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.

---

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

Calling me a "researcher" is just another way of saying I'm a giant nerd

Today was basically my day to completely nerd out.

First of all, I got to speak (over Skype) with Helen Hardacre this morning, which was pretty excellent.  She gave me a bunch of advice on graduate school applications (I contacted her because she's one of the people I'm looking at as a potential advisor), and also was Actually Interested in my research project, which was very exciting!  She'll apparently be coming to Nanzan in May, so hopefully I'll be able to meet her then!

Second of all, in class today we split into the "girl team" and the "boy team" to categorize different branches of pre-War Shinto philosophy, and so I got to use all those hours of reading about Yoshida Shinto and Ise Shinto and National Learning to correctly classify pretty much all of them.  (I said that Yoshida Shinto was a reverse honji suijaku type and National Learning was a shinbutsu bunri type when my advisor wanted us to say that both Yoshida Shinto and National Learning stressed the unique characteristics of Shinto and saw them as the source of all other religious traditions.)  The girl team (comprised of myself and the one other girl in the class) did much better than the boy team, in any case.

Third of all, I asked my advisor if there was a secondary library on campus, since the main college library's Shinto collection is one shelf of out-dated encyclopaedias.  He wound up taking me to the Nanzan Institute for Religious Studies' library, and I might have swooned a little bit.  SO MANY BOOKS.  And I haven't even read most of them!  (He also said that I can probably get into the closed area of the college library, where they keep all the interesting books.)
As we were heading out of the library, my advisor pulled a copy of Shinto: The Way Home off the shelf.  "Have you read this?"
I answered that I had read it.  It was one of the many (many, many, many, many) books I read for my thesis.
"The author's here; would you like to meet him?"
"YES?????"
So I got to meet Thomas Kasulis, who was nice enough to actually sit down and talk to me about my project and grad school and what he's working on right now (which is a history of Japanese philosophy, as a companion to Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook).  When he discovered that I was working on shrines and the local community, he proceeded to introduce me to three other professors, two of whom have connections to chounaikai* and said they would be happy to talk to me.  So that was very exciting as well!  Plus, everyone's reaction to my research project wasn't "Why would you study that?" or "Oh, I'm so sorry" (the two most common reactions I get from Nanzan students) but "Wow, that's a really cool topic, and I can't think of anyone else who's worked on it!"  So that was a nice affirmation for me that what I'm working on Actually Matters.  Plus, now I have contacts!  And I know where the books are!

...basically, deep down, I am a giant nerd, and I will stay happy as long as I have books and people to talk to about academics.  I'm pretty sure it's Not Normal to prefer talking about Taoism's influence on early kami-worship to talking about The Latest Pop Culture Thing, but I don't particularly care.  I am a nerd and proud of it!
...I have a feeling that graduate school will make me absurdly happy, in some ways.  Who needs a social life when you have a library?

Also, three final notes:
1. For some reason, mosquitoes keep biting my ankles.  Or, really, my right ankle.  I have a perfect little anklet of bite marks right now.
2. While several people left excited comments about possibly microwaving mochi during Stuff Not to Microwave Night, I have to tell you that it's not particularly exciting about exploding.  I couldn't even tell that it had exploded until I took it out of the microwave and discovered that it looked as though someone had dropped a sonic rain nuke on it.**
3. This song has taken over my brain.

*Neighborhood organizations would be the Western equivalent, I suppose.

**Eheheh.  Ask your local brony for an explanation.

In which people keep giving me food

Susanoo Shrine was having their festival today, so I walked over this morning to check it out.  When I arrived, there were only about five people there, but I asked one of the women who seemed to be in charge  if I could observe the festival and gave her my business card.  She said sure, and wait just a moment, and then she came back and said the guji already knew who I was.  As it turns out, Nakano-san, Gosha Shrine's guji, is also the guji of Susanoo Shrine.  She told me a bunch about the shrine's history, including that the mountain kami enshrined in one of the side shrines was actually originally enshrined in a temple, but during shinbutsu bunri*, the kami was transferred to the newly built Susanoo Shrine.

