A Brief History of Shinto (part 5)

I didn't realize that yesterday was post #50 until just now.  Yay?

Also, a lot of today's post is modified from my thesis.  'cause sometimes you really want to include a quote from General Douglas MacArthur.

ANYWAY.

Academic Post #5

A Brief History of Shinto (part 5): Actually, We Changed Our Minds; Shinto's a Religion Again, and Everyone Is Super Confused

When World War II ended and the Occupation was faced with the task of “rehabilitating” Japan, their first major hurdle was State Shinto.  The leaders of the Occupation saw State Shinto as the source of the Japanese xenophobic ultranationalism.  Of course, some people saw the situation in a different light than others; General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the allied powers and a generally REALLY INTERESTING GUY, declared, “Japan is a spiritual vacuum.  If you do not fill it with Christianity, it will be filled with Communism.  Send me 1,000 missionaries.”[1]  Although Shinto leaders feared that MacArthur planned to Christianize Japan by force, most of the Allied Occupation leaders were significantly more reasonable and mostly wanted to make sure that Shinto would never again be used for nationalistic or militaristic purposes.

This is where the Shinto Directive comes in.

The Shinto Directive (which, ironically, I have to read for class this week in the original Japanese) basically said:

1. The Japanese people have religious freedom.
2. Shinto is the same legally as any other religion in Japan.
3. Religion and the state must be separate.
4. All references to and instruction on Shinto must be removed from public school curriculum.

Ironically, the part of the Shinto Directive which sparked the most outcry from the public was the last bit; people argued that shrines, aside from being religious instituions, were places of immense historical and cultural value, and so children who were deprived of field trips to shrines would grow up lacking a proper appreciation and understanding of their culture and history.  The Occupation government wasn’t convinced, but after the end of the Occupation, field trips resumed.*

The other major change which occurred under the Occupation was that the emperor was required to renounce his divinity in a radio broadcast to the nation.  It was the first time the emperor had ever done a radio broadcast, and everyone I have talked to from that generation has vivid memories of the event.  It’s sort of like how in my generation we ask, “Where were you when you heard about 9/11?” except that it’s “Where were you when you heard the emperor was human?”

And now I get to talk about all the weird fallout created by classifying Shinto as a religion.

This is definitely one of the things I find most fascinating about Shinto, so excuse me as I wax poetic.

The problem boils down to this: nobody’s really sure what the heck Shinto is.

Historically, there was no concept of a religious sphere that was separate from the secular sphere in Japan.  The old word for government (政; matsurigoto) literally meant “the business of ritual worship.”  To say that government and religion were heavily intertwined would be to imply that they were two different things, which they weren’t.

Thus, when Japan came into contact with the West, and, perhaps more importantly, Christianity in the nineteenth century, it had no equivalent concept or term for the word “religion,” nor any concept of “religion” as a distinct sphere of daily life.  However, the Japanese needed a word for “religion” if only for translation purposes, and so after trying a variety of different words, they settled on shūkyō (宗教), a Buddhist technical term.

Additionally, the lack of resemblance between Japanese religions and Western ones was what led to the discussion among scholars of the early Meiji period concerning whether the word shūkyō could be used to describe Shinto.  In the end, as you already know, it was decided that Shinto was not a religion, because the Shinto priesthood, for the most part, associated shūkyō with doctrine, funerals, and rites intended to induce this-worldly benefits, NOT with the rites of state which State Shinto was supposed to perform.

However, at the end of the war, suddenly Shinto was a religion, and everyone was really, really confused.  Everyone is still really, really confused, as illustrated in a survey conducted by the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture.  29% of the respondents said that they belonged to a religious group, and 19% described themselves as atheists.  Despite what Western audiences might see as a very low level of religious affiliation, 50% of the respondents professed belief in the existence of deities, and almost two-thirds said they believed in an “unseen higher power.”  Most interestingly, 25% of those who described themselves as atheists said that they believed in a God or gods.[2]  So what exactly Shinto is, what religion is, and how the two are related is still kind of an amorphous blob of confusion, for most people.

