TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
If you look it up in a dictionary, "Shintou" is described as the indigenous religion of Japan. This is not an inaccurate definition, but there's a lot of things about it that are misleading. Especially if we compare it to "religions" like Buddhism or Christianity. To explain a bit about why that is and also to understand Shintou in a more authentic way, we need to give an overview of where the term came from and also what the history of religion in Japan has looked like. This is a highly abbreviated account with a lot of important points left out, but I still aim to reduce confusion by being thorough.
神道 is made up of two kanji. One for "kami" or "god(s)" and one for "way" (literally "path"). In that sense, Shintou literally means "the way of the kami (gods)." Those in all sorts of traditions often use the metaphor of a "spiritual path" to describe the religious life. But the truth is that we should be wary of this tendency to view the "way of the gods" as something distant, removed, and connected to withdrawal from and disdain for a "normal" existence. The kanji 道 (pronounced as "tou" or, more commonly, "dou") literally means "path," but it is used in a very prosaic terms in the description of many other activities and forms of everyday "know-how" in Japanese. For example:
書道 (shodou) = calligraphy, the "way of writing")
武道 (budou) = martial arts, the "way of arms" (see also many individual martial
arts like juDOU, aikiDOU, and kenDOU that have the same etymology of ending in 道)
弓道 (kyuudou) = archery, the "way of the arrow"
華道 (kadou) = flower arrangement, the "way of flowers"
茶道 (sadou) = tea ceremony practices, the "way of tea"
In the perspective of many modern "religions" like Buddhism and Christianity, it might seem strange to merely think of spiritual practice as a kind of "know-how" on the same level as knowing how to play an instrument. But this is a modern imposition. The entire conception of "religion" as something meant to be separated from life and delimited as a more elevated form of transcendent activity is a modern idea which is not borne out in the entire history of even just the west.
(NOTE: There is some notable overlap in this concept of "know-how" with Heidegger's discussion on art as being one "techne" among other to the ancient Greeks. We can imagine he would say the same about their religious rites. I address this in my lecture MARTIN HEIDEGGER EXPLAINED: LATER WRITINGS.)
The ancient Japanese did not use the word "Shintou" to refer to the rites and customs in which they related to the gods. They did not even have a word like "religion" to refer to it. Nor is this solely a unique quirk of Japan. We see the same lack of this concept in most "pagan" societies like ancient Greece and many Native American tribes. When you read about the ancient Greeks and Romans, they often expressed a sort of intolerance about the "barbaric" religious practices of other groups like the Gauls or Carthaginians. But note the important distinction: They disapproved of different PRACTICES, not different "religions." If you asked them to distinguish the "religion" of the Gauls and their "religion," the question wouldn't even make sense. They were all just practicing the "way of the gods!" It would be like a disagreement in musical customs. They could have very different instruments, but they were all playing "music" with them at the end of the day.
The concept of "religion" does not even emerge with the dominance of Christianity. For the medieval Christians, there was still nothing like "religion." There was only truth and various forms of ignorance and heresy. "Religion" is rather an Enlightenment-era idea. It is a term people have used to try to isolate these systems of practice and belief from the stuff that "really matters" (laws, government, ethics, etc.) for the sake of creating tolerant, pluralistic societies and while respecting the cultural importance of potentially incompatible sources of dogma. Such was the story in the west that led to the creation of the concept of "religion". It sounds strange to say it, but "religion" is a term that implies disagreement (even if in a tolerant and respectful fashion). "Religion" is always what THOSE superstitious people do, not what WE rational people do.