The actual ceremony was very small, since there were only nine of us, plus the guji.  Since this festival was the big fall festival, it was longer than usual, because the guji had to perform separate ceremonies in the honden, in front of the mountain kami's shrine, and then inside the shrine office, where there is a small Ebisu shrine.  The shrine precincts are very small, and because there wasn't a huge crowd, we could very clearly hear everything that was happening in the neighborhood surrounding the shrine.  Not only was there a large construction project going on in the next block over (so there would be jackhammer noises every few minutes), there was a large group of crows nearby being VERY LOUD.**  After the ceremony, the guji commented on the crows; apparently Susanoo is believed to use crows as a sort of spirit animal, and so their presence was an affirmation that the ceremony was going well!

I stuck around after the ceremony to talk to the guji, and she showed me the norito she had been reading.  They're written in the old, kanji-only-version of Japanese, so they're incredibly difficult to read.  The copies she had were done in beautiful calligraphy; she said her husband made them for her.  As I was chatting with the guji, one of the older gentlemen from the ujiko organization came over and was pouring everyone purifying sake (which I have now learned is called omiki).  He asked me if I drank, and I said I didn't, and so he taught me the correct protocol for non-drinkers.  Essentially, the pourer pantomimes pouring sake, and you pantomime drinking it.  Good to know for next time!

It also turned out that the one of the guys who was supposed to show up to the ceremony (he's from the local ujiko organization) couldn't make it today, so they had an extra lunch set.  Which meant that I got to have lunch with a bunch of really cool people, and hear terrifying stories about crows.  Crows, being scavengers, have a habit of going after garbage bags, so people put nets over them garbage bags to keep the crows away.  But apparently it doesn't always work, since one of the gentlemen there said he had seen a crow just scoop up the net and fly away with the garbage bag in it.  Yikes.  I also got to learn some cool crow-related mythology--apparently crows are a symbol of death, since they are supposed to perch on the roofs of houses where people were dead or dying...kind of like vultures in Western culture, I suppose.  Also, the reason the crow is black is because he wanted to be the prettiest bird in the world, and so he went to all the other birds and asked what color was the prettiest, and then mixed all their suggestions together...which produced black.

During the ceremony, as usual, the guji had offered a variety of foods to the kami, but after the ceremony, the offerings were removed from the honden and divided up among the participants, so everyone got to take a bit of kami-blessed food home.  I got to help two of the other women to divide everything up fairly, and they taught me the names of a whole bunch of new foods.  They kept saying, "Do you know what this is?" and if it looked like plant matter I would guess seaweed.  I was right about half the time.  Plus, they told me how to cook it (most of their advice was "it's good in miso soup!"), which was excellent.  And then, as I was leaving, they made sure I took a bag with me.  So I got a couple of days' worth of groceries and a free lunch and a bunch of really cool conversations out of the experience.  (Plus they said I'm welcome back any time, and Nakano-san said to call her if I ever have free time and want to hear a whole lot about shrines.  OH MAN, I AM SO UP FOR THIS.)

Unfortunately, having to drop groceries off at my dorm made me late to Kawahara Shrine, so by the time I got there, the ceremony in the honden had already started.  That was just as well, because shortly after I arrived I suddenly realized how completely exhausted I was and had to sit down.  Apparently my body doesn't like doing 12 hours of fieldwork in a 36 hour period on limited sleep.  HOW LAME.

The enclosure for mochi throwing had already been set up.

Along with their names, the requesters at Kawahara Shrine also wrote the addresses of their businesses (small characters on the right-hand side).

This is about 30 minutes before the event was supposed to start.  Good crowd gathering, people hanging out with their neighbors, all good stuff...

Here's the (increasingly crowded) walkway to the main shrine...

There were a lot more stands today than there were yesterday; the mochi throwing was a much bigger draw than the "pre-festival" (that's how one of the shrine workers described it) yesterday.

Ten minutes 'til things get hurled...

And here are the brave men (and women) who will be chucking things at us.

...and, go!

I managed to catch a piece of mochi this time as well, although they were significantly more dangerous than yesterday.  The mochi at Ikatsu Hachimangu were relatively soft, whereas the ones at Kawahara Shrine were about as hard as rocks.

This woman was one of the last ones with any mochi left, so everyone was crowding around her.

(I got whacked in the face and the back of the head and nearly pushed over at this point.)

Also, an old guy got into a physical fight with a little kid over a piece of mochi.  SCARY.

...everyone else is leaving, and that woman STILL has mochi.

