Kami ... Gods of Japan

[ . BACK to TOP . ]

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

In the land of the kami

QUOTE
©　Japan Times
Sunday, March 14, 2010


By MICHAEL HOFFMAN

"In some rural areas even today, elderly villagers face the rising sun each morning, clap their hands together, and hail the appearance of the sun over the peaks of the nearby mountains as 'the coming of the kami,' " — so wrote historian Takeshi Matsumae in "The Cambridge History of Japan," published in 1993.
What is Shinto? There is no answer; its devotees hardly seek one.

Who or what are the kami, the myriad objects of Shinto worship? Nobody knows; knowledge seems beside the point.

"The Japanese people themselves do not have a clear idea regarding the kami," writes Sokyo Ono in "Shinto: The Kami Way" (1962). "They are aware of the kami intuitively at the depth of their consciousness and communicate with the kami directly without having formed the kami-idea conceptually or theologically."

Ambiguity is fertile breeding ground, and kami, whatever they are — gods? spirits? natural? supernatural? good? evil? both? neither? — crop up everywhere, in overwhelming profusion, in every conceivable form. A 10th-century text enumerates 3,132 of them — the upper crust, so to speak. It's a far from exhaustive list.

Most kami are purely local; many are ancestral; many more are animals (tigers, wolves, hares, serpents), or natural phenomena (wind, rain, thunder — "the kami that rumbles"), or natural objects (most famously Mount Fuji — "the mysterious kami" celebrated in the eighth-century poetry anthology "Manyoshu").

A numberless horde are Japan's kami. The "Nihon Shoki," an eighth-century court compendium of myth and tendentious history, speaks of "kami that shone with a lustre like fireflies, and evil kami that buzzed like flies."

"God" or "deity" seems the best the English language can do with "kami," but this misleads by suggesting a level of exaltation foreign to Japanese worship. The Emperor's former status as a "living god" was not what many horrified Westerners took it to be. In fact, he was a "manifest kami" — hardly the same thing and much less shocking.

Anything, or anyone, can become a kami by being striking or, in some undefined way, "superior" — the literal meaning of the word. The classic definition comes from the 18th-century nativist thinker Motoori Norinaga, who dedicated his life to exalting suprarational Japanese purity over Buddhism's and Confucianism's corrupt enslavement to human reason.

"I do not yet understand the meaning of the term kami," wrote Norinaga (in "The Spirit of the Gods," 1771). "It is hardly necessary to say that it includes human beings. It also includes such objects as birds, beasts, trees, plants, seas, mountains and so forth. In ancient usage, anything whatsoever which was outside the ordinary, which possessed superior power or which was awe-inspiring, was called kami. . . . Evil and mysterious things, if they are extraordinary and dreadful, are called kami . . . "

Rooted in the spontaneous nature- worship of deep prehistory, Shinto is probably the most archaic living religion anywhere in the developed world.

Why is it living? How did it survive?

The greatest challenge Shinto encountered came not from modern times but from Buddhism.

It's a story that goes back some 1,500 years. Indian in origin and newly arrived in Japan via China and Korea, Buddhism was everything Shinto was not — elegant, systematic, moral, philosophical, profound. No two world views could have been more different.

Preliminary skirmishes flared into civil war. The Buddhist faction won. That was in A.D. 587. Around the same time, in far distant lands utterly unknown to the actors in the Japanese drama, Roman Christianity was confronting the heathen religions of Dark Age Europe. Heathenism died out. Shinto did not. Why?
Possibly its very nebulousness saved it.

Shinto defies a direct approach. It is easier to say what it is not than what it is, what it lacks than what it has.

In its pristine form — as distinct from what the state and scholars like Norinaga made of it from time to time — it has no gods more exalted than kami, no myths that transcend childishness, no charismatic founder, no sacred texts, no art, scarcely any notion of good and evil, no morals, no ethics, no punishment, no concept of personal responsibility, of the soul, of immortality.

There's no human or animal sacrifice either, inseparable though these expressions of cosmic terror generally are from mankind's dawning religious consciousness.