Further reading

Sources of Japanese Tradition volume 2

Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religion

Shinto and the State, 1868-1988

Also, the BBC has a brief history of Shinto, which you may find helpful (and more coherent than mine).

And thus concludes this brief history of Shinto series!  I hope it has been somewhat informative/not confusing.

I have some ideas for new academic topics starting next week, but if you have suggestions, I would love to hear them!  You can leave a comment below or you can email me or you can send me a letter by carrier pigeon or you can yell really, really loudly.  Unfortunately, I do not know everything in the world, so if you suggest a topic I know absolutely nothing about (like, I dunno, Buddhist influences in Basho’s poetry), I probably won’t be able to write anything about it.  BUT if you want to hear about a supremely nerdy topic (like internet shrines or the Lucky Star shrine or mail-order amulets) I can probably talk/write your ears off.

*Nakano-san said that 2^nd graders visit Gosha Shrine twice a year for fieldtrips.

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[1] Helen Hardacre, Shintō and the State, 1868-1988, 135.

[2] Robert Kisala, “Japanese Religions,” 5-6.

A Brief History of Shinto (part 4)

Academic Post #4

A Brief History of Shinto (part 4): If You Overthrow the Shogunate and Establish a New Government, You Can Say Anything About Shinto That You Like (Although People Might Not Listen)

Where we left off last time, National Learning dudes were convinced that Shinto should be used by the emperor to rule over all people.

Suddenly, the Meiji Restoration happened!*  Basically, a bunch of disgruntled people overthrew the shogunate and put the emperor back into power.  But then someone said, “Hold on a second!  This is actually not that great of an idea!  Look at China.  They have an emperor, but they’re getting crushed by Westerners and all sorts of crazy rebellions!**”  So after studying Western forms of government, they decided to set up the Diet and a cabinet of ministers…so it became an oligarchy, basically.

In addition to governmental changes, there was a huge push in Japan to modernize and Westernize.  At the same time, the new state-builders were worried that unless the Japanese people were united as a whole, the West would be able to just swoop in and crush them.  What Japan needed was a “national consciousness,” something that bound all Japanese people together.  What it needed was…State Shinto.

The problem was that Western powers were pushing for Japan to guarantee freedom of religion, which meant that if the Meiji government made observances of State Shinto mandatory, the Western powers would get ticked off and beat them up.  On the other hand, if they didn’t make State Shinto mandatory, it wouldn’t be very effective.

The solution?

Shinto isn’t a religion.  It’s a SUPRARELIGIOUS ENTITY.***

There’s a whole lot that can be said (and has been said) about State Shinto, but since this is a brief history, I’ll stick to the basic outline:

What was State Shinto supposed to do?

1. Make the people feel loyal toward the government (especially the emperor).  As a consequence of their loyalty, they would do pretty much whatever the government asked them to do.

2. Unite the people by making them feel as though they all had something in common which made them Japanese.  Remember, Shinto stretches back to ANCIENT ANTIQUITY and hasn't changed AT ALL NOT A BIT.

3. Remember all that about Japan being the source of everything ever?  Well, imagine that times one thousand.  A sizable chunk of the propaganda from WWII features poor, unenlightened Koreans/Chinese/Taiwanese people on their knees as they are dazzled by the Japanese army, who have conveniently brought Amaterasu with them to spread her heavenly light over the poor, oppressed, unenlightened foreigners.***

How was State Shinto supposed to do that?

1. Shinbutsu bunri, also known as the separation of Shinto from Buddhism.  Shrines were ordered to be moved out of temple complexes and vice versa.  Any Buddhist paraphernalia in shrines had to be thrown out.

2. Setting up national holidays and certain rites which the whole populace was supposed to participate in.  Also included mandatory fieldtrips to shrines for kids in elementary school.

3. Ordering the priesthood to stop performing rituals that could be associated with “religious” activity.

4. Worshiping the emperor as a “living kami.”  While the imperial family was always believed to be descended from Amaterasu, their connection to the sun goddess was particularly stressed during the State Shinto period.

How well did this work?

1. Shinbutsu bunri.  Not all that well.  Shinto didn’t really exist separate from Buddhism, so separating the two of them was…hard, to say the least.  It would be like if I handed you The New Testament and asked you to take all the silly stuff about Jesus out.