Then everyone stormed the festival stands to buy food.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday is GUNS.  There are very strict gun laws in Japan (i.e. NO GUNS AT ALL IN THE COUNTRY), but yesterday I saw a little kid waving a gun around.  I must admit that I FREAKED OUT for about three seconds.  Then I realized that it was a model gun.  Because there are no real guns in Japan, you can make model guns as realistic as you want, I guess?  Anyway, there were a whole bunch of kids with model guns at the shrine today ('cause you could win them as prizes at several of the booths), and I kept having to remind myself that they weren't real...

Anyway, I headed over to the shrine office to say hi quickly, and upon discovering that I had only caught one mochi, they provided me with more.  So now I have more mochi than I know what to do with.  I've already offered to share it with my suitemates, so hopefully they'll take me up on the offer...

I also found out that if you microwave mochi, it explodes.

Good times.

Too tired.  Gonna crash.  Zzzzzzzz.

*Essentially a movement during the Meiji restoration to separate Buddhism and Shinto. I'll write a longer post about this at some point.

**If you have never seen a Japanese crow before, let me explain.  Japanese crows are bigger than American crows, weirdly aggressive, and when they cry, they sound like cats being murdered.  I wish I were kidding, but my blood freezes every time I hear Japanese crows.

In which I nearly get concussed by mochi

I had another amazingly long day of fieldwork today, but this time I remembered to bring my xD card, so you get pictures!

I started the morning off by heading to Ikatsu Hachimangu.  Halfway to the shrine, I ran into a group of about ten kids (none of them could have been older than about five years old), carrying shishi, and their parents, who were making sure that they didn't wander into the middle of traffic.  There was an older gentleman acting as a sort of traffic guard and making sure that they kept up their chant (元気を出して！わっしょい！わっしょい！); it turned out that he was from the neighborhood patrol, which happens to have their office situated on Ikatsu Hachimangu's grounds.  Their parade was much less formal than the one at Gosha Shrine...and even less formal than the one at Yagoto Shrine.  The kids were all wearing happi, but the parents were just wearing normal clothes, and the kids, being kids, kept saying how tired/hungry/bored they were and that they wanted their parents to carry them or chasing each other around or forgetting that they were supposed to be chanting and poking each other instead.

I followed the parade of kids to Ikatsu Hachimangu, where they joined a bunch of other shishi-bearing groups.  It seems as though, rather than having a single parade cover the entire shrine-protected area, there were a series of small groups each carrying two shishi which circled smaller sections of the neighborhood.  Probably a good plan, when your shishi-bearers aren't old enough to be in elementary school.

As you can probably tell from the picture, a large...enclosure had been set up in the middle of the shrine grounds.

These papers were hanging up all over the enclosure.  Each one has the name of a requester (in black) and then what they were requesting (in red).  In this case, the requester is a local business and the request is "business prosperity."

A bunch of kids were playing in the gravel.

And here's the side of the enclosure in front of the shrine.  The baskets on top of the enclosure were full of mochi.

The guji arrived and purified everyone who had carried a shishi, and then all the kids went home while the guji led a special group (who would later be pitching mochi) into the honden for a special ceremony.

This group showed up late and missed the purification ceremony.  Apparently their leader had thought that the ceremony was taking place later than it actually was.

Here everyone is leaving...

I wanted to ask one of the shrine workers when the next part of the matsuri would be occurring, but he was busy talking to someone, so I stood nearby and waited for him to finish.
Then this little girl (she was probably about three) came up to me.
Girl: *holding up a leaf*  This is a leaf!
Me: Yes, that is a leaf.
Girl: *holding up a red rock*  This is a red rock!
Me: Yes, it's very pretty.
Girl: *holding up a white rock*  It matches this white rock!
Then she launched into an extremely elaborate explanation of how she had gone looking for rocks while her grandfather was doing something at the shrine, which I caught maybe half of, because she kept mumbling and using little kid words.  But she was SO ENTHUSIASTIC, and apparently not scared of me, which was kind of amazing, since pretty much all the other kids I've run into in Japan either stare at me or run away in fear when they see me.  In any case, her grandfather finished his business and took her home, and I went to talk to the shrine worker about when the second part of the festival (the mochi throwing) would be occurring.  He said it wouldn't start until 4 o' clock, and it was currently 1:30, so I had some time.  He also told me that there are three shrines in the area that do mochi throwing: Shiroyama Hachimangu, Ikatsu Hachimangu, and Kawahara Shrine.  He said that the people who throw the mochi are all people who are having yakudoshi* this year, and that the idea behind the mochi throwing is that they are taking their bad luck and spreading it out among a huge crowd of people, so the year isn't so bad for them.