Is it even a religion? Ono, a noted Shintoist scholar, calls it "more than a religious faith," but one could just as easily call it less. "It is an amalgam," Ono continues, "of attitudes, ideas, and ways of doing things that through two millenniums and more have become an integral part of the way of the Japanese people."

It was in the air Japan breathed. It never even had a name until Buddhism — Butsudo, the "Way of the Buddha" — came along and presented something to contrast it to. Hence Shinto, the "way of the kami," a word combining shin, another reading of the kanji character for kami, and to, which means "way."

Shinto is blessed with a joyously exuberant view of the world. It has no heaven because it doesn't need one. "This world," writes Ono, "is inherently good."

There is evil, certainly, but it is ascribed either to pollution, which can be purified, or to an intrusion from other worlds, which can be exorcised. Pollution arises from contact with illness, blood, death. Childbirth is deemed more polluting than murder if the murderer spills no blood.

Ono offers this peculiar explanation: "The Shinto manner of grasping truth takes into consideration the fact that values are constantly changing. For example, in Shinto ethics nothing — sex, wealth, killing, etc. — is regarded as unconditionally evil."

Norinaga, the 18th-century nativist, in effect transmutes evil into good by making it no less divine: "Among the kami there are good and bad ones. Their actions are in accordance with their different natures, so they cannot be understood by ordinary reason. . . . In foreign countries all the good and bad things that happen are either attributed to karmic retribution according to the Way of the Buddha or else thought to be, according to the various Ways of China, acts of heaven. . . . All these theories are mistaken. . . . It is entirely due to the will of the kami that there is harm in the world, that everything cannot be proper and in accordance with reason, and that there are many wicked things."

Buddhism, when at last it put down inextricable roots in Japanese society, must have seemed to the Shinto mind a bitter if intellectually bracing pill.

"As opposed to Shinto, which views physical life as basically good and acceptable," writes the scholar H.E. Plutschow (in "Chaos and Cosmos," 1990), "Buddhism regards life as suffering, and physical existence as basically undesirable."

Are these contrary outlooks reconcilable? Astonishingly, mysteriously, they turned out to be.

Shinto's roots reach so deep into the past as to be scarcely traceable. Before agriculture, before metal, the Stone Age hunter-gatherers of the long Jomon Period (c.8000-300 B.C.), in their instinctive veneration of mountains, fields and streams, were in a sense proto-Shintoists.

The wet-rice cultivators of the succeeding Yayoi Period (c.300 B.C.-A.D. 300) worshipped a rice spirit "believed to dwell at harvest time in specially reaped sheaves of rice," writes the historian Matsumae. "These sheaves were enshrined in grain storehouses" — apparent archetypes of the distinctive and rudely beautiful Shinto shrine architecture we know today.

Sun worship, too — subsequently to loom so large in official, militaristic "state Shinto" of the 20th century — is a Yayoi legacy. The famous mythological quarrel between the benign sun goddess, Amaterasu, and her raging brother, the storm god Susano'o, who desecrated her rice fields, reflects the fearfully precarious footing on which Yayoi agriculture stood.

Its long prehistory over at last, Japan enters recorded history as the kingdom of Yamato (ca. A.D. 250-587), its kings (or emperors) increasingly acknowledged by rival clan chiefs as supreme.

That this supremacy was largely religious was of great significance for the future of kami worship. So far, cultic evolution had been slow and natural. Now it would be rapid and political.

Imperial ascendancy came to rest on divine descent. Benevolent and charming in the early myths, Amaterasu, emerging in the sixth century as the Imperial ancestress, grew ominously, though briefly, awesome. Buddhism in the next century tamed her; Confucianism, a later import, dimmed her. For centuries, even as folk Shinto, or "shrine Shinto," flourished in villages and urban plebian quarters, Amaterasu herself eked out a bare survival as "avatar" of the Roshana Buddha. [see accompanying story]

But her brilliant, fleeting glory inspired scattered minds here and there — Norinaga's, for instance. In the fullness of time it resurged.

