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Shinto death 2: Washing

October 20, 2015 / John D. / 4 Comments

The extracts below from Elizabeth Kenney’s article will bring to mind the 2008 Oscar-winning film called Okuribito (The Departed), which begins with the mesmerising scene detailing the extraordinary care and deference with which the corpse is ritually cleansed. There is however an important step before that known as matsugo no mizu (the last water). Please read on…

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1 . Wetting the lips of the deceased
A close relative of the deceased takes a disposable chopstick with cotton tied to the end, dips it in a small bowl of water and touches it to the lips of the deceased. Traditionally, a writing brush was used. Because today 80% of deaths occur in hospitals, a doctor and nurse may solemnly observe the rite, giving medical professionals a role in the rituals of death.

Symbolically, this last offering of water is the final chance to revive the corpse. Since the dead will no longer drink of the water of the living, this water is both an offering to the deceased and a guarantee that he is truly dead. In addition to providing hope (of revival) and proof (of death), this water is the first in a long series of offerings of food and drink made to the deceased in his new status as an ancestor.

Offerings to the kami originated with offerings to the ancestors

Offerings to the kami originated with a desire to nurture the dead

Lying in his hospital bed, the deceased still has an ambiguous status: human yet dead. His last sip of water as a human is also the first he receives as an ancestor. The dead in Japan revert to a condition of babyhood, needing to be fed by living adults. This role reversal (children feeding parents) casts the living as maternal nurturers of the dead. The living provide the dead with the food they need in their new existence… it is thoroughly integrated into Japanese funeral practices, being performed by Shintoists as often as Buddhists, and usually without the presence of any religious official.

2. Washing the corpse
Both the Buddhist and Shinto dead (like the dead in most cultures) receive a last bath. Even today in Japan, it is usually relatives, rather than funeral or medical specialists, who perform this final cleansing. Today, people use alcohol and gauze (which may have been provided by the hospital or by the funeral company), rather than giving the deceased a true bath.

It may be, as several Japanese scholars contend, that the awareness of death pollution is diminishing in modern Japan. Death taboos are less strictly observed, and many young or middle-aged people do not readily think in terms of impurity or pollution (kegare). When asked, for example, why they do not send new year’s cards when there has been a death in their family or why they refrain from entering a shrine after a relative’s death, they will respond that it has to do with “sadness” or “mourning,” and the term “death pollution” is unlikely to be uttered.

Although the notion of death pollution (an intangible condition) may be fading, today’s Japanese (like citizens of other industrialized countries) are squeamish about the actual corpse. As death becomes less familiar to the Japanese, the bathing of the corpse may gradually become abhorrent.

Ritual purification of the body is important in life as in death

Several Japanese college students have told me they were “surprised” to encounter this rite after the death of their grandparent or great-grandparent. But the more important point is that these Japanese students did help wash the corpse or observed the activity (with some reporting that they felt “uncomfortable”). In contrast, American and Australian college students ask, “Isn’t it illegal?”

In Japan, the washing is already sanitized by the hospital setting, the use of alcohol, and the quickness of the procedure. The ritual washing may eventually be entirely in the hands of professionals, as it already is in the U.S.

While the intimate handling of the corpse grants the mourners a last chance to attend to the deceased, it is also the most polluting moment in the funeral process, since it requires direct contact with the corpse. Shinto priests naturally do not participate in the handling of the corpse (and neither do Buddhist priests). If the family needs guidance and support during this act, they will get it from a funeral company employee or from a community group. The Shinto priest does not arrive until the next stage.

The corpse needs not only to be bathed but dressed and made up (“death makeup,”). Buddhist rites focus on the dress of the deceased far more than do Shinto rites. A student told me that when her family bathed the corpse of her great-grandmother, they wore straw wreaths (“like a life-saver”) over one shoulder and across the torso. Her mother explained that the wreath “had the power to keep my great-grandmother from bringing us into the other world with her.”

