Author: John D. (Page 98 of 202)

Jewish connection

August 29, 2014 / John D.

The colourful old synagogue of Krakow, now serving as tourist sight. Only 200 Jews now live in the city, though before the war there was a thriving community of over 60,000.

My summer vacation this year has brought me to the charming town of Krakow, in southern Poland, where the castle, churches and old part of the city offer European culture at its finest. One of the prime tourist sights is the former Jewish quarter, near which stands the factory where Oskar Schindler famously compiled his list. Auschwitz is just 40 miles away.

As it happens, my maternal grandmother was a Czech Jew who died in the Holocaust, though for most of my life I was unaware of it. Only after the death of my mother did I find out, for she had kept it secret from her children throughout her life. Later I discovered that this was common amongst Holocaust survivors, in order to protect their offspring.

It was in Japan, oddly, that I first learnt the truth about my background, through a chance meeting with a Czech musician in Kanazawa. It led me to trace my grandmother to the camp of Terezin, from where she was sent to Lvov and shot. Her husband, a high-court judge, had already died of natural causes, and my mother managed to escape to the West on a false passport via the south of France.

Model of the Ark of the Covenant. Many have noted its similarity to the mikoshi (portable palanquin) used to transport the kami at Japanese festivals.

Though I spent three years in the Middle East (Bahrain and Kuwait), I had never learnt much about Judaism. Now however, wandering around the old Jewish area of Krakow, the similarities with Shinto come to mind, particularly how closely the two ‘world religions’ are identified with one particular race. The subject was something I’d thought about before through reading such books as The Jews and the Japanese by Ben-Ami Shillony, professor of Japanese history, which notes the common characteristics of hard work, cleanliness and sense of the collective which led them to become ‘successful outsiders’.

Despite the obvious difference with Judaism and its emphasis on morality and monotheism, Shinto shares a vital characteristic in the notion of a ‘chosen people’ for whom their land was specially intended. Commentators have suggested this leads to insularity and a tendency to see the world in terms of us and them. As a result, race, religion and homeland are all closely bound up with the sense of identity.

There are those who go further, however, and claim there are actual historical links between Judaism and Shinto. The theory supposes that one of the lost tribes of Israel made its way along the Silk Road and entered Japan in the early centuries, leaving their mark on the indigenous faith. It’s not such a cranky idea as it might appear, since Jewish settlers are known to have existed in China from early times. And arguments have been made for Japan’s influential Hata clan having Middle East origins.

For those interested in the remarkable similarities between Jewish and Japanese culture, the academic Kubo Arimasa has compiled a list at the following site. They include linguistic oddities, such as the 500 vocabulary items which closely resemble the other language: http://www.biblemysteries.com/library/tribesjapan.htm

For those who prefer to watch a video, there’s a three-part truncated Japanese television programme with subtitles that examines some of the research being done into possible historical links. Even if you don’t find the arguments persuasive, and some are clearly speculative or coincidental, there are fascinating questions raised by people willing to put their reputations at stake. Take a look for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhlkuGwEecY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw59ryraJ90
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt5oHPNuLh0

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The following article comes from the Jerusalem Post in 2010 (click here for the original).

At Hebrew University, 26 Shinto priests from Japan conduct interfaith dialogue.
Though a polytheistic religion such as Shintoism, and the world’s oldest monotheistic religion – Judaism – seem worlds apart, followers of the two seem to think there is common ground. To that end, 26 Shinto priests from Nagoya, Japan, met last Thursday at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to conduct an interfaith dialogue with Israeli academics. Among the academics were Prof. Ben-Ami Shilloni of the Department of East Asian Studies, who discussed similarities between Jewish and Shinto beliefs.

Jewish scholars meet with Shinto delegates from Atsuta Jinja for discussions at Israel's Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2010

According to Shilloni, followers of Shintoism, which believes in multiple gods, seek interfaith dialogues in an effort to get past religious barriers that are, in their eyes, the basis for much of the world’s conflicts. Shintoism, Japan’s “natural and oldest religion,” is a pacifistic faith that accepts other beliefs.

The delegation comes from Nagoya’s Atsuta Shrine, traditionally believed to have been established during the reign of Emperor Keiko (71-130 CE). The 200,000 square meter shrine complex draws more than 9 million visitors a year.

At the meeting, Shilloni read the verse from Isaiah in Japanese, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Shilloni elaborated, “Though this was prophesized by Isaiah 2,600 years ago, Japan has been blessed with peace, while the Jews have yet to be.” According to Shilloni, the followers of Shintoism have a very positive view of Judaism, and see it as the mother of Western religions, and thus holier than other monotheistic faiths.

