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Click to conserve

September 18, 2014 / John D. / 2 Comments

Anyone interested in nature worship will also be concerned with conservation. In this respect there is one easy way in which to help protect the natural world, and that is by simply clicking your mouse every morning on the website described below. By this one simple action, you can help preserve rainforests and endangered species. The explanations below provide the rationale and a description of how it works.

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About EcologyFund

EcologyFund is owned and operated by The Hunger Site Network as a way to get new funds for critical habitat and wilderness preservation using the power of the internet. When you “click to give” our sponsors pay the project you selected to preserve the number of square feet shown by each project. You pay nothing.

To maximize the contribution, click on each project every day. If you register, The Hunger Site Network will donate 500 square feet of wilderness in your name, and will keep a running tally for you of all the land you have preserved. Other sites owned and operated by The Hunger Site Network are The Hunger Site, The Breast Cancer Site, The Rainforest Site, The Animal Rescue Site, and GreaterGood.com.

All monies from sponsorships generated on EcologyFund go to purchase and protect wild lands. Sponsors are interested in supporting wilderness preservation for the same reasons we are: 1) its good for the environment, 2) our advertising budgets can do double duty and accomplish something important, and 3) the best form of public relations is good work.

If you click and visit a sponsor’s site it will usually double their contribution. Clicks to site advertisers in our Special Donations section will save additional land or plant trees. Certain actions (ordering free catalogs or registering for free) will save even more land or plant additional trees through our Rainforest Rewards section. Shopping through Shop For Acres will save an average of 50 square feet per dollar spent. The average amount of land protected through each action of the site is always specified. A breakdown of the amount contributed is listed in our totals section.

Click here for the Ecology Fund

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Testimony to the effectiveness of the Ecology Fund follows below written by the World Pantheism Movement, of which I am a member…

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Nature can be tenacious, but it needs our help from the predations of mankind

The WPM has saved more than 100 acres of natural wildlife habitat from destruction through our click group at EcologyFund, and an additional 75 acres through sponsorship of click schemes at EcologyFund and Care2. Most of this land is rainforest brought under the protection of conservation organizations in Central America.

We currently focus our efforts on EcologyFund, where we have a click group with over 1,200 members. We have saved more land than any other religious or environmental group on the site (including Sierra Club and WWF groups), and even more than some groups listed in the top ten.

How it works

Each person who clicks every day, at the current total of 87 sq ft per day, can save almost three quarters of an acre (almost 32,000 sq ft) of wildlife habitat per year from development or exploitation!

This has benefits for the climate as well as for biodiversity. If this area were cleared for farming, it could emit carbon dioxide equal to what the average American produces in half a year – or an average European in a full year. Your daily clicking can prevent that from happening.

Rainforests are the most biodiverse habitats on earth. Just one acre contains around 300-400 individual trees of 20-80 different species, and each tree is home to thousands more species. One tree in Peru was found to house 43 different species of ant.

Who pays for it?

Each page of the site shows ads for eco-friendly companies and non-profits. The income from these advertisements is given to nature conservation organizations. These organizations in turn buy private land in sensitive areas and dedicate the land in perpetuity to wildlife habitat. Basically, your clicking stimulates organizations and companies to spend money on conserving wildlife habitat. You can increase their gifts by visiting, and perhaps even buying from or otherwise supporting an advertised site that catches your eye.

How do I know this is for real?

The World Pantheist Movement has direct experience that it works, because we have advertised with EcologyFund in the past. Our check was always addressed and sent directly to the conservation organization we wished to sponsor – in our case the Rainforest Trust (formerly World Land Trust USA). EcologyFund did not take a cut. World Land Trust undertakes to preserve one acre of habitat for every $100 donated.

Why participate?

We are an integral part of Nature, which we should cherish, revere and preserve in all its magnificent beauty and diversity. Conserving rainforest is also a matter of survival for millions of humans whose homes and livelihoods may be threatened by sea level rise or climate change.

