Japanese Religions

Abstract

Shinto. Shinto, or the “way of the spirits or deities,” began to take form in Japan’s pre-historic period before the sixth century C. E. In this early phase, Shinto was the religion of a pre-literate society that was organized around the central social unit of the clan. Shinto deities or kami were seen as permeating the natural world. Uniquely shaped or awe-inspiring trees, mountains, rivers, and rocks, all could be considered kami, but human beings could also be viewed as kami. An early mythology developed by the leading clan of the sixth and seventh centuries, the Yamato clan, later known as the Imperial family, holds that the leader of the clan, the emperor, was a descendent of their protector kami, the sun goddess Amaterasu. But great warriors and poets, for example, have also been recognized as kami by virtue of their special abilities. Since early Shinto did not have a founder or produce sacred texts, it was through communal rituals that the religion was transmitted. The goal of the rituals was to maintain or reinstate the harmony between nature, humans and the kami that the early Japanese appear to have taken as the norm. As the Japanese began to adopt agriculture around the third century B.C.E., Shinto rituals became closely tied to the agricultural year. Communal festivals were conducted at times of planting or harvest, or at important times in the history of a community. Major rituals contained four parts: purification, offerings, recitations or prayers, and a concluding meal. All members of the community took part, if only symbolically, in the final meal, thus bringing harmony again to the relationship of humans and the kami. Although Shinto had no sacred structures in its earliest phase, by the sixth and seventh centuries C.E., the Japanese began to build shrines that housed symbolic representations of the kami and that provided a site for rituals. 1 It is worth noting that, while Japanese government leaders used Shinto to legitimate Japan’s War in the Pacific from 1937 to 1945, throughout most of its history, Shinto was a religion linked to nature, agriculture and local communities.