The story in Japan was completely different. The inhabitants of Japan have been doing spiritual rituals and holding spiritual beliefs for as long as we have records of them. Around the late 6th century AD, the Japanese began to trade and exchange information with the surrounding kingdoms on the continent more regulraly (mostly via the Korean peninsula, of course). It was during this time that Buddhism was first introduced to Japan after it had found its way to China and Korea from India and Central Asia. Other Chinese influences like Confucianism and Daoism came along with it. (Of course, none of these "isms" existed back then)
The transition was not an easy one. Many rejected Buddhism as a destructive, evil, foreign religion. (In cases like these, we can indeed correctly use the phrase "religion!") But the story goes that the kami were asked and officially sanctioned Buddhism as something to introduce to the Japanese archipelago. After all, there seemed to be nothing inherently contradictory in the practice of the two at first glance. Buddhism had made room for indigenous gods and the worship of them when it swept through India, China, and Korea, so there was no reason to think it couldn't do the same thing in Japan. A standard conception to make sense of this pluralism is that the kami worshipped in Japan were in truth 権現 ("gongen") or "incarnations" of Buddhas in another form in order to benefit the Japanese in particular. Some have also preferred the reverse formation: In fact, the Buddhas were merely kami in a guise designed to beneit those overseas!
The pluralist conception resulted in some 1000 years of syncreticism. Most religious centers in Japan were full of native gods being worshipped next to Buddhas and monks. And the coexistence was by and large a peaceful one. But in the late 1500s, a very different religion emerged on Japan's shores: Christianity. Strange, blue-eyed men who stank like butter said that they arrived from a far-away land called "Portugal." One thing was certain: They would be useful, if nothing else, for their scientific knowledge, which was immense. The aristocracy learned quite a lot about navigation, astronomy, and, most importantly, firearms. For this reason these "padres" were quite useful for a shougun to have in his court. But there was a price to pay. They were spreading a religion called "Christianity" which taught that all native Japanese religion was false and heretical.
This alien religion threatened to destroy the entirety of Japanese society. Christianity was outlawed in the early 1600s and the entire country of Japan was soon closed to the rest of the world to prevent the further erosion of society and tradition by foreign religions and cultures. The 鎖国 "sakoku" period was not marked by total ignorance of the outside world. Nor by complete hatred of it. Foreign influences continued to enter the country. Calvinist merchants from the Netherlands proved less interested in mass conversion of the Japanese population, and so were allowed to have special access to a port in Nagasaki where they brought European goods as well as European learning. Buddhist monks were often allowed special trips to China for the sake of religious learning. It wasn't uncommon for young, curious men to join the temple merely for the sake of experiencing the novelty of travel to foreign lands.
This is the circumstance in which the term "Shintou" came into being. The desire to isolate Japanese culture and society from the rest of the world had to sustain itself by a special question: What was "Japanese" culture? What was "Japanese" society? What did Japan have that was distinctive and indigenous, and not merely inherited from China, India, or, more recently, the west? This constellation of spiritually "Japanese" tradition began to be labelled "Shintou" in contrast to the Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity that had become entangled with it over the years.
This was not merely a scholarly, intellectual movement. It has popular, grassroots support. One effect of outlawing Christianity was a requirement for all Japanese citizens to nominally join a local Buddhist temple. All of Japan became "Buddhist." Of course, this was not strictly monitored. It was more of a way that the government rooted out hidden Christians. Most leaders didn't care whether the adherents went to a temple regularly or supported one monetarily. They just cared about proving that you were not a Christian.
That said, no all temples were so benign. Many leaders of temples realized that they had a great opportunity to exploit peasants: Force the peasants to pay or they would report them as Christians to the shougun and they would be executed. Lots of corruption seeped into the Buddhist institutions as a result of being so powerful. This fueled a nationalistic, anti-Buddhist movement which sought to destroy Buddhist institutions and expel Buddhism as a foreign, corrupting religion. But wait... If these people were not Buddhists but also not Christians, what were they? Ah. This is where the term "Shintou" began to emerge as an alternative to both. It was what was left after you stripped away the influences from overseas.
In 1868, the American officer Matthew Perry put an end to Japan's isolationist period via a sort of forceful "gunboat diplomacy." The Japanese world shook. A new era had dawn. The Meiji Restoration occurred, which essentially constitutes the creation of the modern Japanese state. On the one hand, the Meiji Restoration was horrifying to the most staunchly conservative Japanese. The country westernized at a rapid pace. Some two centuries' worth of closed-off political and technological reform seemed to now flood Japan in an instant. Japan became rapidly westernized, both in society and government.