Then he gave me a special charm from the shrine:

It's essentially a five-yen coin with a little piece of string knotted through it, wrapped in paper.  He said that it's a charm that's only made at Ikatsu Hachimangu, so that's super cool.  I thanked him profusely, and he said I was welcome back any time.

So then I headed out to find something to do for a couple of hours.  As it turns out, there's a Book Off! about ten minutes away.  Book Off! is a chain of used bookstores in Japan, and IT IS EPIC.  So many books for so little money. (They also sell CDs and DVDs and video games, but I am, and will always be, a giant bookworm.)  I had fun looking at all the book titles (Why Japan Is the Most Popular in the World was definitely high on the bizarre-o-meter), and wound up buying a copy of the fourth Durarara!! for 350 yen, 'cause I want to be able to read things that aren't stuffy books about Shinto.

Anyway, that, uh, pretty much sucked up all my time.  Like I said, I am a giant bookworm.

So I headed back to Ikatsu Hachimangu.

There were huge numbers of people streaming into the shrine, and for some reason all of them were carrying plastic bags.  HMMMMM.

This was about 20 minutes before the mochi throwing was due to start.  As you can tell, there weren't a whole lot of people there yet, but some of the mochi throwers were getting into position.

All the mochi throwers wore special vest-things that said "Ikatsu Hachimangu."

Starting to get pretty crowded...

About five minutes before the mochi throwing started, there were a series of announcements about how not to get hurt during the event.  First, the announcer asked the mochi throwers to please not throw "baseball style" (that is, overhand).  Second, the announcer asked that people not push each other.  (This was the point at which the group of three girls behinds me, who had been chatting nicely up to this point, turned to each other and said, "Well, it's every woman for herself now.")  Third, the announcer warned people that they might get hit in the head.  Fourth, the announcer suggested that people take off their glasses, because if the mochi hit them in the face, their glasses might go flying and break. (This was the point at which I took my glasses off and started edging away from the really fierce-looking old lady, who was jockeying for position to my right.  She had TWO plastic bags and was ready to use them.)  Fifth, the announcer told everyone that the actual mochi throwing would probably take about three minutes.

And then the mochi was thrown.

I have to say, it was one of the most terrifying epic things I have ever been through.  (It probably didn't help that my glasses were off, so I had no depth perception to speak of.)  Imagine being surrounded on all sides by people who are throwing mochi at you (and mochi, by the way, is not a particularly soft substance; imagine if people were lobbing gobs of slightly-dried Play-Dough at you), and all the people next to you immediately hit the ground to pick up the mochi that falls or hold up their plastic bags to catch the mochi raining down.  There was some seriously cut-throat behavior going on: people snatching mochi from each other, pushing each other out of the way, etc.  This was the point at which I got whacked in the back of the head with a piece of mochi, which hurt.  (My head's still kind of sore, five hours later, so I think it might bruise.)  However, being whacked in the head made my brain go into karate mode, which meant that mochi = attack, and the next piece of mochi that came flying at me, I automatically did a catch-block on (I dunno what my brain was thinking, other than maybe "ooh, should catch this and then BREAK ALL THE BONES IN ITS ARM"), which basically meant that I caught a piece of hurtling mochi out of the air.  Then someone behind me had the GALL to try to snatch it FROM MY HAND, as if that would ever work.  I did not relinquish my death grip on the mochi (it was going to PAY for that cheap head shot).

(Here is my cowering prey, mwahahaha.)

As it turned out, the mochi throwing only lasted for about 90 seconds, not the originally estimated 3 minutes.

Here everyone is, pouring back out of the shrine.

As I was leaving, I saw the shrine worker I had spoken to earlier, and I held up the piece of mochi I had got and said, "I caught one!"  He grinned, and then thrust a bag full of mochi (plus two more of the five-yen charms) at me.  As usual, the exchange went something along the lines of "But but but but" "TAKE IT" "THANK YOU."  And then I was swept away by the crowd.

