Shinto and Japan

Japan has a very unique and interesting history that has influenced its culture immensely. The culture of Japan is one marked with assimilation and evolution of the many other forces and societies that have influenced it. The reason for this lay in its roots. The most significant of the beginnings of Japan is Shinto. Shinto is a religion that was given birth by the Japanese and their culture and now over many years of cultivation and growth Shinto is not a separate entity from the society, but rather, one in the same. It is through the ideas and influence of Shinto that the nation of Japan has interacted with the outside world in the past, and continues to do so even now in the present.

To understand Shinto, though, one might want to travel back a bit further and understand that Shinto can also be understood as an even more primal religion called Shamanism. What is Shamanism though? And if Shinto’s roots come from Shamanism, then where are the roots of Shamanism, and shouldn’t we start there at the “true” beginning? Well Shamanism, as anthropologists can tell, is “one of humankind’s most ancient traditions.” (1, pg. 13) Traces of this religion can be found throughout the world and Walsh believes that this occurs because of a common innate human tendency¹. This innate tendency is the logical mind of humans. Humans see things and can logically assume that all effects have causes. This is true in everything they can experience in the natural world. No phenomenon that occurs is always accompanied with a cause, a reason to why things happen or work. However, it proves to be a bother when humans cannot identify a cause to certain effects. Things such as disease or natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes must have been quite an enigma to the early humans. They did not have scientific instruments to analyze the plates underground or the specific weather patterns, or the microscopic germs that caused these horrors to early society. The only natural assumption they could come up with is that these phenomenon must have unseen causes. These “unseen forces” in turn could be persuaded not to wreak havoc and destruction upon the people. This is where the roots of Shamanism lie, in the logical minds of all capable and thinking human beings who had no other way to observe nature except with their own two eyes. Now let us take a look at Shinto.

Shinto

Shamanism was a religion for a hunter and gatherer society. Shinto is shamanism in an agricultural setting. It is the only known religion to adapt Shamanism to this setting. It is this ability of adaptation that makes Japan infinitely unique in the way that their culture has been affected by those outside of the island. So now that we know the roots of Shinto let us take a further look into some of the details. Shinto is derived from two Chinese words, not Japanese the two words are Shen and Tao; Shen meaning god or kami and Tao meaning “the way.” Together they can be literally translated as the way of the gods, or the way of the kami². Since the beginnings of Shinto come from Shamanism it is only natural to assume that Shinto also has a developed a special reverence to nature. They believe that these kami embodied nature and animals and filled people with a sense of “wonder and awe.” (3, pg. 105-106) Shinto, being a religion of action and external symbolism, venerated these kami through carefully performed rituals and ceremonies. The Shinto Priests that performed these rituals were cleansed and had to be pure in front of the kami as to not insult or anger them. This sense of purity and cleanliness was a fundamental component of Shinto. Things that were offered up to the kami had to be appropriate. Things like fish, rice, vegetables, and salt were common offerings but blood and meats were seen as impure and unfit gifts

⁴. The places in which they held the ceremonies and the kami were honored had to be pure and sacred places as well. These “jinja” were to be well kept and maintained for these purposes. Many kagura, ceremonial dances, and kagura-uta, songs to accompany those dances were performed in ritualistic manners as well³. Along with the ideas of purity and reverence to nature, two other characteristics stand to define Shinto. One is continuity, which I will discuss later and the other is the concept of festival. Matsuri, literally means festival in Japan, however, there are some festivals celebrated in modern times that do not have their roots in Shinto. The ones associated with Shinto are usually the festivals grew out of rice culture rituals. These rituals were used to protect the rice crops and to help them grow. It is in these rituals where one would normally see the practices and offering mentioned above and eventually these rituals turned into festivals to celebrate different things like the rice harvest³. This concept was to further the acting of spontaneous joy and represented the breaking through of pure goodness. Through the festivals, the Japanese sought to see the pure positive-ness of life and to reconnect with those aspects of life. Through this reconnection the Japanese developed a sense of duty and honor and this was all a part of the development of both Shinto and how Shinto affected and still affects Japanese culture. The last characteristic of Shinto was the idea of continuity. This idea is not only how Shinto has survived in modern day Japan, but also how the Japanese society has been able to keep old ideas and new ideas, and how they have been able to combine the two in a meaningful way.