ruling imperial line. But the successive emperors of Japan – the members of the world’s longest surviving ruling house – do not claim merely to have adopted Amaterasu as their tutelary kami. Instead they have proudly proclaimed over the centuries an actual lineal descent from her. This is a divine ancestry that justifies the temporal power that they have enjoyed for so long, and has certainly helped preserve the dynasty, even if some of its members were deposed, banished and in one case, drowned.8
The earliest written accounts that make this claim date from the 8th century, by which time the imperial house was well established and Japan had embraced Buddhism and its associated Chinese culture. The sources include two important semi-historical works called the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon shoki (720), which were compiled under the guidance and direction of the imperial court. At first sight these ‘Books of Genesis’, which begin with the creation of the universe and move inexorably to the establishment of the ruling house, are works of colourful mythology. But they were also political propaganda, whereby several powerful myths, hitherto unrelated but now combined into a strong narrative, were used to justify the supremacy of one family – the ‘Yamato Court’ – over all others. This is not to say that these stories were deliberately invented by the imperial scribes. It is more likely that the tales already existed as animistic legends told by farmers and fishermen who venerated their own local kami.9
Dancers at the Fushimi Inari shrine near Kyōto.
The Kojiki version may be summarized briefly as follows. After a succession of generations of creator kami, the husband and wife Izanagi and Izanami give birth to the main islands of Japan. Izanami then brings forth the kami of fire and is burned to death. Izanagi goes in search of her in the land of the dead. Upon his return, he purifies himself in the ocean, an action that results in the creation of three important kami, each born from a different part of his body: Amaterasu, the Sun-Goddess, Tsukuyomi and Susa-no-o, to whom are allotted the three parts of the universe. Susa-no-o exhibits violent behaviour, which alarms his sister Amaterasu so much that she takes refuge in a cave. The world is therefore plunged into darkness and her fellow kami try desperately to entice her out. As a trick, Amaterasu is told that a rival kami even more powerful than she has arrived. Her interest aroused, she peeps cautiously out of the cave. The first things she sees are a precious jewel hanging from a tree and, next to it, the face of her new rival. This makes her start, and she is grabbed before she has time to realize that what she is actually looking at is her own reflection in a bronze mirror. Light is therefore restored to the world.
Susa-no-o takes a more positive role when he destroys a monstrous serpent that is terrorizing the people. As he reaches its tail, his blade meets with unexpected resistance, and Susa-no-o discovers a sword hidden therein. As it is a very fine sword he presents it to his sister, Amaterasu.10 Amaterasu in turn gives the sword to her grandson, Ninigi, who descends from heaven to rule the earth. Ninigi eventually passes it on to his grandson, Jimmu, identified as the first tennõ (emperor) of Japan, to whom are given the traditional dates of 660–585 BC. Jimmu Tennō keeps this sword as one of the three ‘crown jewels’ of the Japanese emperors. The mirror and the jewel that had restored light to the world become the other items in the imperial regalia.
A typical small Shintō shrine.
A young visitor to a Shintō shrine drinks from the sacred fountain, where one also rinses one’s hands.
By the time of these writings, the imperial line had faced many challenges to its supremacy. The rival clans who opposed the Yamato Court had their own creation myths and their own tutelary kami, as may be deduced from reading between the lines of the Kojiki account.11 A particular current of rivalry is suggested in the narratives concerned with the kami Susa-no-o. He is presented negatively as an unruly rebel and positively as a dragon-slaying hero, but he eventually submits to the authority of Amaterasu. Susa-no-o is associated with the important Izumo area of Japan (modern Shimane Prefecture), where he is honoured as the region’s cultural hero who brought knowledge of metal-working. As the myth finishes with the agreement of Susa-no-o’s descendant to yield the territory of Izumo to the Yamato line and build a grand shrine there, we may see within the story a re-telling of the political subordination of the sun line’s greatest domestic rival.12
To counter opponents like the Izumo chieftains, the Yamato line harnessed both the sacred and the samurai. The term ‘samurai’ was coming into use to describe the elite mounted warriors used by the emperors to enforce their rule. With the samurai as their army, their bodyguards and their policemen, the emperors ruled through a political structure based on successful Chinese models of governance. In this context it is interesting to note that one particular Chinese political tradition was decisively rejected by the Yamato emperors. Early in Chinese history, the idea had developed that the person who ascended the throne possessed the ‘mandate of heaven’. This implied that if heaven withdrew its mandate then the ruling house could be legitimately overthrown and be replaced, as was the case with successive Chinese dynasties. In marked contrast the Japanese creation myths recognized the emperor as the highest Shintō priest in the land who was descended from the greatest kami of all. This gave the Yamato rulers a permanent heavenly mandate.