So then I walked to Kawahara Shrine, where there were already A MILLION bicycles parked on the sidewalk, and the street had been shut down on either end.

There were a variety of festival stands set up throughout the grounds.  This one was for a shark fishing game, in which kids used little fishing poles with magnets on the end to pick up plastic sharks (with bells in their mouths) and win prizes.

Here's a bunch of kids (and their parents) parading out of the shrine with a shishi.

Another festival staple: the cucumber on a stick!  I'm not sure why I'd pay 200 yen for a cucumber, but whatever.

More stands!

Here's the mochi throwing area, already set up for tomorrow.

A stage had been set up in front of the shrine office, and there they were performing...

...kagura!

(The girl on the left is the miko I spoke to the first day.)

I have to say, the miko at Kawahara Shrine are much more synchronized in their kagura than the miko I've seen at the other shrines.

Then these kids came out and did a dance as well.

This blog is now about dancing children, every day.

This was, unfortunately, the best picture I could get of the musicians performing.  While I'm pretty tall by Japanese standards, I'm not THAT tall.

Then these guys came out and danced, and I could not get a decent picture of them, because the sun was setting and my camera hates darkness.

Then the head of the musicians (with the microphone) and the guji (on her right) tried to convince everyone to back up and tried to separate the audience into children and adults.  Everyone ignored them.

Then they pitched candy and snacks into the audience.  Fortunately I managed not to be hit or trampled this time, although I also didn't get any.

Throwing stuff + dusk = trippy camera

Once that was done, a surprising number of people went to pray their respects to the kami.  At most of the other festivals I've been attending, once the event is over, everyone leaves, but most people stuck around here.

Here's the long line of people going to pray their respects to the kami.

The stands and the lanterns were lit as the sun went down, which was really cool!

I grabbed some kara-age (fried chicken...sort of) for dinner, and then I wandered over to the shrine office, where I was dragged inside and introduced to a bunch of important people.  One of the guys who belonged to the local ujiko organization explained a little bit more about the mochi throwing to me.  He said that the mochi symbolizes the unluckiness, so when you pick up the mochi, it's like you're taking someone else's unluckiness away.  "So instead of the yakudoshi people getting really sick and dying, you'll get a little sick instead!" he concluded.  It puts a whole new spin on those people who were so desperate to get their hands on as much mochi as they could...

I also talked the guji about the mochi throwing, and she said that it's gotten a lot safer than it used to be.  When she was little, not only was the mochi thrown from the ROOF, it wasn't wrapped in a little plastic bag like it is now.  She said that people wouldn't care and would just brush the dirt off the mochi and eat it anyway, since it was supposed to be protected by the kami, but now people don't want to risk it.  She also said that a lot of places have opted for just passing out the mochi instead of throwing it, but that's no fun.  Apparently, Kawahara Shrine throws a lot more goodies than most other shrines; they added the candy throwing today, and at Setsubun,** they throw candy along with beans, because "otherwise it's just too mean."  The guji said that when she was little she was so thrilled to catch anything being thrown--it didn't even matter what it was--that she wanted to share that feeling with the local kids.

We also worked out the details of the meeting next Monday; it's basically going to involve taking the subway to the train and then the train to Higashi Okazaki, which is where the meeting is being held.

As I was leaving, one of the shrine workers gave me this little bag of rice.  It's apparently from the shinden*** of the shrine, and you're supposed to mix it with regular white rice and eat it.  An omamori that you can eat?  I AM SO INTO THIS.

Tomorrow's another insanely full day, so I shall leave it at that and collapse into bed.

*Unlucky years.  They vary from shrine to shrine, but they tend to be around 19 and 33 for women and 25 and 40-ish for men.  Of course, some shrines add extra years, and you're not supposed to be entirely safe for the years on either side of the unlucky years as well.

**Setsubun is a holiday taking place on February 3 (which, according to the lunar calendar, is the beginning of spring).  Essentially, people dress in demon masks, and you chase them out of the house, pelting them with beans and yelling, "Demons out, good luck in!"  I've actually celebrated Setsbun before (at Foothill), so I'm looking forward to seeing it in Japan.