Enmusubi Jewish-style – an amulet for successful relationships on sale in the Jewish quarter of Krakow

Bahij Monsour, head of the Foreign Ministry’s religious department, said this trip was initiated by the Shinto priests, who approached the Israeli ambassador in Tokyo . Shinto priests last visited here about 10 years ago, when they met with then-Sephardic Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron. The current delegation, here for just five days, did not meet with either chief rabbi. They did, however, visit Yad Vashem.

According to Shilloni, the dialogues aid in portraying Shintoism as a less primitive religion than is believed by most of the monotheistic world, and aim to show the common ground shared by Shintoism and other faiths. Israel also has an interest in interfaith dialogues, as they contribute to Israel’s and Judaism’s image as open and accepting, he said.

“It is much easier for us to conduct interfaith discussions with Shinto than with Christianity or Islam, since the latter two reject Judaism in favor of their own faiths, while Shintoism accepts Judaism as it is,” Shilloni said last week.

Though the followers of Shinto embrace all faiths, not all faiths embrace them. This, suggests Shilloni, may be the reason priests did not meet with any Christian or Muslim representatives during their visit.

While Christianity and Islam classify people as either believers or nonbelievers, the followers of Shintoism have no problem accepting other religions and practices, and one can be a perfect Shintoist while simultaneously serving other gods or participating in other types of worship. Testimony to this, said Shilloni, are the Christian wedding ceremonies most Japanese couples undergo, despite their adherence to Shintoism.

Ainu spirituality

August 27, 2014 / John D.

Ainu prayer ritual to the god of fire (this and other photos courtesy Sato)

Though they are few in number now, the Ainu of Hokkaido have great appeal to some because of their ancient traditions. Ethnologists believe they are the remnant of Japan’s original Jomon people, and their spiritual heritage reaches far back into the realm of prehistory. For Joseph Campbell they offered a compelling picture of how religion evolved in its earliest form.

The following informative piece is taken from the blog ‘Discover Japan’ by Yumiko Sato, writer and music therapist living in Aomori. Her writing is hosted on Huffington Post UK, and the link carries a listing of her articles. I’m very grateful to Yumiko for her permission and cooperation. (All photos on this page are taken from her blog.)

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Yumiko writes….

An Ainu elder, around 1930

After visiting the Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, Hokkaido, I wrote two posts about the Ainu, indigenous people of Japan who still live throughout the country. (See here and here.) There are about 23,000 – 24,000 Ainu in Hokkaido today, but this doesn’t include those living outside Hokkaido. The exact number of the Ainu living in Japan is unknown. One reason for this is that some feel the need to hide their identities in order to avoid discrimination.

I decided to look deeper at the Ainu culture, because I knew so little about it. It seemed strange that the indigenous people of Japan had mostly been ignored by its own country. I don’t know anyone personally who discriminates against the Ainu. At the same time I don’t know anyone who is interested in their culture either. This indifference is perhaps the source of discrimination. My hope is that sharing the information will help you learn about their unique culture and traditions.

One can not understand the Ainu without learning about their spirituality, since it’s central to their lives. Their spiritual practices are rich and complex. They’re different from Shinto, the traditional Japanese religion, and they don’t fit the usual definition of animism.

The Ainu felt the presence of the spirits of the dead in their day to day lives. They believed that the human lives were protected by the dead spirits who lived in all things that existed in the human world. At the museum the first thing on display was a large board depicting different gods – solar deity, god who rules the fish, god who rules the deer, god who rules the earth, god of fire, and so on.

The Ainu solar deity

“Ainu” means “human” as opposed to “kamuy” (gods). The Ainu believed that Gods existed everywhere in the world. This included not only natural phenomenons but also the man made objects, such as the lacquerware boxes which were used for important rituals. The lacquerware boxes were also symbols of power and wealth, since the Ainu gained them through trade with the ethnic Japanese.

To acquire one lacquerware box the Ainu had to offer a number of valuable items, such as a hundred of salmons or furs of several bears. So the house with many lacquerware suggested that the man of the house was a good hunter, and that the family didn’t have to struggle with foods.

Inaw [or inau], prayer sticks made of wood, were also very important spiritual icons. There were many different kinds of inaw. Some were offered as gifts to gods or used to communicate with gods, while others were considered gods themselves.

Iyomante spirit-sending ceremony, one of the most important for Ainu

The life of the Ainu was guided by their deep sense of spirituality. On every occasion prayers were offered and various ceremonies were held. “Iyomante” is one of the most important Ainu ceremonies and perhaps the most misunderstood one – the spirit-sending ceremony.

Iyomonte is a ceremony to send back the spirits of bear cubs to the divine world, an intricate ceremony involving many steps and extensive preparations. Iyomante represents the essence of their spiritual life, but its complex nature has also caused outsiders to misunderstand the spiritual traditions of the Ainu.

