Shinto

• 1. Introduction

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  Eight million kami. In Japanese, that number does not mean a precise count. It means infinity, a way of saying that supernatural entities are present everywhere. This is the world of Shinto, a religion that began in Japan and revolves around the kami, beings believed to inhabit all things, from forces of nature to a single waterfall or a distinctive tree. There is no founder. There is no single sacred text. There is no central authority telling anyone what to believe, which is why belief and practice vary enormously from one community to the next. Most of Japan's population takes part in both Shinto and Buddhist activities, treating the two as compatible rather than exclusive. So what exactly is a kami, and why are mirrors and swords hidden inside locked boxes? Why do scholars argue that this ancient faith may actually have been invented in the nineteenth century? And how did a religion with no moral code become entangled with an emperor, an empire, and a shrine that still draws condemnation from across Asia? The answers run from briny seas stirred with a jewelled spear to roughly 100,000 shrines scattered across the country.

• 2. The Kami Nature

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  Joseph Kitagawa, a historian of religion, called the English translations of kami "quite unsatisfactory and misleading." The word has been rendered as "god" or "spirit," but many scholars urge against translating it at all. In Japanese the term is conceptually fluid, vague and imprecise, often applied to any phenomenon that inspires wonder and awe. Kitagawa described this as the kami nature and thought it somewhat analogous to Western ideas of the numinous and the sacred. Kami are not omnipotent, omniscient, or necessarily immortal. They inhabit the living and the dead, organic and inorganic matter, and even natural disasters like earthquakes, droughts, and plagues. The anthropologist John K. Nelson observed that Shinto treats the actual phenomena of the world itself as divine. During the Yayoi period, kami were regarded as formless and invisible. Only later, under Buddhist influence, were they depicted in human form, and statues of them came to be known as shinzo. Kami are usually tied to a specific place, often a prominent landscape feature such as a mountain, a large rock, or a waterfall. The physical objects in which a kami is believed to dwell are called shintai, and those placed inside a shrine are go-shintai. Mirrors, swords, stones, beads, and inscribed tablets are common choices. These are concealed from visitors, sometimes hidden inside boxes so that not even the priests know what they look like. A kami can be benevolent or destructive. Ignore its warnings, and it may mete out punishment, often illness or sudden death, a penalty called shinbatsu. Some kami can be intensely local. A community's protective kami is its ujigami, while a household's is its yashikigami, and a village founder enshrined in western Japan is a jigami.

• 3. Spear And Sea

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  The Kojiki recounts that the universe began with ame-tsuchi, the separation of light heaven from heavy earth. Three kami appeared first: Amenominakanushi, Takamimusuhi no Mikoto, and Kamimusuhi no Mikoto. Then came a brother and sister, Izanagi and Izanami, who were instructed to create land. Izanagi and Izanami stirred the briny sea with a jewelled spear, and from it Onogoro Island formed. The two descended to Earth, where Izanami gave birth to many kami. One of them was a fire kami, whose birth killed her. Izanagi descended to yomi to retrieve his sister, but he found her body putrefying. Embarrassed to be seen that way, Izanami chased him out, and he sealed the entrance with a boulder. Izanagi bathed in the sea to cleanse himself of the pollution of witnessing her decay. From his body further kami emerged: Amaterasu, the sun kami, from his left eye; Tsukuyomi, the moon kami, from his right; and Susanoo, the storm kami, from his nose. Susanoo behaved so destructively that Amaterasu hid inside a cave, plunging the earth into darkness, until the other kami coaxed her out. Amaterasu later sent her grandson Ninigi to rule Japan, handing him curved beads, a mirror, and a sword, the symbols of imperial authority. These narratives come from two eighth-century texts, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, both commissioned by ruling elites to legitimize and consolidate their rule. They drew heavily on Chinese influence and were never of great importance to everyday religious life. Yet in the early twentieth century, the government proclaimed their accounts to be factual.

• 4. Purity And Pollution

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  Death, disease, incest, and blood from menstruation or childbirth all count among Shinto's particular pollutants. The avoidance of such kegare, while ensuring harae, or purity, is one of the religion's central themes. In Japanese thought, humans are seen as fundamentally pure, so kegare is only a temporary condition that can be corrected. Rites of purification restore a person to spiritual health and render them useful to society. Full immersion in the sea is often regarded as the most ancient and effective form of purification. This links directly to the tale of Izanagi cleansing himself in the sea, the act from which other kami sprang. An alternative is immersion beneath a waterfall. Salt is treated as a purifying substance, and some practitioners sprinkle it on themselves after a funeral, while restaurant owners may place a small pile of salt outside before opening each day. Certain words, called imi-kotoba, are taboo at a shrine, and people avoid speaking them; these include shi for death, byo for illness, and shishi for meat. The misogi ceremony uses fresh water, salt water, or salt to remove kegare, while the oharae, the ceremony of great purification, is conducted twice a year at many shrines for end-of-year cleansing. This focus on purity threads through Japanese culture beyond the shrine. Performers of noh theatre undergo a purification rite before they perform, and purification is treated as important in preparation for the planting season.