Apostle of the past and unconscious herald of the future, Norinaga in 1771 wrote: "(The Sun Goddess) is without peer in the whole universe, casting her light to the very ends of heaven and earth and for all time. There is not a single country in the world which does not receive her beneficent illuminations. . . . This goddess is the splendor of all splendors. However, foreign countries, having lost the ancient tradition of the Divine Age, do not know the meaning of revering this goddess."

They were, of course, to learn, though Norinaga in his own day seemed more wistful than prophetic. Long relegated to an official netherworld, Shinto under the 1868 Meiji Imperial Restoration was abruptly adopted as the state cult. Shinto myths, taught in schools as historical fact, propelled Japan first into the most intensive modernization the world had ever seen, then headlong into the most destructive war the world has ever known.

The curtain came down on state Shinto in December 1945, its abolition decreed under the Occupation by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers — "in order," reads a SCAP memorandum to the Japanese government, "to prevent recurrence of the perversion of Shinto theory and beliefs into militaristic and ultranationalistic propaganda designed to delude the Japanese people and lead them into wars of aggression."

There remains to this day shrine Shinto — unperverted Shinto, we might call it — at the heart of which are Japan's ongoing wealth of timeless festivals — timeless in two senses of the word: timelessly ancient, timelessly eternal.

Dancing and carousing celebrants welcoming, entertaining and finally seeing off local kami in due season perform rites as old as mankind. Shinto festivals, each distinctively local and yet all so essentially alike that some scholars infer an ancient proto-festival from they all descend, represent order destroyed, disorder tamed, order restored.

On this ritual representation depend cosmic order, always precarious, and kami benevolence, never to be taken for granted.

The next time you see hordes of men in loincloths tearing through town at festival time shouldering a kami-bearing mikoshi (portable shrine) to spirited (but lexically meaningless) shouts of "Washoi! Washoi!," you might reflect on the awesome implications of the innocent fun. The symbolic destruction and regeneration of time and cosmic order is no light matter.


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20100314x2.html

Buddhism's arrival, Shinto's endurance
By MICHAEL HOFFMAN

The Korea of that time was split among several perpetually warring kingdoms. The three largest were Kokuli, Silla and Paikche. The envoy was from Paikche, whose defenses were buckling under attack by Silla.

He came, says the 8th-century chronicle "Nihon Shoki," bearing a plea and a gift. The plea was for military aid; the gift, a "wonderful doctrine . . . of all doctrines the most excellent . . . hard to explain and hard to comprehend," but through it "every prayer is fulfilled."

This was not Japan's first contact with Buddhism, vague word of which had been percolating for some 150 years, but now its time seemed to have come. Emperor Kimmei, says the "Nihon Shoki," "leaped for joy."

Kimmei's ministers were less jubilant. Those who saw in the "wonderful doctrine" and its sumptuous trappings an entry into the dazzling civilization of China were opposed by a nativist faction that saw only danger. Foreign gods, foreign prayers, foreign rites were abhorrent to them. On the benevolence of the native kami depended the abundance of the harvest, the health of the state. The kami must not be offended.

Leading the Buddhist cause was a powerful immigrant clan named Soga. An uneasy compromise was struck: the Soga family would receive the gilt-copper Buddha image presenented by Paikche envoy and worship it privately at home.

Pestilence broke out. It frequently did, but for this epidemic the nativists had a ready explanation: the kami were raining vengeance down on their unfaithful people. The Soga's household temple was torched, and the image was seized and flung into a canal.

A fire at the Imperial Palace, however, soon gave fresh impetus to the Soga. Construing it as signifying outrage among the Buddhist gods, they promptly set about procuring from Paikche images, sutras, monks, a temple architect and three child-nuns.

Pestilence spread again, spurring on the nativists. The nuns bore the brunt of their wrath, suffering a public whipping.

Then Emperor Yomei fell ill and, defying his nativist ministers, turned to the new religion for succor. The schism widened. In 587 civil war broke out.

The Soga won, decisively routing the native clans.

Why did Japan at that point not become a Buddhist state?
Why did Shinto not fade quietly into oblivion?