2. National holidays worked equally badly, mostly because a lot of people ignored them.  Many of the new holidays and rituals had no grounding in local beliefs or traditions, so nobody really had an incentive to follow them.

3. Trying to cut the religion out of Shinto failed pretty spectacularly as well.  The main problem was that the government couldn’t afford to support shrines, and the main way shrines normally got their revenue was from the local populace.  If the local populace came to the shrine and asked for prayers for health/good luck/plentiful crops to be performed and the priest refused, the shrine had no money and the priest starved.  If the priest accepted, he was violating Shinto’s suprareligious nature.

4. It’s…not really clear how well the propaganda concerning the emperor worked.  People certainly knew about it, but whether they believed it is another matter entirely…

But now you’re saying, “Waaaaait a second!  If State Shinto failed so spectacularly, what’s the deal with WWII?”

Well, there are a couple of things going on here.

First of all, State Shinto didn’t cause WWII.  State Shinto was the result of a mindset which contributed to the start of WWII.  Think of it as a symptom of the underlying problem, not the problem itself.

Second of all, State Shinto was pretty horribly ineffective at the beginning, but as the war progressed (and the situation in Japan got generally scarier) some bits of it became more effective.  If it’s a question between going to the festival that is meaningless to you or working, you’re going to work.  But if it’s a question of going to the festival that is meaningless to you or getting shot in the face, you’re probably going to go to the festival.  Also, there were some bits of it which were relatively effective from the beginning, such as the observances performed at schools.

Third of all, the situation was a lot more complicated than I have room to describe here, so you should really go read more about it if you are interested.

Further reading

Sources of Japanese Tradition volume 2

Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religion

Shinto and the State, 1868-1988
Japan's Modern Myths by Carol Gluck
Although this book doesn't focus specifically on Shinto, it does talk about ideology in the Meiji period, of which State Shinto was a small part.

*Note: This is not actually how history happens.  Some people had to get killed in nasty ways before anything got restored.

**Taiping Rebellion.  Best rebellion ever, not even kidding.  Basically a guy claiming to be Jesus’s younger brother (yes, that Jesus) gathers together a bunch of followers, runs away from the army with his followers and in the process somehow manages to capture the southern half of China, holds onto the southern half of China for ten years as the Qing army fails hilariously at defeating him, manages to tick off/weird out the Western powers who are actually interested in helping him, rewrites the Bible, orders the death of his right-hand man (the Holy Ghost) and the resulting slaughter takes out about twenty thousand of his followers, and is finally killed, becoming one of the twenty to thirty MILLION deaths caused by the rebellion.  If you’re interested in reading about this (bizarre and fascinating and bloody) rebellion, I highly recommend God’s Chinese Son by Jonathan D. Spence.

***You have my permission to headdesk, if you so desire.  If you do not have a desk, you may headtable.

A Brief History of Shinto (part 3)

Academic Post #3

A Brief History of Shinto (part 3): Shinto Is the Greatest but Jesus Was Bad at Learning It

Where we last left off, there were a whole bunch of conflicting theories of Shinto, but one of the last ones to emerge was that Shinto had been “polluted” by foreign ideas.

So now we reach 国学 (Kokugaku).  There are actually a lot of names for this school of thought, both in English and Japanese.  Some Japanese names I’ve seen include 国学、古道、and 復古神道, and some English ones include National Learning, National Studies, and Ancient Studies.  I’m going to use 国学 and National Learning, because a) that’s what I used in my thesis and b) that’s what I’ve seen used most commonly in English-language literature.  (More conservative studies in Japanese seem to favor 復古神道, though.)