The wreath is clearly akin to the big straw circles, like freestanding doorways, erected at Shinto shrines at the end of June and December. People step through these straw circles at the liminal times of midyear and year-end in order to purify themselves and ensure health and safety for the next half year.

Vaginal symbolism is surely also part of the meaning (rebirth), especially in the case of the family members attending to the deceased. By wearing the wreath, pushing themselves through the circular opening headfirst, they enact the dead person’s rebirth in the realm of the dead (but do not go all the way through themselves). At the same time, the straw wreath retains its symbolism as an agent of purity and thus protects the mourners from the power and pollution of death.

Stepping through the straw circle is a form of rebirth, whether in terms of a new purified self or into the life beyond

Stepping through the straw circle is a form of rebirth, whether in terms of a new purified self or of entering the world beyond

Shinto death 1: Overview

October 18, 2015 / John D. / 1 Comment

Japanese graveyard at Obon. Uniformly Buddhist?

This series consists of adapted extracts from Elizabeth Kenney’s groundbreaking work on Shinto funerals, with her permission. Her remarkable research shows in graphic detail how the traditional Shinto arrangements differ from the more prevalent forms of Buddhist funeral and mourning. Though the research was carried out in the 1990s and some of the information is dated, the fundamentals still apply.

For the original article, see Elizabeth Kenney ‘Shinto mortuary rites in contemporary Japan.’

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Elizabeth Kenney, at a conference in Kyoto 2015

So who dies Shinto?

Certainly most Shinto priests have a Shinto funeral. Their family members, too, will usually choose Shinto rites. For a woman who has married a Shinto priest, a Shinto funeral does not necessarily represent a religious commitment to Shinto but rather is part of her fitting in with the ways of her new household. The reverse situation occurs, too: the daughter of a Shinto priest marries into a Buddhist family, “becomes” Buddhist, and has a Buddhist funeral.

I conducted interviews with three families who live near Kamigamo Shrine and consider themselves exclusively Shinto. In one case, the men of the family are Shinto priests. In each case, the wife had grown up in a Buddhist household and had converted, so to speak, to Shinto upon marriage.

According to the women, the family religious practices are “simply a matter of custom.” To move from a Buddhist to a Shinto household is not so different from joining a Zen household from a Pure Land household; “you just have to learn some different customs if you marry into a Shinto family” — and one of those customs is the Shinto funeral.

There are a host of other reasons for choosing a Shinto funeral. Some areas of Japan have been predominantly Shinto since the Edo period, when Shinto funerals were first widely encouraged. Some people choose a Shinto funeral in order to save money: “[They] think, ‘Since a kaimyôu is expensive, I’ll have a Shinto funeral'”. (The kaimyô is the posthumous Buddhist name bestowed on the deceased by a Buddhist priest and engraved on the memorial tablet. It can indeed be expensive, costing one or even two million yen for the most prestigious honorifics. The average spent on the kaimyô is about 300,000 yen.

In other cases, a falling out with the local Buddhist priest prompted some families to switch to the local Shinto shrine for their funerals. Change can go both ways. In a village in Saitama prefecture, one household, which had switched to Shinto several generations earlier, changed back to Buddhist.

Of course, it is not just the kaimyô that costs money. Some funeral expenses are unavoidable and do not vary with the religion (coffin, hearse, flowers, food, tombstone, and so forth). One survey found that the average total price for a funeral is around 2,500,000 yen (over U.S. $20,000), with a high end of 7,900,000 yen and a low end of 550,000 yen .

All sources agree that a Buddhist priest charges the most, partly because the kaimyô may be included in the temple fee. A “donation” to a temple averages 490,000 yen, while one could expect to pay 350,000 yen to a Shinto shrine and 190,000 yen to a Christian church .