It very nearly did.

A growing civilization demands outward grandeur. Buddhism's capacity to provide it was no small part of its early appeal. Wielding power behind a compliant throne, clan chieftain Soga no Umako embarked on a spree of temple building. The Asuka-dera, completed in 596 at Asuka near present-day Nara, was Japan's first Chinese-style temple. Forty-five others followed before Umako's death in 626. By the end of the Nara Period (710-784) there were more than 1,000.

The Imperial backing Umako needed came from an individual ranked among the great shapers of Japanese history, the Prince-Regent Shotoku Taishi (574-622). Devoutly Buddhist, Shotoku, like Umako, was an energetic propagator of the faith; unlike Umako, he was a deep student of the sutras — of Chinese literature in general.

He was perhaps the first Japanese — and for 100 years or so the last — to grasp Buddhism's moral dimension. To Umako and most others, Buddhism was no quest for enlightenment or nirvana but an elaborate, hence potent, brand of magic, whose intricate ceremonies and solemn magnificence would strengthen the state, and the Soga's fortunes within it.

However little they had in common at the intellectual or doctrinal level, Shotoku and Umako were agreed on one thing: China was the model Japan should look to as it modernized. On this they built their alliance.

That Shinto remained afloat in this Buddhist-Chinese tide is testimony to the power of the native kami — testimony also, perhaps, to the power of vagueness, for what religion could be more vague or inarticulable than Shinto? What philosophy could Shinto put forward to oppose the highly refined one of Buddhism?

None — which is the point.

The Soga were overthrown in a palace coup in 645.

The fact that the coup mastermind, Nakatomi no Kamatari, was a scion of one of the nativist clans defeated in 587 could have meant a Shinto resurgence, but Nakatomi had something quite different in mind. His aim, like Shotoku's and Umako's, was a centralized Chinese-style state.

If anything the urgency had grown. China under the dynamic T'ang Dynasty (618-907) was expanding ominously eastward into Korea. Not only Japan's civilized arts but its military capacity needed to be advanced.

The Japanese court bureaucracy that emerged post-645 was Chinese, or pseudo-Chinese, and Buddhist, or pseudo-Buddhist, in all respects but one. The lone exception was the very powerful Jingikan — "Bureau of Kami Affairs." This had no Chinese equivalent. Its role was to appoint Shinto priests and see to it that the native kami were worshipped properly.

The kami, evidently, were still very much alive.

The Jingikan survived intact until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, even then serving as model for various successor bodies under which Shinto became the official state religion. So it remained until the postwar Constitution separated religion and government.

The Jingikan turned the Emperor into a kami.
Emperor Temmu (reigned 672-686) was apparently the first to style himself akitsukami (manifest kami), meaning a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu — a dignity claimed by all his descendants until Emperor Showa renounced his divinity in a 1946 radio broadcast.

It made perfect sense, given the goal of rapid centralization, given also the nature of kami, which could be anything at all — superhuman, human, subhuman; animate, inanimate.

But from another angle it seems to make no sense at all. What does it mean to be a kami in a Buddhist state? More baffling still, what does it mean to be a kami and a Buddhist?

It means, for one thing, to be Emperor Shomu (reigned 724-749).

Kami though he was, he was a Buddhist in the Prince Shotoku mold, learned and devout. In unabashedly styling himself a "slave of the Three Treasures" (meaning Buddhism), he left an enduring conundrum to future ages more logically minded than his own:
Can one religion's divinity be another religion's slave?

With smallpox ravaging Nara in 735, Shomu vowed to build a giant image of Roshana Buddha — the supreme universal Buddha of whom the earthly Buddha is a manifestation.

But Shomu had forgotten neither the native kami nor his own divine status. He could hardly afford to. As the historian George Sansom points out (in "Japan: A Short Cultural History," 1931), "To erect a great Buddha in the middle of the capital and to make it . . . an object of national worship was, on the face of it, a serious blow to the native divinities, unless some means could be found of reconciling the two faiths."

