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Alternative Shinto (Okuninushi)

February 21, 2019 / John D. / 0 Comments

An Edo era picture of the kami of Japan gathered at Izumo for the kamiari celebration each autumn. How come they all gather at Izumo and not Ise?

“Depending on who speaks for or about it, Shinto may appear as an ancient folk tradition of personal prayers and communal festivals, as a nonreligious tradition of civic rites and moral orientations centered on the imperial house, or as a universal religion with ethical teachings.” – Jolyon B. Thomas in ‘Big Questions in the Study of Shinto’. Review of books for H-Japan, H-Net Reviews. November, 2017. The book discussed below by Yijang Zhong is entitled The Origin of Modern Shinto in Japan: The Vanquished Gods of Izumo (Bloomsbury Shinto Studies), 2016. ( Zhong is a professor at the University of Tokyo: see here.)

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Okuninushi, lord of Izumo, whose legacy may have been usurped by the Yamato lineage

Jolyon B. Thomas writes…

Zhong’s new book persuasively shows that there are many stories to tell about Shinto, and not all of them would position Amaterasu, Ise, and the imperial household at the center of Japanese public life. Rather than focusing on the mythology that prioritizes the legitimacy of the imperial house, Zhong reads past this “official” Shinto to focus on the lineage dedicated to Ōkuninushi and the Izumo Shrine (located in present-day Shimane Prefecture).

Like Nancy K. Stalker’s work on Ōmotokyō as an “alternative Shinto” in Japan’s imperial period (Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburō, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan [2008]), Zhong’s book shows that modern Shinto has never just been the official cult of the Japanese state. Zhong also shows that Izumo priests were able to successfully make the claim that Ōkuninushi was the only deity in Japan unambiguously associated with “pure” Shinto and not adulterated by Buddhist influence. This claim directly challenged the primacy of Ise and the imperial deity Amaterasu, who was still understood as a manifestation of the cosmic Buddhist deity Mahavairocana.

Zhong persuasively demonstrates in chapter 2 that it was Ōkuninushi, not Amaterasu, who received the lion’s share of popular attention during that time. This was based on a doctrine strategically generated by priestly lineages serving the shrine [in Edo Period} claiming that deities gathered at Izumo in the tenth lunar month to discuss marriages (en musubi). Their decision to conflate Ōkuninushi with the fortune deity Daikoku (one of the Seven Lucky Gods, or shichifukujin) also helped to boost the deity’s popularity, providing yet another challenge to Amaterasu’s authority.

Daikoku – conflated with Okuninushi because his name has the same Chinese characters

Chapter 3 in particular is an impressive argument that shows that modern Shinto came into being in response to external pressures and that National Learning (kokugaku) was inherently a response to the influx of Catholicism, Western astronomy and calendrical practices, and incursions from Russia to the north. Zhong focuses on the figure of Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) and his 1811 book True Pillar of the Soul, which positioned Ōkuninushi as a cosmic deity with control over death and the afterlife; the book also rendered Shinto as a native epistemology that could hold its own in competition with foreign modes of knowledge.

In Atsutane’s rendering, Shinto became an indigenous tradition associated first and foremost with the terrestrial Ōkuninushi, while the solar deity Amaterasu assumed secondary status. Hirata’s disciples and Izumo priests rushed to disseminate the new doctrine throughout Japan even as political trends were shifting toward the “restoration” of the emperor to direct rule and the concomitant elevation of the imperial cult of Amaterasu. Despite his popularity, Ōkuninushi would eventually be eclipsed by the sun goddess.

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For a more in-depth review of the dissertation on which Professor Zhong’s book is based, please see this piece by Aike Rots.

For more about Izumo as an alternative centre of Shinto, see this previous posting.

Izumo Taisha, according to some site of the oldest shrine in Japan

Mirror appreciation

February 19, 2019 / John D. / 0 Comments

Fourth century bronze mirror, courtesy NHK. Concentric circles of decorative patterns defy simple interpretation.The knob at the centre has a hole for string to pass through in order to attach the mirror.

The NHK website has a radio programme lasting 12 minutes about ways of appreciating a fourth century mirror. It includes observations on the design, the history of mirrors in general and in the Far East in particular, as well as the individual history of the mirror in question. Like other Chinese funeral objects, the mirror is made of bronze, an alloy primarily of copper with tin and lead.

Along the way we learn some fascinating things. The patterns on the decorated side of the mirror are adaptations by Japanese craftsmen of Chinese cosmology. In other words, decorative rather than meaningfully symbolic. This fits in with the Japanese love of form over function, and reminds me of the way Hidden Christians in Japan carried on reciting old Portuguese and Latin prayers even though the words were wrong and the meaning unintelligible.