The grafting of a system of imperial self-justification on to a stock of well-established localized folk-beliefs about kami – beliefs that were so much taken for granted that there was no need to give them a name – was to have fateful results many centuries later. In 1868, after the last Tokugawa Shogun had been overthrown in favour of a restored imperial power, there was an enforced separation of Shintō and Buddhism and the creation of purely Shintō shrines with no Buddhist elements within them. The founding fathers of modern Japan therefore made Shintō into a state cult of imperial veneration. They also made it serve nationalistic ends and used it to justify military aggression overseas. Motoori Norinaga, whose definition of kami was cited above, was a scholar whose work was to influence the restoration movement. He was clearly under no personal illusions when he wrote the following:
Our country’s Imperial Line, which casts its light over this world, represents the descendants of the Sky-Shining Goddess. And in accordance with that Goddess’s mandate of reigning ‘for ever and ever, coeval with Heaven and earth’, the Imperial Line is destined to rule the nation for ever until the end of time and as long as the universe exists. That is the very basis of our Way. That our history has not deviated from the instructions of the divine mandate bears testimony to the infallibility of our ancient tradition. It can also be seen why foreign countries cannot match ours…13
The inner courtyard of the Isonokami shrine near Tenri, showing casks of sake left as offerings.
This is a classic exposition of Shintō in its bombastic nationalist guise, and passages such as these, when contrasted with the rustic simplicity of a village shrine, can only serve to increase the confusion over what Shintō actually is. Is it ‘a relic of ancient nature worship’ or ‘an outdated invented tradition’?14 The most extreme position on this was taken by Kuroda Toshio, who regarded both the indigenous nature of Shintō and its supposed uniqueness as being largely a modern construction dating from the time of Japan’s re-emergence into the wider world. Something that had never really existed before 1868 was invented and given the label of ‘Shintō’ to justify the new powers exercised by the emperor. Belief in a continuous Shintō tradition was therefore no more than belief in a ghostly image.15
Kuroda did not deny that the worship of kami had gone on for centuries. Rather, he saw them as occupying a central role in pre-modern Japanese religious life as a way of localizing and integrating Buddhist worship into the Japanese milieu. All of what is commonly regarded as Shintō was kami worship carried out side by side with the worship of Buddha, not as a compromise but as a well-integrated whole. The historical position has been expressed succinctly as follows:
The fact of the matter is that Buddhist monks in pre-modern Japan were also Shintoists, which is to say no more – but no less – than that they were enmeshed from birth in a cultural fabric that was shot through with a melange of indigenous and imported myths, symbols, rituals and moods that taken together we call Shinto. Throughout most of Japanese history, foreign (Buddhist, but also Taoist and Confucian) and indigenous elements were amalgamated in a single cohesive whole. Indeed, Buddhism and Shinto were amalgamated institutionally, ritually, and doctrinally to such a degree that to treat them as distinct, independent traditions is to misrepresent the structure of pre-modern Japanese societies.16
In this way not only did Buddhism influence Shintō – Shintō also caused the transformation of Buddhism within Japanese culture. There may have been differences between the sorts of rituals that Shintō and Buddhism carried out, but they were functional differences rather than ones that could be labelled ‘sectarian’.17
A Shintō priest carrying a gohei (the ceremonial ‘wand’ used to give blessings).