Picture depicting Ainu and bear cub during iyomante

The Ainu people believed that gods took on the forms of animals and visited the human world. The bear god was highly regarded, since it provided many things to humans, such as fur and meat. During iyomante the soul of bear cubs was sent back with abundant offerings, such as foods, sake, treasures, or ornamental arrows.

But what does it mean by sending a bear cub to the divine world?

Iyomante took place between January and February when the snow was deep on the ground. The bear cub, captured in a hibernation den during winter, had been kept in a cell next to the house. The Ainu people often raised the bear as a part of the family and developed a deep bond.

Inaw, the ritual wood shaving sticks used in prayers.

It took nearly a month to prepare for iyomante. Two weeks prior to the ceremony they began making sake and dango (dumplings). A few days before they started making inaw, important spiritual icons of the Ainu. On the day before the ceremony they offered a prayer to the fire goddess. This was done prior to all ceremonies because communication with other kamuy (deities and spirits) was impossible without her divine intervention.

After the prayer people celebrated with dance, song, and story telling, which sometimes lasted until the midnight. Next day iyomante took place. It began by offering prayers to the god of fire once again, which followed by placing inaw in certain ways to make an altar like structure.

After lunch they took the bear out of the cell and tied him/her to a post with a rope. The bear cub would play while people offered a prayer. Women would line up in front of the house, clapping and dancing “rimuse,” the last dance to show God that this was in the form of animals called “bear” on this earth.

Eventually men would shoot arrows and kill the bear. Then the prayers were offered again to the bear. Some men would place dango (dumplings) and kurumi (walnuts) next to the body while others drop dango from the roof of the house. It was believed that the bear would take those things to the divine world. Once the dango was scattered, a young man would shoot an arrow into the sky toward the East, a sacred direction to the Ainu.

Even though the bear was ceremonially killed, he was not a sacrifice to god. Instead the Ainu believed that a god spirit came to the people, disguised as a bear, and that the death of the bear released the spirit, allowing it to return to god’s land.

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For the current situation regarding Ainu, including their position as an official minority and a politician’s assertion that they no longer exist, please see this article. For a seven-minute documentary, see this youtube video.

Traditional housing in Hokkaido at the Ainu museum

Ainu house interior decoration with inaw, Some were used multiple times, and some disposed of after being used for a single prayer.

Post-Shamanic

August 22, 2014 / John D.

A festival tengu, remnant of Japan's early shamans

A news item recently caught my attention relating to the world’s oldest pair of trousers, found on some Chinese skeletons. The trousers were thought to be those of shamans.

It’s thought shamanism was widespread in early cultures, and Plato wrote in Phaedrus that ‘the first prophecies were the words of an oak’ (interestingly, this was the sacred tree of the Druids). Ancient people used to listen to an oak, or even a stone, he claimed, ‘as long as it was telling the truth’. Hah!! I like that!

Shaman masks now treated as 'treasures' of the Gion Matsuri

In the shamanic world there are ancestral spirits which watch over their descendants, and their are spirits in nature which inhabit animate or inanimate objects. The shaman is a person with special gifts able to mediate between the material world and the spirit world, typically in the form of trance or possession.

Shamanism developed with hunter-gatherer tribes and herding societies. With the move to agriculture, different forms of religious expression evolved which were more stratified and codified. In a paper on the subject, Dean Edwards writes that ‘A society may be said to be Post-Shamanic when there are the presence of shamanic motifs in its traditional folklore or spiritual practices which indicate a clear pattern of traditions of ascent into the heavens, descent into the netherworlds, movement between this world and a parallel Otherworld. Such a society or tradition may have become very specialized and recombined aspects of mysticism, prophecy and shamanism into more fully developed practices and may have assigned those to highly specialized functionaries.’

As Joseph Campbell has pointed out, with a settled existence shamans lose their power and ritualists take over, more concerned with social order and stability. These priests become organs of state, with a vested interest in support of the ruling class. Those with direct access to unruly spirits are demoted and reduced to the role of magicians, or marginalised to the mountains.

Spirit clothes, used in Korean shaman ceremonies

Something of the kind clearly happened in the case of Shinto, where kami are summoned by formal requests by licensed priests rather than induced by trance. The divine voice expressed once in oracle is now sold through fortune slips. Female shamans possessed by kami have been transformed into sales girls selling amulets and performing stately dances. It’s evident too in the animal statuary of Shinto. Power animals once helped the shaman in the transition between worlds – ‘memories of their animal envoys still must sleep, somehow, within us,’ says Campbell. Now they stand as immobile guardians at shrines, fossilised in stone.

In the taming of Shinto, I can’t help thinking there’s something of the Japanese penchant for taming (human) nature. Control, ritual and orderliness is the Japanese way. As Alex Kerr has pointed out in his book Dogs and Demons, the common boast of having a special connection with nature can mean in practice a cut flower in a tokonoma – contained and framed. Shamanism by contrast is much too wild!