***The most sacred place in the shrine, where the kami are enshrined.

In which I face my old enemy, uncooked alcohol

So due to a series of complicated circumstances, I found out that Shiroyama Hachimangu (remember when I mentioned it about a million years ago?) was having a festival today, and I only live about 20 minutes away by subway.  It was pouring rain this morning, so I was afraid that the festival was going to be cancelled, but then it cleared up in the early afternoon, so I hopped on the subway and rode on over.

The shrine is beautiful--it's situated in the middle of a forest on a hill--and I would show you pictures, but I somehow managed to take my camera with me...without the xD card in it.  To make matters even more confusing, my camera "took pictures" for about an hour before informing me that my memory was full...at which point I discovered that I didn't have the xD card in the camera.  So I'm pretty sure the camera was just hallucinating or something.

ANYWAY, I could talk a lot about the shrine, but it's late and I'm tired, so I'll save that for another day (when I have pictures).

They had opened up the honden of the shrine for the festival and had tents with seating right outside the honden, and when I asked one of the miko if I could observe the festival, she directed me to the tent.  Anyway, once I was settled in the tent, another miko came over and told everyone in the tent that, actually, not enough people had shown up who were supposed to be sitting in the honden, so all of us were allowed to come inside and watch the festival from the honden.  Awesome.

The ceremony itself was very, very similar to the one which occurred at Gosha Shrine last week, just longer and with more people involved.  There were five (!!) priests involved in the ceremony, plus an additional two guys dressed in semi-priestly attire whose job seemed to mostly consist of putting down mats for the other priests to kneel on and then picking up the mats.
Super quick outline of the ceremony (some events may be slightly out of order because I couldn't take notes and also couldn't see everything going on because there was a pillar blocking my view):
1. Norito by younger priest
2. Purification by younger priest
3. Offerings to the kami
4. Kagura by miko
5. Song and music by court musicians
6. Norito by guji
7. Norito by older priest #2 (they kept calling him "kenpeishi," but I can't find that in my dictionary)
8. Offering of sakaki by various groups (the shrine staff, then the soudai, then two guys who I couldn't figure out (I think one of them might have been a politician?), then another local group, but no people-without-a-group group this time)
9. Removal of offerings

At this point, all of us filed out of the honden and I realized I HAD MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE.
You see, when you have participated in a ceremony and you're not shrine staff (and not observing with the shrine staff, as I was at the wedding ceremony), you're offered sake as you leave.
And I don't drink.
So there I was, in line to leave, and everyone was being handed little plate-bowl-things of sake.
My train of thought went something like this:
OH NO HOW COULD I FORGET
Maybe they won't notice me...oh shoot, they've handed me a plate.  Shoot shoot shoot.
Okay, maybe I should just say no thank you.  No thank you, I don't want any sake, thanks, I know it's supposed to purify me and all but I don't drink thanks.
They are going to lynch you alive.
Maybe I should just drink the sake.  I mean, it's probably two sips.  How bad could it be?
Remember the ibuprofen?*  Remember the chocolate-covered espresso bean?**  Remember general anesthesia?***  Is now really the time you want to be experimenting with alcohol?
OH NO THEY JUST POURED ME SAKE
GOTTA DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH IT IN THE NEXT FIVE STEPS 'CAUSE I GOTTA PUT THE PLATE DOWN ON THE STACK
AHHHHHHHHHHH

I wound up just pantomiming drinking and then putting the plate full of sake on the stack and running for dear life, which, in hindsight, was probably not the greatest way to deal with the situation, but given that they had to wash all the plates anyway, it didn't really make any extra work for anyone (I hope).  Ironically, a woman behind me just declined the sake, so now I know I can do that without being lynched.

There was supposed to be mochi throwing afterwards, but the rain had started up again during the ceremony, so they decided to cancel it and instead hand out the mochi to the incredibly large crowd who had suddenly showed up.  This turned out to be a disastrously bad idea, as the crowd rushed the table with the mochi, leaving the guy with the microphone to scream, "Don't push!  You're going to hurt someone!  Stop pushing!  Please, stop pushing the people in front of you!" over and over and over again.  It probably didn't help that, even though people were only supposed to get four mochi apiece, some people went back for seconds...and thirds...and fourths...and were very aggressive about it.  There was a little old lady who filled an entire shopping bag full of mochi and was shoving people out of the way to get to the front.  It was terrifying, and I stayed clear of the whole mess.
Once the mochi ran out, pretty much everyone left.  I wandered around the shrine a bit more, picked up some pamphlets, and then headed back to my dorm.