A golden Shintō gohei was used as a battle standard by Shibata Katsuie. In this print his standard-bearer Menju Ietora fights bravely to rescue it from the enemy.
Modern research, unfettered by the nationalism of the mid-20th century, tends to see Shintō as a complex religious phenomenon, and questions the understanding that the Japanese people have of themselves in relation to Shintō. Many Japanese people participate in a large number of Shintō festivals and rituals, such as shrine-visiting at New Year, a time when a casual visitor to the Inner Shrine at Ise receives the impression that half the Japanese population has come along too. No Japanese people, however, would profess affiliation to ‘the Shintō religion’. Kami worship is more like an undercurrent to the business of being Japanese, expressing a concept of worship that is very different from conventional Western ideas of religious behaviour and belief. Modern research leads to many conclusions about Shintō’s complex origins that go far beyond the imperial creation myths.18
THE ORIGINS OF THE KAMI
If Shintō is itself difficult to define, the same applies to the deities that are its focus. Among the notable differences between Japanese and Western thinking about religion is a willingness to accept comparatively imprecise definitions of the nature of its gods. Kami never seem to be precisely identified, and it is sometimes difficult to avoid a circular reasoning that defines Shintō as the worship of kami and then defines kami as that which is worshipped in Shintō, although this vagueness somehow manages to express something of the true kami nature.19
Any modern searches for the origin of the kami must begin with certain archaeological artefacts that suggest a use for religious purposes. Without written evidence, however, we can only speculate as to how such a religion was practised, and whether any entities resembling kami provided its focus. As time went by two distinctive pottery-producing cultures emerged. The first was the Neolithic Jōmon culture (c. 10,000–300 BC). It was initially a hunter/gatherer culture, followed by primitive agriculture, and excavations of Jōmon sites have yielded some very striking clay figurines called dog. Nearly all depict women with exaggerated breasts and distended abdomens suggestive of pregnancy. Some have been accorded special care, having been placed on a platform,20 and it has been suggested that the dog represent female deities who managed procreation.21
The Yayoi culture (c. 300 BC–AD 300) that succeeded the Jōmon era was based around a developed agricultural system that concentrated on the cultivation of rice. Bronze and iron tools were used in rice growing, and divination was practised by shamans who interpreted the cracks that resulted from heating deer bones.22 The Yayoi people also used tools that were probably imported from mainland China and Korea. These included iron shovels and ploughs, but bronze mirrors and bell-like ritual objects were also an important part of their lives.23
The developed form of Shintō shrine-building is illustrated here by the Oagata shrine near Komaki.
We know far more about the Yayoi Period because of accounts written by Chinese visitors to Japan. One, the Wei Zhi (History of the Kingdom of Wei) of c. 297 AD, describes a female ruler of Japan called Pimiko who practised shamanism.24 Bell-shaped bronzes called dõtaku are also found in Yayoi sites and appear to have been used for ceremonial and religious purposes,25 but the most striking link from the Yayoi Period to what we now call Shintō lies in the design of the earliest Shintō shrines, which emerged a few centuries later and show a debt to Yayoi culture. The erection of buildings to make a jinja (shrine) where ‘the kami is venerated at a place of his own selection, rather than that of man’ is a later development in Japanese religious history.26 Because the most ancient form of sacred space had been a tree, a stone or some other natural phenomenon, many shrines incorporated their natural surroundings into their design, as they still do today, sometimes with the sole addition of a small hokora (a small stone shrine with a sloping roof).
Archaeologists believe that the distinctive style of the shrines at Ise is typical of rice storehouse construction during the Yayoi Period. An image of one storehouse appears on a cast bronze bell discovered on the island of Shikoku.27 Ise, the location of the enshrinement of Amaterasu, consists of two shrines: one to Amaterasu and the other to Toyouke, the kami of food. According to a long tradition the two shrines were alternately rebuilt after a period of 20 years in an exact replica of the building that came before – a simple wooden structure consisting of a high pitched roof and a raised floor.