11 WC8U0163.November Schamanin, Jeju, Korea JPG.

Shaman dance in Jeju, Korea where shamanism remains a living tradition

Hearn 1): v. Chamberlain

August 21, 2014 / John D.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) and his one-time mentor and friend, Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850-1935), were both deeply versed in Shinto. I’ve long been fascinated by the differences between them, perhaps because they speak to different parts of my personality. On the one hand is the deeply romantic Hearn, who sought to escape an industrialising present in an idyllic Japan. On the other hand, there is the scholarly Chamberlain, concerned to maintain his commitment to truth.

Statue of Lafcadio Hearn in Matsue, Shimane, where he had his first house

Basil Hall Chamberlain, one-time good friend and mentor to Hearn

Hearn married a Japanese and went native; yet though Chamberlain was the more fluent linguistically (he famously taught Japanese to the Japanese themselves), he clung to his British identity. In contrast to Hearn’s enchantment with folklore, Chamberlain remained detached in his compilation of the voluminous Things Japanese (1890-1906).

It was Chamberlain who as professor at Tokyo Imperial University helped Hearn get his first job in Japan. Hearn became more well-known because of his writings, which shaped Western perceptions of the country. He wrote of folk customs and ancestor worship, whereas B.H. Chamberlain translated the archaic Kojiki (1882), a huge achievement but not of such popular appeal. Nonetheless Chamberlain is acknowledged as the most influential translator of Japanese before Arthur Waley (who translated Genji).

The Japanese adopted Hearn as one of their own, as indeed he was after being naturalised as Koizumi Yakumo. His house has been turned into a museum, and his great-grandchildren keep his name alive in the public domain. Chamberlain by contrast is little-known among the Japanese. But a century after the influential pair, it seems to me that though Hearn’s writing has a seductive pull, it was Chamberlain who was the more enlightened, as is evident in the paper below. I used to belong to the Hearn persuasion; recently I’m inclining towards Chamberlain.

The garden in Hearn’s house in Matsue of which he wrote so graphically

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New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 3, 2 (December, 2001): 106-118.
INTERPRETING JAPAN’S INTERPRETERS: THE PROBLEM OF LAFCADIO HEARN
NANYAN GUO1 University of Otago

Hearn loved what he thought of as ‘Shintoism’, which in his mind combined various beliefs and practices of the common people with the ideology of the Emperor system, which was being constructed in the Meiji period. This has been emphasised recently by some Japanese scholars who treat Hearn as the non-native person who best understood the traditional culture of Japan.

However, Hearn’s interpretation of Shintoism is problematic. He confused the Shintoism he discovered in Japanese legends and religious sentiment, which fascinated him, with the fanatic nationalism which was then being constructed by politicians and ideologues on Shinto foundations. He seems to know little of the political background to this latter process.

Chamberlain’s translation of The Kojiki opened up the stories of Japanese mythology to the likes of Hearn and other Japanophiles.

Having himself become ‘Japanese’, Hearn’s writings on Japan suffer from his uncritical and excessive embrace of many things ‘Japanese’, and it is this element which makes them susceptible to manipulation in the interests of a different kind of nationalism one hundred years later.

When Japan started to gain confidence from its economic success in recent decades, Hearn’s popularity again rose. During the 1990s, his major works were re-translated, compiled into a six-volume series and published under new titles and in a new order decided by the editor. Frequent re-printings of this pocket-sized series indicate that Hearn is being widely read today in Japan.

The editor, Hirakawa Sukehiro, who is also author of several books on Hearn, argues Hearn was the only Westerner of his generation to pay attention to the importance of Japan’s native religion. Hirakawa believes Hearn wrote beautifully about the Shintoist feelings of the common people and the legends of the world of the dead. Hirakawa also thinks that the re-evaluation of Hearn is part of the process of realizing that Western religion is not superior. Hearn’s frequent praise for Japanese patriotism based on his understanding of ‘Shintoism’ deserves especially careful study.

IGNORING INDIVIDUALITY
In Hearn’s article, ‘From the Diary of an English Teacher’ (in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan), there is a conversation between Hearn and one of his students from the Middle School of Shimane Province in Matsue regarding bowing before the Emperor’s portrait. Hearn said to the student:

I think it is your highest social duty to honor your Emperor, to obey his laws, and to be ready to give your blood whenever he may require it of you for the sake of Japan. I think it is your duty.

In other words, he was doing no more than repeat what most Japanese teachers were telling their students at this time because they all knew that the Christian essayist Uchimura Kanzö (1861-1930) had been expelled in January 1891 from the First Higher School in Tokyo for failing to show sufficient respect for the signature of the Emperor appended to a copy of the new Imperial Rescript on Education.