• 5. A Religion Of Things Done

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  "Shinto is interested not in credenda but in agenda, not in things that should be believed but in things that should be done." That observation from the scholar Stuart D. B. Picken captures why Shinto carries no codified ethical doctrine. There is no unified, systematized code of behaviour. An ethical system nevertheless arises from practice, with emphasis on sincerity, honesty, hard work, and thanksgiving directed toward the kami. The virtue of shojiki encompasses honesty, uprightness, veracity, and frankness. Kannagara, the way of the kami, is treated as the law of the natural order, with wa, or benign harmony, inherent in all things. Disrupting wa is bad, contributing to it is good, and so subordination of the individual to the larger social unit has long marked the religion. The notion of saisei-itchi, the union of religious and political authority, runs throughout Japanese history. This flexibility has drawn frequent criticism from those who argue the religion can readily become a tool for legitimising power. Modern Shinto has tended toward conservatism and nationalism, an association that leads various Japanese civil liberties groups and neighboring countries to regard it with suspicion. The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, devoted to Japan's war dead, is especially controversial. In 1979 it enshrined fourteen men declared Class-A defendants at the 1946 Tokyo War Crimes Trials, drawing condemnation at home and abroad, particularly from China and Korea. Priests face their own ethical binds. In the 1980s, priests at the Suwa Shrine in Nagasaki debated whether to invite the crew of a docked U.S. Navy vessel to their festival, given the sensitivities around the 1945 atomic bombing of the city.

• 6. The Architecture Of Worship

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  Around 100,000 public shrines stand across Japan, in isolated rural valleys and dense metropolitan districts alike. About 80,000 are affiliated with the Association of Shinto Shrines, and another 20,000 are unaffiliated. The generic term for these spaces is jinja, meaning kami-place, a word that refers to the location rather than to any single building. Inside a shrine complex, the inner sanctuary where the kami lives is the honden, which may store the kami's artworks, clothing, weapons, instruments, and mirrors. Worshippers usually carry out their acts outside it. Halls of worship are called haiden, and the hall of offerings is the heiden. Shrine entrances are marked by torii, two-post gateways topped with one or two crossbeams, of which there are at least twenty different styles. Passing under a torii is often seen as a form of purification, and the gateways have become internationally recognised symbols of Japan. Most are painted vermillion, a choice reflecting Chinese influence dating from the Nara period. Statues of lion or dog like animals, the komainu, guard many entrances to scare off malevolent spirits, typically in a pair with one mouth open and one closed. A single kami may be enshrined far beyond its original home. Hachiman has around 25,000 shrines dedicated to him, and Inari has 40,000. Establishing a new shrine for a kami who already has one is called bunrei, dividing the spirit, and the kami's power is not believed to diminish by residing in many places at once. Some shrines are not even permanent. The Ise Grand Shrine is moved to an adjacent site every two decades to remove pollutants and ensure purity.

• 7. Priests And Shrine Maidens

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  Kannushi, the Japanese word for a Shinto priest, means proprietor of kami. Many take on the role through hereditary succession traced through specific families, and two universities train those who wish to become one: Kokugakuin University in Tokyo and Kogakkan University in Mie Prefecture. The number of priests at a shrine varies wildly. Some have dozens, others have none and are run by local lay volunteers, and some priests administer more than ten small shrines at once. Priestly regalia draws on the clothes of the Heian-period imperial court, including a tall rounded hat called an eboshi and black lacquered wooden clogs called asagutsu. During rituals a priest carries a flat piece of wood known as a shaku. The chief priest is the guji, with a larger shrine sometimes adding an assistant head priest, the gon-guji. Women's place in this hierarchy has shifted sharply over time. Female priests existed historically but were largely pushed out of their positions in 1868. During the Second World War, women were again allowed to serve as priests to fill the void left by men enlisted in the military. By the late 1990s, around 90 percent of priests were male and 10 percent female, feeding accusations that Shinto discriminates against women. Priests are assisted by jinja miko, sometimes called shrine-maidens, who are subordinate to the priests in the modern hierarchy. Their most important role is the kagura dance, the otome-mai. Miko earn only a small salary but gain community respect and learn skills like cooking, calligraphy, painting, and etiquette, which can help them later when seeking employment or a marriage partner.

• 8. Born Shinto, Die Buddhist

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  "Born Shinto yet die Buddhist." The scholar Brian Bocking used that phrase to describe most Japanese people, and it points to a deeper truth about how Shinto handles the boundaries of a life. A child's first visit to a shrine, the hatsumiyamairi, traditionally happens on the thirty-second day after birth for a boy and the thirty-third day for a girl. Historically the mother did not bring the child, because she was considered impure after childbirth, so another female relative carried the infant; since the late twentieth century it has become more common for the mother to do so. Coming of age is marked around the age of twenty, and weddings are increasingly held at shrines, which now treat them as an important source of income. Death is the boundary Shinto steps back from. Funerals tend to take place at Buddhist temples and involve cremation, because contact with death imparts the impurity called kegare. The earliest known Shinto funerals date from the mid-seventeenth century in certain areas of Japan, with local support. After the Meiji Restoration, in 1868 the government recognised Shinto funerals for Shinto priests, and five years later extended this to the entire population, though most people kept their Buddhist rites anyway. Whether a faith with this many local forms even counts as one religion remains disputed. The historian Kuroda Toshio argued that before modern times Shinto did not exist as an independent religion, and several scholars hold that it was essentially invented during the Meiji era. That was when nationalist leaders expelled Buddhist influence from kami worship and formed State Shinto, encouraging citizens to worship the emperor as a kami, an arrangement undone only after Japan's defeat in the Second World War, when Shinto was formally separated from the state.