However, the Meiji Restoration also made Japan much more "Japanese" than ever before in a politically nationalistic sense. That is, the Emperor finally became the central figure of Japanese politics again. This had not been the case since the Heian period (794-1185). For over 500 years, Japan had been ruled by shouguns from the military class. It was also under Meiji that the religious policy of Japan massively changed. Japan adopted the policy of freedom of religion like other western countries. Christianity was officially legalized. But more importantly, Buddhism was defined as a "religion" just like Christianity, and was no longer intertwined with the state. But something else was in its place: Shintou.
The framers of the Meiji Constitution did not put Shintou on the same level as other "religions" like Buddhism or Christianity. They did not see it as a "religion." Shintou was now interpreted as an apparatus of the state, as the Emperor was divine. It became nationalistic rather than religious. Shintou was Japanese culture and spirit itself. To be a Japanese was to be a Shintouist and vice versa. As a part of this, the policy of 神仏隔離 (shinbutsu kakuri) was introduced, which did not allow the now government-owned Shintou shrines to be connected to Buddhist instutitions. You can see remnants of this today in Japan. A lot of Shintou shrines are right next door to Buddhist temples. In most cases, they were probably originally part of the same complex, but had to be isolated during the Meiji Restoration.
"State Shintou" would meet an untimely end. It was the ideology which propelled Japan to become a fascist state in World War II. When the war was lost, Emperor Shouwa was forced to give his famed 人間宣言 ("Human Declaration"). In it, he explained that his role was to merely be one of trust and admiration. He claimed that he was not in fact divine, nor were the Japanese any more divine or destined for supreme rule than any other races in the world. State Shintou was finally outlawed and Shintou was finally set apart as one "religion" among others in the country. It was one with a particularly central and imporant cultural history to the country, to be certain, but no longer one to be tied to the state. The Emperor's position would become like that of the royal families of England and other European constitutional monarchies. The exact status of the Emperor and His "divinity" is one I will address later.
In this case, we can see how the whole idea and label of "Shintou" is iteslf a new concept. It is now considered a "religion" in the western sense, but only after having been through a strange journey to get there, usually more as a reaction to external circumstances than anything inernal. In its most original, primal conception, Shintou was not a "religion" at all. It had no founder, no holy texts, and no proscribed beliefs. There were only customs, practices, and teachings. Shintou could not be disentangled from other elements of Japanese culture and society, any more than traditional forms of music and art could. When you actually talk to people who work at shrines in Japan, they rarely use the word "Shintou" or say "I'm a Shintouist." In fact, many of them have Buddhist altars in their private houses next to their kamidana (a household "shelf" with offerings to certain kami).
I aim to make the case that the recongition of "Shintou" as something distinct from other traditions like Buddhism is legitimate and important. And I claim that it is one of the most pure and ideal forms of spiritual practice on earth today.
But I also aim to make the case that it is not "unique." It is unique in the sense that it is tied to the customs, history, and landscape of Japan. But it is not unique in that it represents something alien to the world. I believe, rather, that something like Shintou is the form that all spiritual practices would have if they never became "organized religions" in the manner of Christianity and Buddhism. If the Native Americans and pagan Europeans were left alone by Christianity, they would have something very much like Shintou as their "religion." That is to say, as a "know-how" involving gods, fully intertwined with all the other rituals and events of their daily existence.
Now that we know a bit about what Shintou is NOT, we should talk about what actually makes up these traditional rites and beliefs. Shintou is not a faith into which one is initiated. It is one into which one grows organically, as a part of culture and customs. And as such, it always has a strongly "local" character. What an individual manifestation of Shintou looks like can look as different as the rites and customs of different cities in any major country. Even one as densely populated as Japan has these distinctions. On this page, however, I can sketch out some broad themes that are for the most part the same of Shintou no matter where you are in Japan.