The Chinese started producing mirrors about 2000 BC, and as they spread around the Far East the Japanese in particular took to them as symbols of authority. Over 6000 have been found, compared to very few on the Korean peninsula. Chinese mirrors with gods and supplications to powerful forces were imported up to the first century AD, after which Japanese began fashioning their own. They were given by the Yamato to powerful allies and also used as funeral objects. Clan leaders had mirrors placed around their corpse as if to protect the spirit of the dead. Their use seems to have faded out with the ending of the Kofun period.

https://www.nhk.or.jp/japan-art/archives/171012/

NHK introduction…

The masterpiece we introduce this time is a bronze mirror made in the fourth century. Mirrors, with their power to reflect people’s images or light fires, were regarded as sacred objects in ancient times. Many mirrors imported to the Japanese islands from China became symbols of authority and were buried as funerary objects in the graves of the mighty. This particular mirror, too, was unearthed from a burial mound, but it was made on the Japanese archipelago based on Chinese mirrors. Measuring 44.5cm in diameter, it is large by East Asian standards and was very expertly cast. The patterns on the mirrors on which it was based represented the world of the gods as imagined by the Chinese, but the Japanese craftsmen did not understand the symbols and transformed them into original patterns. This piece sheds light on the history of cultural transmission in ancient East Asia.

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For more about mirrors, see here or here.

First steps in Shinto

February 17, 2019 / John D. / 0 Comments

Learning how to pay respects is an important first step into the world of Shinto.

I remember the first training I had in Shinto. We started off by visiting shrines and discussing what we saw: I’d ask questions, my partner would explain, and I’d ask for clarifications. Bit by bit, my questions grew more informed and her explanations more detailed.

We started off with simple things such as the names of shrine buildings and how to tell the Honden (where the ‘body’ of the kami resides) from the Haiden (the Worship Hall where prayers are said). The Sanctuary for the seat of the kami is raised higher than the Worship Hall to show respect, just as in rooms for the shogun or feudal lords the most elevated position is reserved for the one with the highest status. You look up to them – literally. (Interestingly ‘kami’ in Japanese can mean ‘upper’ or ‘higher’, though linguists say the derivation is different.)

One of the key points in these shrine visits was paying respects in the proper manner. Concern with correctness is a key Japanese trait, and I couldn’t help wondering if the Shinto insistence on the right form lay at the root of it. For example, when entering the shrine, you should make for the temizuya, or basin for hand washing. This is a symbolic purification to show respect for the kami, whose pure nature would be despoiled by contamination.

By washing your hands, you show your sincerity; in a sense you are washing your heart-mind. But you cannot just splash the water over yourself in any old way, for this being Japan there’s a prescribed procedure. First you take the wooden dipper with your right hand and ladle water onto the left, then you switch hands and ladle water onto your right hand. Finally you hold the dipper again in your right hand, pour some water into your left hand, and with that wash out your mouth. Then holding the dipper upright so the remaining water runs down the handle and cleanses it for the next person, you replace it back in its proper place across the top of the rock basin.

My companion watched me do this with keen attention, pointing out where I could have done better. The devil lies in the detail runs an English saying, but here the detail was very much the way to the divine. The style of worship too was tightly prescribed. First a slight bow, then a rattling of the bell to alert the kami before tossing coins into the offering box, following which there was a ritualistic 2-2-1 procedure; two bows, two claps, one bow. Here again form was all-important. Another key aspect of Japanese culture, I thought to myself…

(by John Dougill)

Pure spring water for purification prior to praying

Instructions for non-Japanese on how to do the symbolic purification

The tourist boom has led to multilingual explanations. Ten years ago there would have been no information in English.

Setsubun (Fushimi Inari)

February 7, 2019 / John D. / 0 Comments

Young women throwing beans during the mamemaki at Inari

Kyoto is blessed with Setsubun events, and so far I’ve done the rounds at Yasaka, Yoshida, Shogo-in, Heian Jingu, Rozan-ji, and Mibu-dera. This year I thought I’d try Fushimi Inari (next year it will be Matsuo Taisha).

Cosplay rental shops doing a good business these days

Unlike other places, Fushimi Inari does not go in for a performance of oni demons or spectacular fire ceremonies. Instead it has two sessions of mamemaki (bean throwing) at 11.00 and 13.00. As explained in a previous post, the beans symbolise the life force, and have the power to drive away demonic forces.