Hearn’s house, open to the public, stands next to a museum dedicated to the writer

After quoting Hearn’s advice to his students, Hirakawa Sukehiro repeats that Hearn was able to understand the nationalism of the Meiji period despite being a Westerner, and describes Hearn’s observations as an impressive and accurate understanding of the psychology of Japan (Hirakawa 1996: 23 & 27).

Because Hearn was not able to read Japanese, his knowledge of ‘the psychology of Japan’ came mainly from the people surrounding him, and therefore his judgements and feelings were strongly influenced by them. As we can see from his numerous books, Hearn sympathised with Japan because of his love for the people and the traditional culture, and also because of his resentment of modern Western civilisation and Christianity.

Just like the majority of the Japanese around him, he was overjoyed when the country’s army defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) and, as the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) loomed, he believed that Japan would win that too.

Hearn’s belief in patriotism, based on his love of the ‘Shintoist’ ideal of the sacrificial dead, was strong enough to extinguish his humane emotion [for the war damage]. although Hearn perceived the soldiers’ feelings and felt compassion for the dead, he preferred to choose refuge in the so-called ‘Shintoist’ ideal and to forget about the brutal reality caused by Japanese patriotism.

Things Japanese in a revised edition as Japanese Things remains a lively read and is amazingly still in print (and on Kindle)

A DIFFERENT VIEW OF PATRIOTISM: BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850-1935) – In reply to Hearn’s letter in which he wrote: ‘I could really cry with vexation when I think of the indifference — the ignorant, blind indifference of the Educational Powers — to nourish the old love of country and love of the Emperor’ (11 October 1893) (Hearn 1910: 184),

Chamberlain stated an opposite view:”I do not agree with you that the Gove’t [sic] does nothing to foster patriotism and the old military spirit. What of the new songs & poems published by the authorities for the use of soldiers & students …? What of the prostration at New Year before the Emperor’s picture? What of the students’ military drill? What of the creation of such festivals as the Emperor’s birthday, the late Emperor’s anniversary, the 11th February? To my mind there is far too much jingo patriotism in this country. But then I confess that patriotism, anywhere, is a thing altogether distasteful to my mind … It grows from ignorance, and is nurtured by prejudice.” (22 October 1893) (Chamberlain 1936: 108)

Living in Japan for more than 30 years, Chamberlain also loved the country deeply (Ota 1998: 3-4). He insisted that ‘true appreciation is always critical as well as kindly’ (Chamberlain 1905: 7). In 1912, he wrote a pamphlet for the Rationalist Press Association entitled ‘Bushidö or The Invention of a New Religion’, and in 1927 included this in the fifth edition of Things Japanese. In the pamphlet, Chamberlain pointed out:

“Mikado-worship and Japan-worship — for that is the new Japanese religion — is, of course, no spontaneously generated phenomenon …. Not only is it new, it is not yet completed; it is still in process of being consciously or semi-consciously put together by the official class, in order to serve the interests of that class, and, incidentally, the interests of the nation at large …. The new Japanese religion consists, in its present early stage, of worship of the sacrosanct Imperial Person and of His Divine Ancestors, of implicit obedience to Him as head of the army (a position, by the way, opposed to all former Japanese ideas, according to which the Court was essentially civilian); furthermore, [it consists] of a corresponding belief that Japan is as far superior to the common ruck of nations as the Mikado is divinely superior to the common ruck of kings and emperors.” (Chamberlain 1939; 1985: 81, 87)

In Yuzo Ota’ s book Basil Hall Chamberlain, Portrait of a Japanologist (Japan Library, 1998), Chamberlain is shown to be an excellent example for people of today who wish to be free from a narrow-minded nationalism. This book directly challenges the tendency among some Japanese scholars to rebuke Chamberlain and beatify Hearn. It has provided the opportunity to reconsider Chamberlain in comparison with Hearn without bias.

Compared to Chamberlain, Hearn’s love for ‘Shintoism’ and Japanese patriotism was self-deceiving. As demonstrated above, Hearn was not a single- minded person, but rather was conscious of contradictions inside himself. Being aware of these contradictions, he chose to believe in the ‘Shintoist’ fantasy.

His contradictions also disclose the complexity of his literary imagination, and caution us not to take his interpretations of Japan at face value but to examine them carefully. Ignoring his complexity and simplifying his thought can only lead to a self-serving conclusion. Hearn was a problematic interpreter of Japan who deserves an objective and thorough study.

Hearn has long been praised as a way of praising Japan. In the latter years of the twentieth century, glorification of Hearn’s patriotic love for Japan and for the ‘Shintoist’ ideology of the Meiji period can be seen as a rhetorical device to promote a renewed nationalism, one with similar characteristics to that of a century ago. It was the promotion of such an ideology which led, only half a century ago, to the demand in the name of the Emperor for the blood of the people.