In the case of a Shinto funeral, the decorations are simpler, using fewer (or no) flowers and including an important detail: sakaki #| tree branches adorned with white zigzag paper strips. Near the entrance is a bamboo vessel with a dipper, the tools of ritual purification that will be used by the mourners. Gagaku music may be heard (more likely taped than live). Atonal and eerie, this music is associated with Shinto, rather than with Buddhism, and so changes the atmosphere accordingly. The complete funeral consists of a couple of dozen distinct steps and stages.

According to 1992 statistics, 56.7% of funerals were held at home; 28.7% in a temple or church; 10.5% in a funeral hall; 3.7% in a community building; and 0.4% someplace else. With living conditions in urban Japan growing ever more crowded, it may not be long before the majority of funerals are held outside the home.

Click here for Part Two of this series on the topic of cleansing the corpse.

Man mourning his dead parents after the Tohoku disaster (photo Yomiuri Shimbun)

Jizo

October 12, 2015 / John D. / 0 Comments

Jizo at Jisho-in Jizo is the most widespread deity in Japan, to be seen across the country at crossroads, waysides, cemeteries and elsewhere. A guardian of the dead, he is portrayed in monk’s attire and seen as a guardian of the otherworld who ensures safe crossing, particularly for children. Though it’s customary to think of the deity as purely Buddhist, the passage below from Mark Schumacher’s onmark website shows that there is in fact a strong Shinto component.

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Jizō incorporates many of the functions of Koyasu-sama (aka Koyasu-gami), the Shintō goddess of pregnancy, safe childbirth, and the healthy growth and development of children. Shintō shrines dedicated to Koyasu-sama still exist in modern times. These shrines are known as Asama Shrines (also pronounced Sengen).

Princess Konohanasakuya, patron of safe delivery as well as deity of Mt Fuji and cherry blossom

More than 1,000 Asama (Sengen) shrines exist across Japan, with the head shrines standing at the foot and the summit of Mount Fuji itself. These sanctuaries are dedicated to Koyasu’s namesake, the mythical princess Konohana Sakuya Hime, the Shintō deity of Mount Fuji, of cherry trees in bloom, and the patron of safe delivery.

In Shintō mythology, Konohana (lit = tree flower) is the daughter of Ōyamatsumi (the earthly kami of mountains). She was married to Ninigi (heavenly grandchild of sun goddess Amaterasu), became pregnant in a single night, and gave birth to three children while her home was engulfed in fire — thus her role as the Shintō kami who grants safe childbirth. In some accounts she died in the fire, and thus she is likened to the short-lived beauty of the cherry blossom.

Despite the survival of Shintō’s Koyasu-sama into modern times, she has been largely supplanted by her Buddhist equivalents, known as Koyasu Jizō, Koyasu Kannon, and Koyasu Kishibojin.

<Source: Konohana Sakuya Hime and Koyasu-sama; both from the Kokugakuin University Shintō Encyclopedia >

Jizo in his child-caring capacity

Pagan Britain

October 4, 2015 / John D. / 6 Comments

How would those Scottish scenes look if adorned with torii and shrines?

Ring of Brodgar, one of the roughly 1000 stone circles in the British Isles that served as ritual centres

This summer I made a tour around the British Isles and was struck by the pagan resonances with Shinto in many of the country’s features. Sometimes this was to do with the shape of rocks and hillside, sometimes the lay of the land, sometimes a pristine waterfall in a wooded grove. It made me wonder how the country would look if it were adorned with shimenawa and shrines. No rice fields, true enough, but plenty of awesome nature in evidence.

During my stay I happened upon a book by poet and mystic, William Blake, who wrote evocatively of a time in the past when human beings were more open to the Wonder of things. ‘The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and endowing them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive,’ he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790). Elsewhere in the same book he noted, ‘Thus men forget that All deities reside in the human breast.’

We forget too that Europe was once home to a Shinto-like religion of its own.

In some places there are signs that the old ways are being revived

A pagan head in a garden of Guernsey

Harmony with nature was evident in this tree house in Guernsey

The Skara Brae community of 5000 years ago lived close to the land and practised a form of animism.