The bean throwing is done by a team of parish members and young women in kimono born in the zodiac year 24 years ago. They all line up around the kagura stage and throw out packets of beans. It’s all over in about five minutes, and everyone goes home happy as there are plenty of beans for everyone. (Catch them and you’ll have luck through the coming year.)

The most interesting item as far as I was concerned was a lucky charm called shirushi no sugi. This consists of red and white shide (paper strips) on a wooden stick with a picture of Otafuku and a cedar sprig attached. Otafuku makes sense, since the plump cheeked woman is a symbol of fertility like the beans, and therefore an enemy of anything injurious to life, like evil demons. (For a previous piece on Otafuku, click here.) But what of the cedar? I asked one of the priests, and this is the interesting answer I got.

shirushi no sugi on sale at the shrine

In Heian times, when the Kumano pilgrimage was popular, people starting out from Kyoto would stop off at Fushimi Inari to take a sprig of cedar from the hill, because it was considered sacred (the whole hill was imbued with kami). They attached this to their robe as a sign they were on pilgrimage and showed it to the priests in Kumano to be blessed. On their return to Kyoto, they headed again for Fushimi Inari and planted the sprig on the hill. If it took root and started to grow into a new tree, then their wishes would come true.

It’s a pleasant custom in lots of ways, for it asserts the divinity of nature and suggests an environmental element to Inari spirituality. Good to see it still surviving1000 years later, if only as a token charm. Good for Inari, and good for Otafuku!

Poster advertising the shirushi no sugi for Y1000 ($9) with Otafuku face.

Otafuku fertility on display with red and white paper strips (shide) signifying celebration and happiness.

Ujiko (parish) members pose for a photo following their bean throwing. Looks like they enjoyed it!

Some were better at throwing long distance than others…

New businesses are seizing the opportunity that Fushimi Inari’s spectacular rise in popularity has brought…

Some look just the part as a result.

Setsubun: 5 points

February 2, 2019 / John D. / 2 Comments

Shops have been doing a good trade in kits for domestic rites, when you get to throw beans at your family!

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when we get to look towards the promise of spring and try to rid ourselves of winter demons/ Here are five points of note about the seasonal festivity.

1) It’s traditional to gather up the scattered beans and eat the same number as your age, plus one for good measure.

2) The date is taken from the old lunar calendar. Because it needed tweaking to keep in alignment with the solar cycle, the year was divided into 24 seasonal sections. The last day of each section was known as ‘setsubun’ (division). One of these ‘setsubun’ came to hold a special place, because it marked the end of winter by coming between two sections, ‘Severe Cold’ and ‘Spring Begins’. It was clearly a time for celebration.

Eating a special kind of sushi roll (ehomaki) in the year’s lucky direction is one of the Setsubun customs. This year it’s east by north-east!

3) Chasing away the demons at this time was originally a Chinese custom. The change of seasons was seen as a time when the border between the spirit and human world was at its weakest, making it possible to cross more easily from one realm to the other.

4) The throwing of beans in Japan began during the Muromachi period (15th-16th centuries). It may have been connected with a Noh play in which an old woman is visited by a stranger, who turns out to be a demon. In terror she reaches out for the nearest thing to hand – a handful of dried beans – and hurls them at the devil, who is chased away. (My own supposition here would be that the beans represent life and growth, as against the negativity spread by the demon.)

5) In the Edo period traditional Daoist yin-yang geomancy, with its notion of a lucky direction for each year, brought in the custom of facing that way while eating an entire role of rolled sushi. It’s said to have begun when an Osaka geisha performed the ritual to ensure she would be with her lover. As the rolled sushi combines gifts from land and sea, it’s considered auspicious. (I’ve also heard that the ehousushi [lucky direction sushi] contains seven different ingredients, in line with the Seven Lucky Gods.)

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Why beans? See here to learn why the bean-throwing obsession.

Click here for an account of how the celebrations were carried out in Lafcadio Hearn’s time.

Bean throwing at Kyoto’s Heian Jingu; spot the beans (and the geisha)

Robot animism

January 17, 2019 / John D. / 2 Comments

Robot friends are on their way to a shop near you

An article by Joi Ito on wired.com brings up the topic of why Japanese appear to be more disposed to seeing robots in a positive manner than Westerners. It’s a subject Green Shinto has covered before, notably when Christal Whelan wrote from the viewpoint of mana (see here).

Like many others, Joi Ito calls for a rethinking of our attitudes, away from the human-centric thinking that sees the rest of the world, whether living or not, as simply something that is there for our exploitation. What we need is a Gaia-centric outlook.