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For more about Hearn and his writings on Matsue and Shinto, see this posting here.

The sun goes down over Lake Shinji at Matsue a century after the Hearn-Chamberlain friendship came to a fractious end

Mountain kami

August 20, 2014 / John D.

A shrine to Yama no kami (photo by Lee Ratt)

Green Shinto has featured before the writings of naturalist Kevin Short, who combines his research of Japanese flora and fauna with explorations into folklore. In a recent column for the Japan News, which can be accessed here, he writes of the tradition of ‘yama no kami’ (mountain kami) and ‘ta no kami’ (ricefield kami). These are linked to Japan’s rice culture, held to underpin the very essence of early Shinto.

The usual understanding is that the mountain kami morphs into the rice-field kami in spring, descending with the nourishing mountain streams to feed the rice-paddies as it were. In autumn, following the harvest, it returns to the hills where it spends the winter. However, as Kevin Short points out, there is another form of mountain kami which remains in her realm throughout the year. This is the one worshipped by hunters and foresters.

Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan*s shrines were realigned along imperial lines and many of the rural shrines honouring nameless ‘yama no kami’ or ‘ta no kami’ were merged into larger entities. Though not so common now, they can still be found however, and the concept remains a living tradition in rural parts as Short’s article makes plain.

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Man’s survival is an age-old matter of flattering the Mountain Goddess
By Kevin Short / Special to The Japan News August 19, 2014

One of my favorite Japanese folklore themes is the Mountain Goddess and the Devil Stinger. This is a story that is widely told in southern Kyushu, but has similar versions in other areas of the country. The Mountain Goddess, or Yama no Kami, is a Diana-like ruler of lands where men live by hunting wild boar or black bear, or by felling trees or gathering herbs. Men who work in the mountains revere the Yama no Kami as the ultimate life force animating the forests and the plants and animals that live there.

The great storywriter and folklorist Muku Hatoju once accompanied a traditional wild boar hunter on a trip deep into the mountains along the border of Kagoshima and Miyazaki Prefectures. “The wild boars we hunt do not belong to us.” The old hunter explained. “They belong to the Mountain Goddess. When we go boar hunting, we humbly ask the goddess to share some of her bounty with us.”

A yama no kami marker (courtesy fudosama.blogspot - see link below)

But ruling over the mountains and forest creatures are not the Mountain Goddess’ only task. In early spring, when the rice paddies are ready for planting, she morphs into the Ta no Kami or Rice Goddess. The Goddess leaves the mountains and takes up residence on the dikes between the paddies. Here she stays, watching over the precious rice crop, until the harvest is completed in early autumn. Then she returns to her mountain domain.

Rice farmers usually engage in celebrations, including dancing, music and sometimes theater, to welcome the Goddess into the paddies in spring, and to send her back to the mountains in autumn. The Mountain Goddess is a folk superheroine that blesses the lives and livelihoods of both rice farmers and traditional mountain folk.

In Japan, local kami are asked or thanked for their blessings with food, drink and entertainment. Beautiful fish, such as pink sea-bream (tai) are favored by most kami. The Mountain Goddess, however, must be handled with extreme delicacy.

Although kindhearted and with a true feeling of empathy for the people, she is subject to fits of almost manic depression, during which the natural order begins to break down in both the mountains and the paddies.

The Mountain Goddess gets particularly despondent about her looks. She is, if you will, a bit funny looking. If you presented her with a sea bream, she would only feel sadder; because the beautiful fish would stand in sharp contrast to her own strangeness. The only way to coax the Goddess out of a funk is with a fish that makes her feel better about herself. To qualify, the fish would have to be even stranger-looking than the Goddess.

Devil Stinger found in the Indian and Pacific Oceans (courtesy oceanwideimages)

The fish selected for this grave honor is the oni-okoze, called Devil Stinger in English. The oni-okoze is one of a dozen or so species of very similar-looking fish in the genus Inimicus, found in the warm tropical and sub-tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific region. All these fish are ambush predators. They lie camouflaged on the ocean floor until a smaller fish passes close, then thrust upwards at incredible speed. The passing fish is sucked into a wide vacuum-cleaner mouth, and swallowed whole before it even realizes what happened!

The oni-okoze is truly one very strange-looking fish! The heavy body is designed to lay still either on the ocean bottom or just inches above it. The huge, bulging eyes are on top of the head, and the big mouth opens nearly straight up. Bits of skin hang down from the jaws and face, made to look like pieces of algae attached to a rock. The lower two rays of the pectoral fins can rotate freely, and are used as stiltlike supports for “walking” along the sea bottom.