But first, a little bit of background on what was happening at this point in time.  Japan was in its era of isolation; with very few exceptions, there were no foreigners or foreign goods coming to Japan.  Leaving Japan (and then coming back) was also strictly prohibited, so there really wasn’t much exchange of ideas going on.  Meanwhile, the Tokugawa shogunate had basically seized control of the government, completely cutting the emperor out of any decision-making.  The imperial court and the shogunate even had different capitals; the imperial court was in Kyoto while the shogun was in Tokyo.  The shogunate was becoming more and more corrupt/complacent/generally bad at handling things, and increased pressure was coming from the West for Japan to reopen its ports to trade.  Many people saw The Really Bad Stuff Happening in China (like the Opium War) when the Chinese government refused to cooperate with Western trade-related demands, and were afraid that Japan, which at this point was severely militarily behind the West, would be the next target.  So at this point in history you have an intense fear of Western conquest, general discontentment with the government, and an intense urge to discover where China went so horribly wrong.

National Learning sprang out of this miasma of fear and discontentment, which explains a lot about some of its more…ah…interesting ideas.  The general concept behind most National Learning writings is that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong in Japan; ancient Japan had been a place of peace, where the emperor ruled over the whole land and no one dared question him.  But what could have gone wrong, and how could whatever it was be fixed?  What the National Learning scholars did was go back to the oldest written works in Japanese—the Nihon Shoki (a “history” of Japan, stretching from the beginning of time to about the 8^th century), the Manyoushuu (a book of ancient poetry), and, of course, the Kojiki.  These scholars proposed that the main issue with Japan was that the “ancient way of the gods” (also known as Shinto) had been horribly polluted by “foreign doctrines,” namely those from China.  They insisted that if the government were to “reclaim the ancient way,” and separate “pure” Shinto from the foreign pollutants, the land would once again be in a state of harmony.

With me so far?  Here’s where it gets interesting.

First off, the National Learning guys (yes, they were all guys) believed that Shinto was was “enacted by the ruler” and so “subjects should not privately interpret and carry it out.”  Shinto was described by Motoori Norinaga, one of the main National Learning guys, as “the just and public Way with which the emperor governs the world.”  He thought funerals, festivals, memorial services, and, in fact, most of the major rites that were commonly performed at shrines by priests as well as the general populace as “unorthodox rites.”  Rather than being “ceremonies of the Way of the Gods,” they were imitations of Confucian and Buddhist rites merely disguised to appear as Shinto, and “by no means the genuine ancient practices of our imperial land.”[1]  Basically, he thought that Shinto was a way of governance, not a religion.  He, and many other National Learning thinkers, wanted to see Shinto used practically.

But wait, there’s more!  The following are some of the other arguments National Learning scholars came up with:

Japan is the source of all the everythings ever.  Remember how before Japan was the trunk of the tree while China was the branches and India was the fruit?  Well, the National Learning guys took it a step farther to say that Japan was the source of all life and all religion ever.  Yes, even Christianity.  Jesus came to Japan to study, you know.  So did the Buddha.  However, since Jesus and the Buddha were apparently pretty bad at learning Shinto correctly, they transmitted a messed up version of it to their followers.  Therefore, Shinto should be spread to all peoples so that they will be able to partake in the correct way of the gods!

…I hope you are all noticing the foreshadowing going on here.

China sucks.  A lot.  If you ever want to read some astoundingly racist stuff, go check out a lot of later National Learning works.  My personal favorite “oh geez you have got to be kidding me” moment is when one of them argues that the reason China has so many fantastic schools of thought is because the Chinese people are, by nature, lazy and horrible human beings, so they need Confucianism and Daoism to lead them toward being actually productive members of society.  Japanese people, on the other hand, are naturally perfect, which is why they only have Shinto.

When you die, you are dead.  Motoori Norinaga, after his wife’s death, became so depressed by the prospect of her going to Yomi* that he spent a good deal of the rest of his life arguing that Yomi didn’t actually exist.  What happens after you die?  Well, you’re dead.  There is NOTHING.  (If he admitted that the Buddhist paradises or reincarnation existed, he would have kind of negated all his previous arguments.)

If you haven’t noticed the foreshadowing, lemme make it a teensy bit clearer:

IT’S FORESHADOWING STATE SHINTO AND THE START OF THE PACIFIC WAR.

…which we’ll save for next time.

Further reading

Sources of Japanese Tradition volume 2

Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religion

Shinto and the State, 1868-1988

*The Shinto underworld.  It’s a pretty depressing place, to be honest.  As far as anyone can really tell, all that happens is that it’s pretty dark, your body rots, and you’re surrounded by impurity.  YAY.