Of course you can save land on your own – but being in a team that can show visible collective results is a good motivation to stick at it and not forget, and it gives the excitement and satisfaction not only of your own totals but also those of the group.

Unspoilt nature in the grounds of the Togakushi Jinja in Nagano

Overseas shrines pre-1945

September 18, 2014 / John D. / 1 Comment

The information below about former overseas shrines is taken from a paper in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 37/ 1 (2010) by Nakajima Michio, entitled “Shinto Deities that Crossed the Sea.” It covers the spread of shrines in areas under Japanese political sway, which explains why it ignores shrines in Hawaii and Brazil.

Nakajima comments; ‘The Japanese government, which encountered resistance on foreign soil, saw those newly erected Shinto shrines as an opportunity to launch a policy that would incorporate them into its colonial governing system; consequently, it established government-sponsored Shinto shrines in its colonial territories. Taiwan and Korea functioned as testing grounds for what proved to be the quite successful attempt to indoctrinate native peoples into Shinto.’

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There were 611 jinja and 1,029 sha/shinshi—altogether, 1,640 shrines. The regional distribution of these overseas shrines was as follows: 995 in Korea (57 percent), 243 in Manchuria (15 percent), 184 in Taiwan (11 percent), 128 in Karafuto (8 percent), 51 in the Republic of China (3 percent), 27 in the South Sea Islands (2 percent), and 12 in Kwantung (1 percent).

Interestingly, talismans from the Ise Grand Shrine were distributed to almost sixty percent of all households in Taiwan, a rate surpassing that found in Korea and even in Japan itself. Along with displaying such talismans, each family was encouraged to set up a household Shinto altar (kamidana), and this led to the “improvement” of the local household ritual facility (seichō) and the removal of many local statues of gods and buddhas. This policy was intensified to such an extent after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 that local religious facilities called jibyō were massively destroyed. This had such a traumatic effect that the order to abolish jibyō was suspended by another order in June 1941.

Entrance to Chosen Jingu, Korea's supreme shrine (Wikicommons)

On the Korean peninsula, a small Shinto shrine (shōshi) had already been built by the late seventeenth century. In 1678, when Japan House (Wakan) was moved to the foot of Mount Yongdu (Jp. Ryūtō), Sō Yoshizane, the head of the Tsushima domain, established Kotohira Jinja on that spot. This shrine later changed its name, first to Kyoryūchi Jinja in 1891, then to Ryūtōsan Jinja in 1900 (and later still, it was upgraded to the rank of national minor shrine).

As the Japanese advanced on the Korean peninsula in the late nineteenth century, Japanese migrants began to erect shrines in which they could pay tribute to the Ise Grand Shrine (Jingū Yōhaijo). These included one in Wŏnsan (Jp. Genzan, erected in 1882, later renamed Genzan Jinja, elevated to the status of “shrine receiving county offerings” in 1936) and another in Inchŏn (Jp. Jinsen, erected 1890, soon named Jinsen Daijingū, renamed Jinsen Jinja in 1916, elevated to the rank of “shrine receiving provincial offerings” in 1936).

in July 1919, the government-sponsored great shrine Chōsen Jinja was established as the supreme tutelary shrine of the Korean peninsula. The deities to be enshrined there were Amaterasu Ōmikami and Emperor Meiji. Construction of the shrine began in 1920. It was renamed “Chōsen Jingū,” becoming an imperial shrine in June 1925, and a few months later, in October, construction was completed. In this way, Shinto shrines in Korea increased in number and were systematically incorporated into the colonial governing system.

After the Manchurian Incident in 1931, however, shrine visits were required of all students in Korea; in 1936, it became policy to close those schools that refused to participate in shrine visits.