To protect themselves, devil stingers are armed with a row of long, hard, sharp spines along their dorsal surface. These spines can be made to point straight upward and contain very powerful poisons in sacs at their base.

Swimmers and divers sometimes accidentally step on or touch camouflaged oni-okoze. Poison symptoms range from excruciating pain and severe swelling and reddening, to partial paralysis, and even to breathing difficulty and eventual heart failure.

In Japan the oni-okoze live from inshore up to about 200 meters deep, as far north as Niigata and Chiba prefectures. The devil stinger is considered to be delicious, and in some areas is even raised in aquaculture pens.

A phallic looking yama no kami in Niigata (Wikicommons)

Depictions of the Yama no Kami are rare, but stone statues of the Ta no Kami are common throughout the rice paddy countryside of eastern Kagoshima and southern Miyazaki. An amazing chance to see four of them in Tokyo is in front of a small Suitengu Shrine at Ikebukuro Ekimae Park, just a short walk northeast from Ikebukuro Station.

Ta no Kami usually carry a rice ladle and a bowl of steamed rice. They wear unusual hoods or hats that are actually part of a neat deception. Viewed from behind, the hood or hat becomes the head of a classic male phallic symbol. The wish embodied in the stones is for fertility and abundance, not only in the rice paddies, but in the farmers’ homes as well.

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Short is a naturalist and cultural anthropology professor at Tokyo University of Information Sciences.

For more on Ta no kami and Yama no kami, see http://fudosama.blogspot.jp/2006/04/ta-no-kami.html

What is Shinto?

August 18, 2014 / John D.

In an essay on environmentalism in Shinto which has appeared recently on the academic.edu website, Green Shinto friend Aike Rots puts forward different ‘paradigms’ used in descriptions of Shinto. It should give pause to those who like to argue for some kind of ‘official’ version of Shinto. The fact is that there are competing versions.

In the first part of the extract below, Aike talks of the rift between the historical-constructivists and the essentialists. This might seem needlessly theoretical, but as Shinto spreads in the West the arguments between practitioners is becoming increasingly split between the two viewpoints. It’s as well to understand what exactly the differences rest upon.

In the second part, Aike writes of identifying ‘six postwar paradigms’, though reading through the passage below there appear to be only five. Perhaps if Aike reads this, he’d be good enough to write in and add to the following: 1) imperial Shinto; 2) ethnic religion; 3) local (folk) religion; 4) universalism; 5) the spiritual approach.

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Some consider the kamidana an essential part of Shinto – yet the custom of household kamidana only dates back to the mid-Edo period.

In some ways, defining Shinto is even more difficult than defining Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. Those three religions all somehow trace their own history back to a legendary historical founder – Jesus, Muhammad or Gautama Buddha – and to the period in which this person lived. But when it comes to Shinto, there is very little consensus about when this religion started.

Famously, Shinto has no single founder, and it is not easy to trace it to one single period in history. Some argue that it is has existed since ‘time immemorial’; according to one of most famous and widely read English-language introductions (number one on the amazon.com list, in fact), it is the Japanese ‘native racial faith which arose in the mystic days of remote antiquity’ (Ono 1962, 1).

Among Shinto intellectuals, there is disagreement over the question whether the tradition goes back to the worship practices of hunter-gatherers in the Jōmon period (30,000-300 BCE) or to those of Yayoi-period rice farmers (300 BCE-300 CE). Many serious historians think the tradition was shaped much later, under the influence of Chinese ideology and rituals, and of Buddhism: in the Nara period (8th century), according to some; in the late-medieval period, according to others; or even in the 18th or 19th century, as a modern invented tradition (e.g., Kuroda 1981).

In any case, it is important to realise that there is a difference between two things. On the one hand, there is the historical reality of shrine worship, of the worship of local deities (kami) by means of ritual sacrifice and prayers (norito). These worship practices have always been characterised by great local diversity, constant change, and continuous interaction with Buddhism, Confucianism and Chinese cosmology and ritual.

Local, national, international? Some think kami only exist in Japan (kami no kuni). Originally they were localised, nameless and formless. Only later did they become personified as ancestral spirits.

On the other hand, there is the abstract concept ‘Shinto’, conceptualised as a single and singular tradition, which symbolically unifies the Japanese people as a nation and which is often seen as intimately connected with the imperial institution.

As my PhD supervisor Mark Teeuwen once wrote: Shinto ‘is not something that has “existed” in Japanese society in some concrete and definable form during different historical periods; rather, it appears as a conceptualization, an abstraction that has had to be produced actively every time it has been used’ (2002, 233). But this abstract concept has not always carried the same meaning, and it does not mean the same thing for different people.

There is not only the difference between the ‘insider’s view’, which holds that Shinto is the
indigenous worship tradition of the Japanese people; and the more critical ‘outsider’s view’, according
to which Shinto is an abstraction – and one that appeared fairly late in history. I call this latter approach the historical-constructivist approach.