The three terms polytheism, animism, and nature worship are often used interchangeably to refer to Shintou. But all three of these have slightly different definitions that don't necessarily imply each other. We should spell these out.
Polytheism means that Shintouists believe that there is more than one god, just like the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and most other societies before the aberration known as the Abrahamic religions were born. In fact, their pantheon puts most others to shame. The traditional set phrase to indicate the endless myriad of gods in the world is 八百万の神 ("yaorozu no kami"), which literally means the "8 million gods." This is not to say that there are literally 8 million gods. Since there was no coneption of "infinity" in ancient Japan, the number 8 million stands in as a way to signify that there are an infinite, uncountably large number of kami. Shintou enshrines and pays tribute to many, many kami, including many individual human beings who have become apotheosized after death (all canonized pre-Human Declaration, of course).
Animism refers to the belief that all things, including "material" objects like stones, trees, etc. have spirits or "anima" inside of them. That is, there are no truly "inanimate" objects. Shintou is a species of animism. It is believed in Shintou that all things have a kami of their own. Shintou does not have a proscribed metaphysics, so the exact nature of this is left open-ended. It is not clear, for example, if each individual thing actually IS its spirit to the degree that we OUR our minds, or if some closer-to-inanimate things like stones rather have a sort of "guardian angel" who animate them and are responsible for them. Or perhaps both. Colloquial Japanese speech talks of gods of abstract properties like gods of love, of wealth, of computer security, of well-developed boobs (!) and so on, which seems to indicate that the latter is certainly a possibility in at least some cases. In any case, the animism of Shintou is decidedly pluralistic, unlike the animism of some tribes who believe that all things are "animated" by an identical sort of spirit-stuff that flows through everything, like the Polynesian concept of mana or Haudenosaunee (aka Iroquois) conception of orenda.
Lastly, Shintou is a form of nature worship. This is not an uncommon pattern in polytheism. Most polytheistic societies have gods that are related to natural phenomena like wind, rain, sun, harvests, and so on, and Shintou is no exception. Most all Shintou rites somehow revolve around reverence of the natural world and a desire to exist in harmony with it. This, again, was common to most religious traditions before a strange species of anti-natural religions called the Abrahamic faiths were born in the desert lands of the Middle East and proceeded to destroy most of the diversity of religion around the world.
If there is one thing that most immediately "bounds" Shintou and sets up its form in the modern day, it is the 神社 (jinja) or shrine. There are some 80,000 shrines in Japan today (though this number is even fewer than there used to be, as many were merged and consolidated under the Meiji Restoration).
In simplest terms, a shrine is a DWELLING-place of a kami. This is once more an important point that separates a shrine from a church, mosque, or Buddhist temple. It is not a place that is set up primarily for social worship and religious community. It is a RESIDENCE of its kami. This is similar to earlier examples we see in ancient Greece and the Middle East. In ancient Babylon, the word for "temple" and "house" were the same word! Because a "temple" of a god was simply where that god resided. In Japan, it seems that the idea is similar.
The typical shrine today consists of an ornate building with several distinctive architectural features:
Its pathway is marked by a 鳥居 (torii), which is a large, red, wooden gateway. Entering the torii is the first place where one prepares one's heart to be deferent and open to all that is numinous and sublime. We also often find traditional rock lanterns and statues of 狛犬 (koma-inu), or lion-dogs. These are meant to be a kind of protective figure to ward off menacing spirits, in the same manner as gargoyles and other grotesques on western churches.
The central building has a hemp rope made or rice straw called a 注連縄 (shimenawa). Shimenawa are made out of rice stalks. We rarely see fully-grown rice stalks these days. But rice, being the staple of all Japanese diets, is a food which is essential to all life and existence. The straw floors in many shrines are also made of the same material. There will often be white zigzag-shaped paper streamers called 紙垂 (shide) hanging from the shimenawa.
The central building will also often (though not always) have ornamentation on their roofs called 千木 (chigi) and 鰹木 (katsuogi). Shrine roofs are gabled, and feature forks called chigi at the edges that point out at the edge of the roof, looking sort of like horns. Along the gable, there are logs laid on top in a perpendicular fashion called katsuogi.