A shrine in prewar Manchuria (http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC/USMC-C-Tinian/)

Yasaka to Yasui Konpira (Kyoto)

September 15, 2014 / John D. / 0 Comments

Yesterday was a glorious sunny day in Kyoto, and armed with the guidebook Shinto Shrines and Hugo Kempeneer’s Yasaka postings on the Kyoto Dream Trips blog, I set off with Chris Cooling (Communications Assistant at Jinja Honcho) for a walk to Yasaka Jinja. Afterwards we took the pathway leading to Kiyomizu temple before backtracking through Yasui Kompira Shrine, which led us into the Gion district around the time that the geisha set off for their evening engagements. It’s one of my very favourite walks, guaranteed to throw up something interesting, and this occasion was no exception as you can see in the photoessay below…..

Kyoto looking good in some late summer sunshine

On a sunny Sunday queues to pray at Yasaka can be surprisingly long, and some take the opportunity for a photo pose before the massive worship hall (the roof of which, unusually, covers both haiden and honden)

Two women paying respects to the kami at the beautification subshrine (as featured in a Green Shinto posting ‘Beauty shrine (Yasaka Jinja)’. There are so many subshrines it is said you can pay respects to all the country’s kami at Yasaka alone.

Chris Cooling takes the opportunity to splash on a bit of beauty water too

Passing through Yasaka Jinja and the Maruyama Park behind, we set off along the route to Kiyomizudera and discovered that the Gionkaku (Gion Pavilion) and Daiun-in temple had a special opening – a rare event.

The temple was originally built by Emperor Ogimachi for the repose of Nobunaga’s soul in 1587, and it only moved to its present site in 1987. The Gion Pavilion next to it was erected in the 1920s by a member of the wealthy Okura family adjacent to his second house.

The interior of the pavilion is covered with Daoist-inspired murals

View from the top of the pavilion over Higashiyama towards the Yasaka-no-to (Yasaka Pagoda)

Further along the pathway was a small Inari shrine with unusually cute ema

The stone lanterns were unusual too – first time I’ve seen a fox cut-out.

At the Yasui Konpira Shrine the queues were even longer than at Yasaka – because of the pulling power of the ‘enkiri enmusubi’ rock

Climb through the hole in the rock one way and it cuts off bad relations – climb through again the other way and it will bring you a good relationship in future

Along with the love hotels that surround the Yasui Konpira Shrine is a new addition – catering for the morning after perhaps.

No walk through Gion would be complete without sight of a geisha – or someone dressed up as a geisha. End of a stimulating afternoon, and thanks to Chris Cooling for his company.

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For more about Yasaka Jinja, see the following links:

http://www.kyotodreamtrips.com/2014/09/yasaka-shrine-kyoto-closer-look-pt-1/
http://www.kyotodreamtrips.com/2014/09/yasaka-shrine-kyoto-closer-look-pt-2/

Kojiki translation

September 12, 2014 / John D. / 2 Comments

Izanagi and Izanami stir the primal brine

The mythological beginnings of Japan, according to Kojiki

Green Shinto reader, Quin Arbeitman, has written in about the just published new translation of Kojiki (712), Japan’s oldest writing. As he says, it’s “A much needed development, as the Basil Hall Chamberlain translation is generally considered a needlessly difficult read, and the well-regarded Philippi translation sells for hundreds of dollars due to the fact that reprints are prevented by legal squabblings over his estate.”

The new translator, Gustav Heldt, is an associate professor of Japanese literature at the University of Virginia and the author of The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan. Green Shinto is very grateful to Quin for his first impressions of the book, which has been out for less than a week….

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Quin in his guise as a jazz musician (courtesy fukuoka.now)

I am finding this new Heldt edition extremely readable. It goes down quite smooth and easy. Its language is simple but suitably evocative. It is in marked contrast to the Chamberlain, who in fact argued that the language of the Kojiki “…sounds queer and bald in Japanese, … and it is therefore right, even from a stylistic point of view, that they should sound bald and queer in English.” I don’t have the familiarity with Old Japanese to make this judgment for myself, but I for one am grateful that Heldt has not adopted Chamberlain’s approach to his prose!