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[1] Motoori Norinaga, “First Steps into the Mountains (Uiyamabumi),” 413.  P.S. I totally copy and pasted part of this section from my thesis. 

A Brief History of Shinto (part 2)

And now it's time for...

Academic Post #2

A Brief History of Shinto (part 2): Buddhas Are Leveled-Up Kami, Kami Are Leveled-Up Buddhas, All of Them are Confucian, STOP SCREWING UP MY SHINTO

Where we left off last time, the Imperial Line had been linked to the Sun Goddess by way of the Kojiki and nobody outside of the court really knew.

Then Buddhism showed up.  

Well, actually Buddhism showed up before that—the “official” account of Buddhism’s arrival in Japan dates it to the mid-6^th century.  I mostly left it out of the equation beforehand to keep things from getting needlessly complicated.  

In any case, suddenly there was Buddhism!  Bam!  Buddhism, unlike the kami-worship Japan was used to, had a body of sacred texts and temples and a priesthood and rituals and doctrine.  Buddhism was shiny and awesome and famous throughout East Asia by this point, and kami worship was kind of amorphous and not particularly flashy.  Needless to say, Buddhism was embraced almost universally.  The imperial court adopted a Buddhist ritual calendar...and performed rituals to the kami as well, but these rituals were almost always subordinate to the Buddhist ones.

This is a perfect illustration of one of the interesting qualities of East Asian religions: they tend not to be exclusive.  While you can’t be both Muslim and Christian, there was (and still is) no problem with worshiping both Buddhas and kami.  In fact, Buddhism pretty much integrated kami-worship into it.  Many Buddhist temples had shrines for kami on their precincts, and some kami were even integrated into the Buddhist pantheon.  People worshiped kami and Buddha side by side, and almost all of the time they didn’t (or couldn't) differentiate them from each other.

Of course, there had to be an explanation for why the kami and Buddhas could be worshiped together, and the prevailing theory for a very long time was called honji suijaku (本地垂迹), which is generally translated as “original essence, manifest traces.”  The basic idea of this theory was that the kami were incarnations or manifestations of the Buddha, whereas the Buddha and bodhisattvas* were the “original” or “pure” essence of divinity.  Other prevailing theories included that the kami were also stuck in the cycle of death and rebirth,** and they needed people to pray to them (and Buddhist priests to perform ceremonies for them) so they could “level-up” to being Buddhas and escape the cycle.

Of course, there were a lot of people who came up with different theories. Some of these people even started calling kami worship Shinto, so I can finally start using that word a little.  Instead of being boring, like the boring book I have to read for class, and listing all of the different schools of thought without telling you anything important about them, I’ll give some general trends that occurred.

Reverse honji suijaku!  It’s not that kami are lame versions of Buddhas, it’s actually that Buddhas are lame versions of kami!  Buddhas have to become enlightened, but kami are born divine.  Clearly the kami are better!

Japan is the source of all the everythings!  Sort of like reverse honji suijaku on steroids.  Not only are kami the true essence while the Buddhas are the manifest traces, Japan is the trunk of the tree while China is the branches and India is the flowers.  Using this analogy, clearly all religion came from Japan!***

Shinto is Neo-Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism is Shinto.  Due to a lot of complicated stuff that I don’t have time to get into, Neo-Confucianism**** rose in popularity starting in the 17^th century.  The Neo-Confucians recognized a potential ally against Buddhism (which was pretty clearly crazily powerful; I might talk about this at some point, but you should all go read about it either way) in the Shinto theorists, and so there was a lot of reimagining Shinto in a Confucian light (and reimagining Confucianism in a Shinto light).  A lot of theorists would pick single qualities (like “honestly” or “sincerity”) which they felt exemplified “traditional” Japanese values and write extensively about those.  Ironically, given the intense amount of mixing with Confucianism going on, this focus on “traditional” Japanese values in Shinto helped to reinforce the idea (later emphasized by the National Learning scholars) that it had existed unchanged since time immemorial.