And I shall finish with that, because I have another long day ahead of me tomorrow and I'm really tired.  G'night!

*The last time I took ibuprofen, I became horrifyingly ADHD for four hours.  I couldn't think straight, I couldn't hold on to a thought for more than about five seconds, I retyped an entire paragraph of my thesis word for word, I got distracted crossing the room to my bookshelf and then couldn't remember what I was doing, I wrote one of the weirdest emails I have ever written in my life...  It was terrifying.  Needless to say, reacting that way to ibuprofen is really not normal.

**At Javaspook (Tech House's Halloween party) last year, I had ONE chocolate-covered espresso bean at about 6 p.m....and was awake until 4 a.m.  Not fun.

***Long story short, general anesthesia makes me have really bad panic attacks.
Basically, drugs and I don't get along, and I'm honestly not all that interested in finding out what alcohol will do to me.  If ibuprofen screws up my thought processes for four hours...yeahhhhhh...

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.

Tuesday sensei is cool but paying for things is complicated

I would like to take a moment here to sing the praises of my Tuesday sensei.  We have a different sensei for Japanese class every day, and Tuesday sensei is a pretty cool guy.
Reasons Tuesday sensei is a pretty cool guy:
1. He talks to me like a normal human being.  Unfortunately, I have discovered that when I stutter and people start talking to me like I'm deaf as well as stuttering (or, worse, when they start finishing my sentences for me), my self-confidence plummets and takes my language ability with it.  But Tuesday sensei not only does not finish my sentences for me, he talks to me like I can understand him...which I can.  Thus, self-confidence up, language ability up, and I can actually express myself normally in that class!  Yay!
2. He studied abroad in Boston, and we totally tried to teach one of the Japanese students how to speak with a Boston accent last night.  (Thank you, Gage, for teaching me this incredibly useful skill.)  She stared at us for a minute and then said, "That sounds super inaka.*"
3. He invited all of us to a nomikai** he's holding for a couple of his classes.  He asked me if I was coming and I told him (very quietly) that I didn't drink and was it okay if I came anyway?  And he said, "Oh, I don't drink either!  You can totally come and we can have oolong tea.  Also, it's tabehoudai.***  SO YOU SHOULD COME."  And my reaction was, "WELL IF IT'S TABEHOUDAI THEN OKAY."  So I am going to a nomikai on the 28th.  Hopefully it will be a good experience.

In other news, I was talking to the girl who was my language partner last night about nicknames, and I said that mine was Calamari.  She said that when she was studying abroad in France everyone called her by her nickname, Kocchan, but they pronounced it the same as the French word for "pig."  "So it's better to be a squid!" she concluded.

On a totally unrelated topic, some Japanese companies don't understand how to pay for things.  To pay for my business cards (which arrived and they are essentially the best), I had to go to the post office with the receipt for my business cards, pay the post office for the business cards, and then presumably the post office will pay the business card company.  OR I COULD HAVE, YOU KNOW, USED A CREDIT OR DEBIT CARD.  Sooooooo complicated.

And finally, a random soundbite from my dorm today:
Sae: *bursting out of her room* DANA.
Me: YES?
Sae: HOW DO YOU SAY FURIISAIZU IN ENGLISH?
Me: Furiisaizu?  What does that mean?
Sae: It's when there is only one size and everyone has to wear it.
Me: Oh, you mean one size fits all.
Sae: One size?
Me: Fits all.
Sae: THANK YOU.  *disappears back into room*

*Inaka is the Japanese word for the countryside or rural areas, and "super inaka," while not a real Japanese phrase (although I have heard people say "ちょう田舎" and "めちゃ田舎"), is one of those Japanglish phrases you'll hear a lot from bilingual people.  Examples include (but are not limited to):
"He lived in the super inaka."
"Our house is super inaka and has no internet."
"Boston accents sound super inaka."

**Drinking party.

***SO MUCH JAPANESE ALL OVER THIS POST.  Tabehoudai is "all you can eat."  Generally the way it works is that you pay a flat fee and then you're given a certain time limit (the place I went to was three hours) in which you are allowed to order and eat whatever you want.  If you order something but don't finish enough of it, they charge you extra for wasting food.