Even leaving aside artfulness of the translation, there is one more very important reason for a new translation. One of the most frustrating aspects of the Chamberlain edition is that he, proper Victorian gentleman that he was, chose to translate anything which he considered “indecent” not into English, but Latin. This results more than a few long tracts of Latin text at important moments in the narrative, as well as several odd sentence constructions such as “…the women weaving the heavenly garments were so much alarmed that impegerunt privatas partes adversis radiis et obierunt.” (In Heldt as “Startled by the sight, Weaver Woman of Heaven slammed her weaving shuttle into her privates and died.”) And this is the only edition of the Kojiki that most bookstores have ever sold! It’s frankly rather amazing that it’s taken 132 years for a new widely available translation to appear in English.

The new translation of Kojiki has Ise's Meotoiwa rocks on the cover, said to reprsent the primal mythological couple of Izanagi and Izanami

Heldt makes the choice to translate all Japanese names etymologically by their kanji. For instance, Amaterasu (天照) appears as a character named “Heaven Shining”, and Okuninushi (大國主) as “Great Land Master”. He is even more poetic in his approach to place names, for instance giving Ise (伊勢) as “Sacred Streams”, and Izumo (出雲) as “Billowing Clouds”.

On the whole, I quite like this approach, as the sheer number of personal and place names in the Kojiki is rather dizzying even in simple English, let alone in the cumbersome cipher of romanized Japanese. Besides, tales of the Great Land Master adventuring through the land of Billowing Clouds has a certain mythic scope and poetry to it which is rather appropriate for a work such as this.

There is also a pair of maps at the back of the book, which give a useful layout of Japan in the Mythical Era. It is far more readable than the rather vague, borderless map included in the Chamberlain, and makes for fun comparisons with modern Japan.

I do have one fairly major gripe with this new edition, though. This is to do with how Heldt has chosen to deal with giving outside information. Unlike Chamberlain, who included pedantic footnotes quite literally as long as the text of the translation itself (resulting in a murder weapon-worthy 592 pages versus the Heldt edition’s 312), Heldt has chosen not to include footnotes or endnotes at all, so as to keep the text readable and flowing. I respect this, but unfortunately Heldt’s own system verges on unusable.

After more than 100 years, time for a new translation of this book too.

He includes three glossaries, one for “general terms”, one for personal names, and one for place names. The listings under “general terms” are sometimes interesting, but because there are no indications in the body of the text itself leading to the glossary, I would never think to look up words as mundane as “arrow”, “bamboo”, and “banner”– just to pick three from the first page– in order to read their enlightening entries. And as for the name and place glossaries, the worst problem is that they are listed alphabetically in order of Heldt’s own translations of them– and there is no cross-reference index by original Japanese name. Let’s say I want to look up all of the places where Ninigi shows up in the Kojiki. How the heck is anyone supposed to know that Heldt calls him “Ripening Rice Ears Lad”? There are literally hundreds of names in the Kojiki, so there’s no excuse for the lack of a cross-reference index for searching by romanized Japanese spelling, which would have taken all of perhaps four or five double columned pages.

Still. That’s only an issue if one wishes to use this text as part of fairly deep studies of Shinto. For the casual reader who just wants to read the oldest source of Japanese myth, free of “bald and queer” Victorian grandiloquence pocked with prudish Latin, this is the new go-to source. I’ll definitely be recommending it to others in the future.

Now here’s hoping for a modern translation of the Nihongi…

Rubbish!

September 11, 2014 / John D. / 4 Comments

When nature is as beautiful as this, who would want to leave their rubbish on the beach?

You wouldn’t think litter has much to do with Shinto. Indeed you might suppose a religion based on purity would lead to a culture that is vehemently opposed to littering. And so it seems to the hundreds of thousands of visitors to Japan each year who come away amazed by the spotlessness of the city streets.

But a letter today in The Japan Times raises the very real issue of the contrast between clean streets and the desecration of nature by wanton dumping and littering. For those of us who live here, it’s a striking phenomenon. “If the Japanese are so clean, why is there so much crap on my beach?” asks an outraged Roberto De Vido. (For the full article, see here.)