A kamidana, the household ‘god shelf’ whereby Shintō has a place in the family home.
A very dramatic change in the religious landscape in Japan came in about AD 300 with the building of the first kofun (large burial tumuli). Those constructed to house the remains of emperors are enormous, often 200m (656ft) long. Some are shaped like a keyhole, and many form artificial islands within a lake. The time of their construction, between 300 and 646, is known as the Kofun Period, and the grave goods and evidence of funerary practices show a considerable religious aspect to the times.28 Queen Pimiko’s burial rites are described in the same Chinese chronicle noted above, which tells us how ‘a great mound was raised over her more than a hundred paces in diameter and over a hundred of her male and female attendants followed her in death’. The few kofun that have been excavated reveal that armour, harnesses, weapons, bronze mirrors and jewels were buried with the deceased. On top of the tombs or inside them were placed haniwa, primitive but lifelike clay models of soldiers, servants and animals, which may have their origins as substitutes for the human sacrifice described in the account of Queen Pimiko’s death. Together with the real weapons buried in the tombs, the haniwa show that these early aristocrats eventually became mounted warriors – the ancestors of the samurai. The articles found inside the tombs indicate both a sophisticated production system in Japan and close trading links with continental Asia.29
Even though the number of artefacts associated with kofun burials is large, it is difficult on this basis alone to identify the specific kami that are connected with the sites other than the august person who is buried there. By this time, however, the ranking of the kami had begun, and the routes by which certain kami had entered the realm of humans were beginning to be identified. Some came from the mountains, others from the sea. Particular reverence also grew for the yorishiro, the symbolic object in which the kami settled.30 A useful metaphor, although one to be applied with care, sees the yorishiro as a ‘landing site’, with the ritual purification of the sacred area as an act of ‘trapping the power of the divinity within the sacred space’.31
There is a great similarity in style between the design of the earliest Shintō shrines and that of the rice storehouses constructed during the Yayoi Period. Here two storehouses have been reconstructed at the important archaeological site of Yoshinogari, which may be the seat of the legendary Queen Pimiko.
The main building of the Kasuga shrine at Nara, founded in 709 by Fujiwara Fuhito to enshrine the tutelary kami of the Fujiwara family. It has close associations with the Buddhist Kōfukuji nearby.
In some mysterious way the kami both inhabit their shrines and act at a distance from the place they reside.32 So, for example, it is not the Sun-Goddess herself who dwells in the Ise shrine. Her true place is in heaven, but she is present in some way on earth, as is proved by her answering the prayers that are made to her at the shrine. The goshintai (the ‘body of the god’ – the object in the shrine that provides the precise location of the kami) may be clearly identified, such as the sacred mountain of Omiwa, but more often it is an object that remains hidden inside the shrine, wrapped in a succession of unopened caskets and cloths, sometimes with its actual identity unknown even to the priests who are its guardians. Of known objects, many are mirrors, while other goshintai include swords, stones and in one case an iron ball. They are often carried in the ceremonial palanquins called mikoshi, the portable shrines paraded during a shrine’s annual matsuri (festival) in a journey that may include a visit to the place where the object was originally found. Elaborate ritual precautions are taken to hide a goshintai from human eyes when it is being transferred from a shrine building, even though it may be securely wrapped. As recently as 1967 cars in Nara still had to put out their lights within the radius of half a mile from a certain shrine when transference was taking place.33
Shintō kannushi (priests) of the Omiwa shrine, dressed in full robes for the shrine’s spring matsuri (festival).
By the end of the Kofun Period Shintō was well on its way to becoming an institutionalized religion that supported the imperial hegemony without losing its agricultural and fertility roots. Perhaps the most significant ritual to demonstrate the continuing link was the Daijõsai, a ceremony held at the time of a new emperor’s accession to the throne, during which the new monarch shared with the kami a meal prepared from rice grown in consecrated fields. By the end of the 6th century, however, the kami no longer had it all their own way. Foreign beliefs had arrived in the land of the gods.