Many shrines also have a sort of yard which is cordoned off by a fence to delimit a space of earth where the kami makes itself manifest. The fence is called a 神籬 (himorogi). It usually has a 榊 (sakaki) tree either set at each of its four corners or in the middle. Some of these areas are left barren, while some have an object in the center such as a tree, rock, or even animal in some cases. The object in this case is called a 依代 (yorishiro), which is an object that attracts a kami to its place, like a sort of spiritual antenna (to use a phrase from Yamakage Motohisa). A himorogi and indeed a shrine itself is a kind of yorishiro, of course.
All shrines will have a 御神体 (goshintai), literally a "god's body." This is a central object in their main halls which stand in as a sign of the kami. In many cases, this is a mirror. The mirror is not itself thought to be the kami, but to represent it through its clarity and purity. Some very special and old shrines do not use a mirror as an object but rather build the entire shrine around the goshintai itself, usually when it is too large or too embedded in the surrounding scenery to be removed. These goshintai are usually things like particularly magnificent mountains, rocks, trees, and bodies of water. This is especially common at some of Japan's oldest shrines, which gives us a hint that the oldest forms of Shintou practice predated the establishment of a building around the goshintai itself.
TODO: Shrine architectural styles
Like all spiritual institutions, shrines are staffed. The main figure in charge of
a shrine is known as a 神主 (kannushi). The term literally means a "master of gods" in
the sense of a "master of ceremonies." The clothes he wears are not necessarily tied
to religion on their own, but are simply the clothes of nobles from the Heian period.
The typical outfit will consist of the following:
浄衣 (joue): A light robe, generally colored white, made of linen or silk.
袴 (hakama): Streaming trousers that reach down to the ankles.
烏帽子 (eboshi): A pointed mesh cap made of silk or hemp that is died black.
笏 (shaku): a flat scepter made of smoothly-carved wood, which serves a ritually
decorative purpose today, but originally was used as a tablet for recording notes.
大幣 (oonusa): A wand, usually made from the branch of a sakaki tree, with white
shide hanging from it. A commonly-seen form of oonusa with only two shide is called a
御幣 (gohei). These are used in purifiction rituals.
Young females called 巫女 (miko) are also a common sight at most shrines of decent size. Female figures in Shintou have traditionally had a role of peforming roles like shamans, mediums, diviners, and other sacred roles. This role has eroded over the years. Miko do not take as much of a central role in worship and ritual today, but their ancient role is hinted at in the performance of the 神楽 (kagura) dance, which is a sort of dance in which the miko becomes a yorishiro and becomes "possessed" by the god during it. Before the Meiji Restoration, miko also used to serve as sacred prostitutes and offer sexual favors in exchange for money at shrines. Can we please bring that practice back???
Traditionally, kannushi and miko would achieve their positions hereditarily. Today, this is no longer institutionalized. To become a kannushi today, one must study at a special university and become certified. There are two major ones: 國學院大學 (Kokugakuin Daigaku) in Toukyou or 皇學館大学 (Kougakkan Daigaku) in Ise. Despite this, it is common to see lineages with a "family business" of owning a shrine. Women can also become kannushi today.
For miko, the conditions are less strict. In fact, it is very common for young high school or college girls to become miko as a part-time job. There is no "belief" required for this position. This is a strong difference from the Abrahamic religions and even perhaps from Buddhism, but it is actually a pretty common state of affairs. The famed orator Cicero from ancient Rome gives us an example: Cicero was employed as an augur, meaning someone who divined things from the flight paths of birds. Cicero, however, made it clear that he did not believe in augury at all! But that didn't matter. The divinations simply had to be done, no matter if the "vessel" doing them believed or not. Most duties of miko are similar, and so it is not uncommon for girls with no "spiritual" beliefs to become miko. You can even see foreign exchange students do it over the holidays sometimes.
TODO: pre-modern training and initiation methods for kannushi and miko