Animal abuse

October 2, 2015 / John D. / 2 Comments

An article in Japan Today details several traditional practices which involve cruelty to animals. Unfortunately Shinto shrines figure prominently among those holding and defending such practices. A nature religion? Or a religion of Japaneseness which includes the preservation of traditional ways?

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Adapted from Kuchikomi TOKYO —Sep. 30, 2015 Japan Today

In an article timed to coincide with “Be Kind to Animals Week” (Sept 20~27), Jun Mishina writes in Shukan Shincho about how activists are riding roughshod over tradition in order to safeguard the life, liberty and happiness of non-human members of the animal kingdom.

The water basin at Suwa Taisha, where animal sacrifice is still carried out not only in the form of frogs but of deer

In January of this year, the Suwa Grand Shrine in Suwa City, Nagano Prefecture, was beset by placard-bearing protesters, who were upset over a “frog-hunting ceremony”—a 1,000-year-old ritual that calls for capturing amphibians and impaling them with arrows, which are then offered to the gods. Presently, only two frogs are so sacrificed, with the impaling ritual taking place in the shrine’s inner sanctum and not in public. That, however, was enough to infuriate a dozen demonstrators, who disrupted the event with chants of “Cruel! Cruel!”

“What I found most objectionable was the female protester who waded into the Mitarai River and physically attempted to stop parishioners from catching frogs,” Masao Kasahara relates. “The shrine regards the spot in the river as a ‘sacred place’ where even the head priest isn’t permitted to enter. And there was this woman, yelling “Stop that!’ and ‘Don’t kill frogs!’ She was pushing so hard she slipped and fell into the river. That was a huge offense to the gods.”

Another assault on tradition has taken place at freak shows, some of which date back to feudal times. During festivals, people would set up as many as 300 tents on shrine grounds, where rubes could come to gawk at such spectacles as “The Human Pump,” “The Fire-spouting woman” and others. (Tokyoites can still see some of these at the Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku during the “Tori-no-Ichi festival held every November.) But you’d better go soon, as their next act may be a vanishing act—literally.

The Hakozaki Shrine festival held every September in Fukuoka City has been beset upon by animal rights advocates, vociferously demanding that performances by the “hebi-onna” (snake woman) and “okami-onna” (wolf lady) be halted.

The entrance to Hakozaki Shrine in Fukuoka, where freak shows include biting the heads off snakes

The entrance to Hakozaki Shrine in Fukuoka, where freak shows include biting the heads off chickens and snakes

The demonstrators were particularly incensed by a female geek who would bite the heads off live chickens and snakes. “That poor snake looks pitiful!” a protestor bellowed.

The demonstrators also persuaded two very reluctant patrolmen to accompany them to the venue. “The cops were saying, ‘If we go along, then the incident will be blown up out of proportion,’” said one of the freak show organizers. “Anyway, they did issue a warning to us, saying, ‘You’re not allowed to do anything illegal or you might get arrested.’”

“Nothing ever came to the point that the cops would walk on stage and make an arrest,” he continued. “But after that, we completely stopped using snakes. ‘Why did you stop?’ spectators were asking. But it couldn’t be helped. After that, we just don’t have the heart to keep doing it.”

Animal rights

September 26, 2015 / John D. / 0 Comments

As someone distressed by the appalling treatment of animals by human beings (factory farming being the most egregious example), it saddens me that modern Shinto shows so little interest in the subject. Animal guardians serve the kami, and horses act as loyal mounts. Yet there is precious little love expended in return. There are whaling shrines, for instance, where the focus is solely on the safety of the hunters not the hunted. There is a Shinto festival with horrific treatment of horses. And not once have I heard a Shinto spokesman speak out against cruelty to animals, such as the notorious slaughter of dolphins at Taiji.

Sliced fish offerings at Yoshida Jinja in Kyoto

In the past animals such as horses were sacrificed as offerings for the kami. Fish still are, and at Suwa Taisha there’s ritual slaughter of deer. It’s Japan’s other main religion to which one has to turn for evidence of a concern with animal rights. The Buddhist tradition of compassion for living beings has played a significant role in the country’s history and first became evident with a decree by Emperor Temmu in the seventh century.