Ancient religions taught that we are an integral part of the world around us. It’s something that Alan Watts always stressed. And it’s something that struck me the other day when listening to a Native American speaking of rocks as ‘our brothers and sisters’. What a leap in consciousness from our economic imperative which drives the brutal rape of the earth. Too bad for us. The earth will survive, but whether humans will is looking increasingly doubtful.

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Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not 
by Ito Joi (July 30, 2018, Wired)

AS A JAPANESE, I grew up watching anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, which depicts a future in which machines and humans merge into cyborg ecstasy. Such programs caused many of us kids to become giddy with dreams of becoming bionic superheroes. Robots have always been part of the Japanese psyche—our hero, Astro Boy, was officially entered into the legal registry as a resident of the city of Niiza, just north of Tokyo, which, as any non-Japanese can tell you, is no easy feat. Not only do we Japanese have no fear of our new robot overlords, we’re kind of looking forward to them.

It’s not that Westerners haven’t had their fair share of friendly robots like R2-D2 and Rosie, the Jetsons’ robot maid. But compared to the Japanese, the Western world is warier of robots. I think the difference has something to do with our different religious contexts, as well as historical differences with respect to industrial-scale slavery.The Western concept of “humanity” is limited, and I think it’s time to seriously question whether we have the right to exploit the environment, animals, tools, or robots simply because we’re human and they are not.

Dolls are important in Japanese culture, and there are services for used dolls that have given years of service

SOMETIME IN THE late 1980s, I participated in a meeting organized by the Honda Foundation in which a Japanese professor—I can’t remember his name—made the case that the Japanese had more success integrating robots into society because of their country’s indigenous Shinto religion, which remains the official national religion of Japan. Followers of Shinto, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheists and the Greeks before them, do not believe that humans are particularly “special.” Instead, there are spirits in everything, rather like the Force in Star Wars. Nature doesn’t belong to us, we belong to Nature, and spirits live in everything, including rocks, tools, homes, and even empty spaces.

The West, the professor contended, has a problem with the idea of things having spirits and feels that anthropomorphism, the attribution of human-like attributes to things or animals, is childish, primitive, or even bad. He argued that the Luddites who smashed the automated looms that were eliminating their jobs in the 19th century were an example of that, and for contrast he showed an image of a Japanese robot in a factory wearing a cap, having a name and being treated like a colleague rather than a creepy enemy.

The general idea that Japanese accept robots far more easily than Westerners is fairly common these days. Osamu Tezuka, the Japanese cartoonist and the creator of Atom Boy noted the relationship between Buddhism and robots, saying, ”Japanese don’t make a distinction between man, the superior creature, and the world about him. Everything is fused together, and we accept robots easily along with the wide world about us, the insects, the rocks—it’s all one. We have none of the doubting attitude toward robots, as pseudohumans, that you find in the West. So here you find no resistance, simply quiet acceptance.” And while the Japanese did of course become agrarian and then industrial, Shinto and Buddhist influences have caused Japan to retain many of the rituals and sensibilities of a more pre-humanist period.

Protective amulets on sale at a shrine on the Fushimi Inari hill

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, describes the notion of “humanity” as something that evolved in our belief system as we morphed from hunter-gatherers to shepherds to farmers to capitalists. As early hunter-gatherers, nature did not belong to us—we were simply part of nature—and many indigenous people today still live with belief systems that reflect this point of view. Native Americans listen to and talk to the wind. Indigenous hunters often use elaborate rituals to communicate with their prey and the predators in the forest. Many hunter-gatherer cultures, for example, are deeply connected to the land but have no tradition of land ownership, which has been a source of misunderstandings and clashes with Western colonists that continues even today.

It wasn’t until humans began engaging in animal husbandry and farming that we began to have the notion that we own and have dominion over other things, over nature. The notion that anything—a rock, a sheep, a dog, a car, or a person—can belong to a human being or a corporation is a relatively new idea. In many ways, it’s at the core of an idea of “humanity” that makes humans a special protected class and, in the process, dehumanizes and oppresses anything that’s not human, living or non-living. Dehumanization and the notion of ownership and economics gave birth to slavery at scale.

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Lots of powerful people (in other words, mostly white men) in the West are publicly expressing their fears about the potential power of robots to rule humans, driving the public narrative. Yet many of the same people wringing their hands are also racing to build robots powerful enough to do that—and, of course, underwriting research to try to keep control of the machines they’re inventing, although this time it doesn’t involved Christianizing robots … yet.

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My view is that merely replacing oppressed humans with oppressed machines will not fix the fundamentally dysfunctional order that has evolved over centuries. As a Shintoist, I’m obviously biased, but I think that taking a look at “primitive” belief systems might be a good place to start. Thinking about the development and evolution of machine-based intelligence as an integrated “Extended Intelligence” rather than artificial intelligence that threatens humanity will also help.