Ew, there's all this other stuff my Shinto!  Once people began to gain an awareness of Shinto as a separate entity from Buddhism (although exactly what that entity was comprised of…nobody was quite sure), there were, of course, people who were horrified at how polluted Shinto had become.  They wanted to cut the Buddhist and Confucian influences out…but, of course, what exactly these influences were, nobody could agree on.  But everyone knew they were bad and they should be gotten rid of.

And then National Learning showed up, but I'll save them for next time.

…meanwhile, the common people had very little idea of the debates going on, and continued to worship the kami and Buddhas as they always had.

Further Reading

Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions by a whole slew of people

Shinto in History by a whole slew of people

Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume One edited by William Theodore de Bary
Sources of Japanese Tradition Volume Two edited by William Theodore de Bary
Because everything is better in two volumes.
Pretty much anything by Kuroda Toshio, but especially "Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion," which can be found in Religion and Society in Modern Japan, among other books

Seriously, the first thing my advisor gave me to read when I was writing my thesis was one of Kuroda's papers.  His work has so much controversy surrounding it (more in Japan than in the US) and upsets some people terribly, which is a good reason to read it in and of itself.

Shinto and the State, 1868-1988 by Helen Hardacre

Although the focus of the book is the Meiji, War, and Post-War periods, the introduction has some information on kami worship in the Tokugawa period. 

Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture, especially the chapter entitled “Masuho Zankō (1655-1742): A Shinto Popularizer Between Nativism and National Learning.” 

...yes, half of those titles are in italics while the other half are underlined.  Blogger is being dumb at me.  Thus the sudden font change.  Grr, Blogger, grr.

*For anyone unfamiliar with Buddhism, a bodhisattva is someone who gains enlightenment but decides to stay on Earth to help other people gain enlightenment instead of moving on and becoming a Buddha.

**Super fast Buddhism explanation 101!  Everybody’s stuck in the cycle of death and rebirth. You die, and then you’re reborn as something different. If you were a good person, you’re reborn at a higher level, like as an emperor if you were previously a peasant. If you were a bad person, you’re reborn at a lower level, like as a worm or a fly.  Being trapped in the cycle is bad because you keep dying and being reborn and it’s all so very pointless.  However, if you gain enlightenment, you can escape the cycle forever!

***If you think this sounds crazy, wait ‘til I get to National Learning and how Jesus came to Japan to study.

****A branch of Confucianism inspired mostly by the writings of Zhu Xi.  You should read about it.

A Brief History of Shinto (Part One)

It’s time for…

An Actually Marginally Academic Post

After reading a whole lot of books for my thesis and a whole lot of books for class and a whole lot of books in general, I have come to a realization—a lot of scholarship on Shinto is really, really boring.  I have trouble keeping my eyes open when reading some of it.*  And that’s too bad, because it’s a fascinating subject that not many people know about!  So my goal for these posts is to present information about Shinto (or Shinto-related topics) in a non-snore-inducing manner.  Plus, I figure that this is good practice for when I have to teach people about this stuff (or just explain it to people on the street).

So, here we go!

Academic Post #1

A Brief History of Shinto (part 1): If You Stab a Lot of Powerful People, You Should Probably Come Up with a Good Explanation for Your Behavior

For as far back as the archaeological record stretches back in Japan (and that’s a pretty long time), people have worshipped spirits.  These spirits, called kami,** are believed to inhabit everything: the water, the air, the trees, the rocks, the plants, the mountains, everything.  They’re invisible***, and they act a lot like humans.  They can get angry (and cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and floods and famines) or they can be pleased (and grant good weather and bountiful harvests and good health).  If nobody worships them, though, they lose their kami powers and become disgruntled spirit-animal-monsters called youkai, which pretty much just wreak havoc everywhere.

In ancient Japan, the basic societal unit was the uji—the family or the clan.  Most uji had an ujigami, that is a kami specific to that uji.  If it was an uji of farmers, the ujigami was often associated with farming; an uji of fishermen might have an ujigami of the seas; an uji that lived in bear-infested mountains might worship an ujigami that took the shape of a bear.  The ujigami varied as widely as the uji, as did people's ways of worshiping them, and most people didn’t know about kami outside of their local area.