There will be a Noh play on Oct 3 (14.00 – ) at Kyoto Kanze Kaikan (075 771 6114) which illustrates the profound effect Buddhism had on animal rights. It’s called Utou, or murrelet, and concerns a hunter who imitates the parent bird calling its child and then kills the young. Karma catches up with the cruel hunter, and after his death he is sent to hell where he in turn is tortured by utou and their fellow hawks. He is prevented too from seeing his own child. In the play his ghost asks a travelling monk to pray for him and save him from the torture.

The following account comes from Nipponia no. 36 (March, 2006) and suggests that in the past Shinto’s concern for purity was part of a widespread reluctance to eat meat. It’s the first time I’ve heard of this and I’m uncertain if it’s historically accurate. If it is, then there’s clear precedence for the encouragement of vegetarianism.

The first law prohibiting meat eating was issued in the year 675, a little more than 100 years after the arrival of Buddhism. In the 7th and 8th centuries, when a new emperor came to the throne he would issue an Imperial edict forbidding meat consumption. This was because, according to Buddhist belief, killing animals is wrong. The fact that these edicts were issued from time to time indicates that some found it hard to give up eating meat. But by around the 10th century just about everyone had stopped eating it.

A white rooster at Ise Jingu, safe from carnivores, serves as an attendant to Amaterasu

In China and the Korean peninsula, the Buddhist clergy were not allowed to eat meat or fish, but in Japan even ordinary people did not eat meat. This was partly because of Buddhism, and partly because the indigenous religion, Shinto, considered that eating the flesh of animals was unclean.

But the rule extended only to meat from mammals, not seafood. Whales are mammals, but the common folk thought of them as big fish and there was no prohibition against killing and eating them. Wild birds were also eaten. There was a belief that chickens and roosters were messengers working for the Shinto gods, and their meat and eggs were not eaten until the 15th century.

Living in harmony

In Ghostly Japan (1899), Lafcadio Hearn wrote as follows concerning Buddhist compassion with animals: “This custom of praying for the souls of animals is by no means general. But I have seen in the western provinces several burials of domestic animals at which such prayers were said. After the earth was filled in, some incense-rods were lighted above the grave in each instance, and the prayers were repeated in a whisper. A friend in the capital sends me the following curious information: ‘At the Eko-in temple in Tokyo prayers are offered up every morning for the souls of certain animals whose ihai [mortuary tablets] are preserved in the building. A fee of thirty sen will procure burial in the temple-ground and a short service for any small domestic pet.’ Doubtless similar temples exist elsewhere. Certainly no one capable of affection for our dumb friends and servants can mock these gentle customs.”

Harvest moon

September 26, 2015 / John D. / 0 Comments

Moon rising over the Eastern Hills A reminder that tomorrow (Mon 28th) will be the harvest full moon, traditionally celebrated by the Japanese as the most beautiful of the year. There are lots of moon viewing parties, which in the past consisted of poetry making while sipping saké and admiring the reflection in a specially crafted cup. Japanese love of beauty at its best.

Miko doing kagura with sakaki branch

One shrine that puts on a wonderful celebration is Kyoto’s Shimogamo Jinja, with musical performances of koto, shakuhachi and other traditional instruments. In one corner the tea ceremony is put on, sometimes there is a demonstration of junihitoe (twelve-layered kimono) while there is usually a dance performance of some sort too. It’s all tastefully done, and as the moon ascends from behind the trees of the Tadasu Wood there’s a murmur of delight from the assembled throng. One of those magical Japanese moments not to be missed.

Happy harvest moon viewing, one and all!

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Click here for a full account of a previous full moon festival at Shimagamo Shrine, or here for an account of a different year.
There’s also a previous description of the harvest moon festival at Kamigamo Shrine.

Shimogamo full moon