As we make rules for robots and their rights, we will likely need to make policy before we know what their societal impact will be. Just as the Golden Rule teaches us to treat others the way we would like to be treated, abusing and “dehumanizing” robots prepares children and structures society to continue reinforcing the hierarchical class system that has been in place since the beginning of civilization.

It’s easy to see how the shepherds and farmers of yore could easily come up with the idea that humans were special, but I think AI and robots may help us begin to imagine that perhaps humans are just one instance of consciousness and that “humanity” is a bit overrated. Rather than just being human-centric, we must develop a respect for, and emotional and spiritual dialogue with, all things.

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For a related Green Shinto article which focusses on the Japanese use of dolls, please click here.

Jun Ito has been recognized for his work as an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and advocate of emergent democracy, privacy and internet freedom. He is coauthor with Jeff Howe of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future. As director of the MIT Media Lab and a professor of the practice of media arts and sciences, he is currently exploring how radical new approaches to science and technology can transform society in substantial and positive ways.

Hatsumode 2019 (Shimogamo Shrine)

January 15, 2019 / John D. / 2 Comments

Regular readers of Green Shinto will know our proximity to the World Heritage site of Shimogamo Jinja, and that we’re always on the lookout for the new items that are regularly added to the shrine. So it was with great delight that we found a notice this year at the entrance which suggested a new awareness of environmentalism…

Unfortunately, despite asking the miko and a young priest, no one seemed to know what this involved or indeed anything about it. Eventually I was directed to the shrine office where after consultation a senior priest came out and told me that it was nothing to do with the shrine but they had been asked as a favour to display it by the Urasenke tea association. Therefore no one at Shimogamo knew what it was! Ironically, that says a lot about official Shinto and their interest in environmental organisations… As we have pointed out before, national well-being is much more central to the thinking, so it was not surprising to find a poster exhorting people to fly the Hinomaru flag for the coming inauguration of a new emperor…

For Hatsumode this year the Maidono (Dance Stage) had been covered in paintings of the Chinese Zodiac with verse translated into French (along the bottom of the paintings in the picture below). It seemed very odd… why decorate a shrine in French? The answer I was given by the friendly priest in the shrine office was that the calligraphy artist Yoshikawa Juichi had been asked to celebrate 160 years of Japanese-French friendship. (Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the predominant colours are red, white and blue – colours of the French flag.)

For the content Yoshikawa chose the theme of Shimogamo, of which he is a great admirer (though he lives in Fukui). Accordingly he had chosen the theme of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, since Shimogamo has hokora in its inner compound to worship them. To accompany each sign, he had selected a verse by Kamo no Chomei, author of Hojoki (1212), who had been a priest at Shimogamo before dropping out to become a Buddhist recluse.

Another first this year was related to the tourist boom of recent years. With increasing numbers of foreigners, the shrine has put up more and more signs in English, particularly concerning etiquette. The following seems straightforward but look at the triangles at the top – No talking! First time I’ve come across that…

Another new item had to do with an ever-present concern – money! Recently Green Shinto carried a post about e-money. Foreign money too is a concern it seems….

But the biggest revelation this year had to do with rugby. Yes, rugby. What would a Shinto shrine have to do with rugby you may well ask… Well, it seems the first rugby game in Kansai took place in the shrine grounds, and a stone monument has been put up to commemorate it. Look carefully and you can see the shape of a rugby ball. ‘Place of the first kick.’ says the inscription. The ema for the nearby shrine are also in the rugby ball shape. With the Rugby World Cup taking place in Japan this year, the shrine is apparently planning a celebration of its own and inviting rugby teams to visit.

One of the most appealing aspects of Japan is the sanctification of history, so it’s interesting to see how a relatively recent episode like the introduction of rugby is being incorporated into the national past. In a board explaining the significance of the event, it said the shrine wished to show through the example of rugby how important it was to cultivate traditional ways. Traditional ways? And yet if one accepts that adoption and adaptation characterises the culture as a whole, then the statement makes sense….

So there we have it. Every time I visit Shimogamo there are new surprises and occasional shocks. This time the shocking news was that 230 trees had been uprooted or damaged by the terrific typhoon that hit Kyoto in the autumn. For three nights there was no electricity and the Shinden building was damaged. The main areas have been cleared up but there are still places where trees block the way.

So that’s the state of things at the start of the Wild Boar year. Greetings for the coming year to one and all from Kyoto and from Shimogamo Shrine!