Fortunately the means were at hand, the sun goddess Amaterasu herself responding to fervent (Buddhist) prayers at Ise Jingu, Shinto's holiest shrine (in present day Mie Prefecture), with the necessary reassurance. Visiting the Emperor in a dream, she declared the sun and the Buddha to be one and the same.

Work on the image therefore proceeded, years of labor producing the enormous (48.7 meters high) seated Great Buddha that to this day awes sightseers and worshippers at Nara's Todaiji Temple.

Flimsy though its basis might appear to us, the merger held, its spirit expressed in a poem attributed to the great Buddhist teacher Kobo Daishi (774-835) some two generations after Shomu's death:

"Among the various ways
to become a Buddha
the most potent way is
the way of the kami."

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20100314x2.html


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20100314x3.html


Symbols of heaven on Earth

By MICHAEL HOFFMAN

Among the grander establishments, two in particular stand out as central to the less spontaneous, more official side of Shinto. Though poles apart in terms of time, setting and ethos, they embody a shared aim — that of strengthening the state and its core symbol, a heaven-descended Emperor.

Ise Jingu and Yasukuni Jinja were both born of modernizing, statist revolutions — Ise of a seventh-century palace coup that transformed a primitive scattering of clans into a centrally governed, quasi-Chinese civilization; Yasukuni of the 19th-century Meiji Restoration that turned a languishing feudal anachronism into a quasi-Westernized military and industrial powerhouse.

The Ise shrine complex in rural Mie Prefecture is ancient and serene. Yasukuni Shrine, in the heart of Tokyo, is modern and stridently controversial. Ise traces its remote origin to a legendary wandering princess seeking a place of worship worthy of Amaterasu, the sun goddess. Yasukuni was founded in 1869 by a new Meiji government intent on forging Shinto into a state cult fostering patriotism, loyalty and obedience.

At Ise are enshrined Amaterasu and an agricultural kami, Toyouke. At Yasukuni repose the deified souls of 2.5 million war dead — including, to the ongoing bedevilment of Japan's postwar foreign relations, more than 1,000 convicted war criminals.

It was probably sometime in the fifth century that Princess Yamato-hime, daughter of the semilegendary Emperor Suinin, began her long journey. Amaterasu and Toyouke had once been worshipped at the Imperial Palace, but the Emperor, says the eighth-century chronicle "Nihon Shoki," "dreaded the powers of these kami, and did not feel secure in their dwelling together."

Bearing the sacred mirror, the sun goddess' emblem, the princess set out from Mount Miwa in today's Nara Prefecture. Twenty years' wandering brought her at last to Ise, where she heard the voice of Amaterasu saying, "In this land I wish to dwell."
Here was built the Inner Shrine (Naiku) dedicated to Amaterasu.
The Outer Shrine (Gekku), dedicated to Toyouke, is 6 km away.

Yasukuni is grim, forbidding. Its central attraction — central abomination, say detractors — is a war museum that seems to glorify Japan's World War II role. Ise, in another Shinto dimension, has down the centuries been a place of joyous, often uproarious pilgrimage.

Yasukuni stands before us solid and imposing. Neither adjective would do for Ise, object of a remarkable ritual symbolizing the transience which the Japanese, almost alone among world civilizations, hold so dear as an essential element of beauty. Both Naiku and Gekku are razed to the ground every 20 years, then identically rebuilt on adjacent sites. This has been going on for almost 1,500 years — and will again in 2013.

Japan's American-written postwar Constitution abolished state Shinto and separated religion from government. This placed Yasukuni, originally a government institution, in an awkward position. It was privatized, but continues to serve as Japan's premier war memorial. Government officials officially paying tribute there to the nation's war dead risk sparking a constitutional crisis and jeopardizing good relations with countries that see themselves as victims of Japan's wartime atrocities.

Current Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan last year became only the second opposition party in 54 years to rise to power, has pledged not to go to Yasukuni and has spoken of setting up an alternative, secular war memorial. For now the matter hangs in quiet but anxious limbo.



http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20100314x3.html


*****************************
BACK TO

Gods (kami to hotoke)

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::