Most historians today subscribe to this approach: they distinguish between the abstraction ‘Shinto’ on the one hand, and the historical diversity of kami worship on the other, and they deny that there is any transhistorical essence to Shinto (i.e., something that defines ‘Shintoness’). This is different from most insiders’ interpretations, and from most popular introductions to Shinto, which usually assert that Shinto is the indigenous religious tradition of Japan – singular, ancient, uniquely Japanese, and with an unchanging core essence. That is why I call these approaches ‘essentialist’.

But there are also significant differences between various insiders’ interpretations. In particular, they differ with regard to what it is that is considered Shinto’s core essence. In my dissertation, I have distinguished between six different paradigms, according to which Shinto has been conceptualised, defined and shaped in the course of modern history.

The first of these was dominant from the second half of the nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, but it still lingers on. According to this view, Shinto is a national ritual cult focused on the worship of the divine ancestors of the imperial family; it was seen not as a religion defined by belief and personal membership, but as a collective Japanese, non-religious ritual tradition in which all citizens should take part. I have called this the ‘imperial paradigm’.

Back to nature. Shrines were a later invention after the spread of Buddhism. 'True Shinto' could be said to consist of outdoor worship.

After the Second World War, this imperial ritual and ideological system (which is often referred to as ‘State Shinto’) was dismantled; Shinto was subsequently established legally and politically as a religion. Accordingly, it was privatised, and it had to be redefined. According to the dominant post-war view, Shinto is the ancient, singular Way of ‘the’ Japanese people; it is an ethnic, racial faith, shared by all Japanese in the present and the past, by virtue of their nationality.

According to this view, Shinto encompasses the realm of religion, but it is much more than that: it is the essence of Japanese culture and mentality. As such, it is public and collective, not private or individual. Ono Sokyō, whom I quoted previously, is a representative of this paradigm. It has long been the view of many shrine priests. I call this the ‘ethnic paradigm’.

There are several alternative views, however. One of these is the ‘local paradigm’. It goes back to the work of the Japanese ethnologist Yanagita Kunio, who wrote most of his works before the war; in recent years, it seems to have acquired new popularity. Proponents of this paradigm challenge the focus on the imperial tradition, and of national unity, that characterises the other two.

According to them, the essence of Shinto cannot be found in powerful institutions; but, on the contrary, in local, rural worship traditions and beliefs, which have nearly disappeared. ‘Real Shinto’, according to them, can be found in the shamanistic and animistic traditions of the countryside – accordingly, they profess a nostalgic desire for a nearly-lost rural Japan, characterised by social harmony and harmony with nature.

Totoro, from the Miyazaki Hayao film – an exemplar of local folk Shinto? (courtesy fanpop.com)

This is the image of the popular film character Totoro, living in a grove near an old farmhouse, in a beautiful rural landscape (satoyama, as it is called in Japanese). In all these paradigms, Shinto is intimately connected with the land of Japan.

But there is an alternative paradigm, which has also been around since the pre-war period, and which I call the ‘universal paradigm’. According to this view, Shinto may have emerged in Japan, but it is essentially a salvation religion, which has the potential to reach out to – and maybe even save – the rest of the world. This view is characteristic of many membership-based groups, so-called new religious movements, which define themselves as Shinto. Yamakage Shinto is one of many examples.

There is some overlap with the fifth paradigm, which I call the ‘spiritual paradigm’. I think it is worth distinguishing between these two, as not all proponents of the spiritual paradigm have an international agenda; some are downright nationalist. Simply put, according to advocates of this view, Shinto is a religion without doctrine, a primordial worship tradition; it can only be truly grasped intuitively, by means of a mystical experience of the divine, not intellectually. Politics, theology, philosophy – it is all peripheral, according to this view.

Is Shinto a spiritual pursuit like Shugendo? Or is it rather a celebration of Japanese tradition?

The lure of the unseen

August 16, 2014 / John D.

The Son of Man by Renée Magritte, 1946

Commenting on his famous picture, Magritte wrote that “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

It’s an illuminating remark, and one that helps in explaining the appeal of Shinto. Traditionally there were no images of kami, because they are unseen. Mystery is preserved by keeping the ‘spirit-body’ (goshintai) hidden. The holy of holies is a mirror – an emptiness that reflects whatever is before it.

In A Handbook for Travellers in Japan, Basil Hall Chamberlain wrote of a disappointed tourist who said of Ise, ‘There is nothing to see, and they won’t let you see it.’ But far from being disappointed, the tourist should have shown appreciation of the subtlety, for the nothingness gives perfect expression to the great mystery of existence. And in its immaculate style and execution, it is quintessentially Japanese.

A work of art with a similar theme to Magritte