Fast forward in time to 645 CE!  Naka no Oe, the head of a prominent uji, somehow got a bunch of prominent families in a room; sources vary on what he actually did to get these people together  (I’ve seen it told as his being present at a ceremony or as his throwing a feast for the other clans and then locking the doors so no one could escape), but, to make a long story short, he, with the help of some friends, assassinated several powerful political figures (by stabbing them to death with spears), and then claimed the throne.

Of course, once his family had taken the throne, they realized that there was nothing stopping anyone else from following their lead and stabbing them to death, so Naka no Oe’s daughter told a writer at the court to compile a history of the family, linking them to their ujigami, Amaterasu (the Sun Goddess), and explaining why they were chosen as the imperial line.  The writer (and his assistant who may or may not have been female) went above and beyond the call of duty, however, and integrated the kami and creation myths of other powerful families into the narrative.****  Of course, the politics behind this move are clear—by presenting the kami of other powerful families as working alongside Amaterasu, the imperial family honored these families and (very subtly) suggested that they should work together, just as their kami did.  Interestingly enough, one of the kami who gets the most page time actually belonged to a region that did not want Naka no Oe ruling over them; eventually, however, the region was successfully integrated into the kingdom, just as its kami was integrated into the story.  The finished book of stories is called the Kojiki (『古事記』; usually translated as “The Record of Ancient Matters”), and is generally accepted as the oldest extant piece of Japanese writing.*****

…meanwhile, everyone outside of the court didn’t know about all this political intrigue and pretty much kept worshiping their kami the way they always had.

"But wait!" you cry.  "Where's the Shinto?  You haven't used that word at all in this entire post!"

Well, dear reader, that's because it wasn't called Shinto yet.  Remember how I said that no one really knew about kami outside of their local area?  In fact, there was no conception that any of the kami worship occurring was connected in any way whatsoever to any of the other kami worship.  If you had picked a random person and plopped them down 200 miles from their birthplace, they probably wouldn't have been able to recognize the local kami as a kami, or been able to make any sense out of the local customs and festivals.

So at this point, we can't really say that Shinto existed.  Yes, people worshiped kami, and, yes, people worship kami in Shinto, but at this point the kami worship was almost entirely localized and unconnected to any larger organization.

And what happened next?  Well, Buddhism showed up, and things just got more complicated.

Further Reading

Kojiki translated by Donald L. Phillipi

There are a variety of translations of the Kojiki, but this one is generally accepted as the best.  Of course, it's also out of print, so have fun getting your hands on a copy of it...  I'm probably going to eventually give up and pay an arm and a leg for my own copy.

Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions by a whole slew of people

A good introduction to Japanese religions.  It's more useful as a bibliography than as an in-depth text, though.

Shinto in History by a whole slew of people

Do not read unless you have an incredibly strong stomach for academic writing.

Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume One edited by William Theodore de Bary

This is pretty much the Bible of East Asian Studies.  It's also an amazing book full of translated historical documents.  Also also, my advisor at Brown's advisor is the editor!  So, basically, I need a copy of this too.  SO MANY BOOKS TO BUY.

*Although the only book I have ever literally fallen asleep while reading was about Zen Buddhism.

**Or mi or nushi or chami or a variety of other things depending upon the time period.  I’m simplifying here.  I'm actually simplifying a lot, which is why it's a brief history.

***Although that can be confusing in the case of, for example, Mt. Fuji.  Mt. Fuji is worshipped as a kami, but (theoretically) it’s not the actual mountain that’s being worshiped; it’s the invisible kami of the mountain. Of course, if you ask worshipers, some of them will inevitably tell you that the kami is the mountain, making academics very disgruntled.

****This also had the interesting side effect of creating gaping plot holes, such as when the world is created at the beginning of the story—only to be created again a hundred chapters later by a different kami.

*****It’s also one of the hardest books you could possibly read, since it’s written using a writing system that was used only for that book.  It uses Chinese characters phonetically…sometimes…and for their meaning…sometimes…and sometimes it just has a bunch of characters on the page and you have no idea what’s going on.  After a while, people just gave up on trying to read it...until the National Learning movement, but we'll get to that later.