Beach gomi (courtesy Roberto De Vido)

Roberto lives near a beach and is concerned about the extraordinary amount of rubbish dumped there. He has taken action to clean it up and prevent it. And through personal experience, he has come to the conclusion that while Japanese feel ashamed to litter streets in full view of others, they have no such scruples when it comes to being in isolated places where the eyes of others are not upon them.

I too have often wondered about the contrast between clean streets and the unwarranted dumping of rubbish and domestic items in rivers or the countryside.

Previously I ascribed it to the ‘uchi-soto‘ (inside-outside) nature of Japanese culture. You don’t despoil your own surrounds, but you can do as you like in places unconnected to you. Such as nature. (The idea helps explain too the WW2 syndrome of an essentially kind and considerate people inflicting horrific cruelty on ‘the other’.)

Roberto De Vido however makes a strong case for ‘shame’ as the motivating criterion. It makes good sense. It was a central concept of Ruth Benedict’s influential book, and Lafcadio Hearn said much the same thing in Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation.

Endo Shusaku gets at a similar point in one of his short stories where he considers how Japanese soldiers could have indulged in vivisection and cannibalism in the Second World War. His writing was inspired by the notion that because of the Confucian sense of the collective, Japanese were likely to be motivated by situational rather than absolute ethics. (Endo of course was a Catholic, and had a point to prove.)

There is a link to Shinto here, which refrains from matters of morality. There is no dogma, no precepts written down in stone. Nature is a force for destruction as well as creation. Kami get angry. War criminals are venerated at Yasukuni. What matters is the endless cycle of renewal, not whether it’s morally good or bad.

If Roberto is right in his thesis, as I believe he is, it behooves the rest of us to speak out and shame those engaging in unacceptable behaviour, whether it be littering, sexual harassment or cruelty to animals. Just because we are ‘outsiders’ does not mean we should be invisible. Indeed, ‘gaiatsu‘ (outside pressure) can be all the more effective because of the stigma of losing face.

Thumbs up to Roberto for taking action to save the cleanliness of his beach. Purity may be a vital part of Shinto, but it seems shame may be even more fundamental to the culture.

Shinto teaches purity, but away from the eyes of the kami its precepts may not always be followed

Day of the crow

September 9, 2014 / John D. / 6 Comments

Yatagarasu, the three-legged emissary of Amaterasu

Today being 9/9, it’s the day of the Crow Sumo Festival at Kamigamo Jinja. (Green Shinto has carried a report on this unique event before; see here.)

Three has been a magic number with spiritual import since ancient times. It is the basic underpinning of the religious impulse through its birth-death-rebirth template, and the tripartite view of life is reflected in Siberian shamanism (and thereby Shinto) with its upper, middle and lower worlds. But if three has a potent significance, how much greater is that of three times three i.e. nine. You can see this in the Shinto wedding ceremony with its 3-3-9 ritual (san-san-kudo).

Shamanic pillar with crow on top

Nine had a magical import for Mongolian shamans, and it’s interesting therefore that the very shamanic Crow Festival in Kyoto should take place on this day. During the festival two priests hop and caw like crows in front of cones of sand representing the holy hill of Koyama where the Kamigamo kami first descended. This happened in prehistoric times when shamanism in Japan was still a living force, and one can presume that the kami descended into a human vessel, part man and part bird. In fact a secret ceremony to reenact this takes place every May which involves a cloak of feathers.

Now here’s the interesting thing. Kamigamo Jinja claims its founding kami was none other than yatagarasu, the three-legged crow of Kojiki mythology. Say what?! In the mythology the crow is a messenger of Amaterasu, sent by the sun goddess to guide her descendant across the dangerous Kii Hanto peninsula. For Kamigamo Jinja, that guide morphed into a member of the Kamo clan and ended up in Kyoto.

Crows and the sun are linked in many ancient myths, and might well derive from the black sunspots visible to the naked eye. A crow with three legs marks it out as being special, just as Siberian shamans are marked by a physical peculiarity to show their specialness. The emissary from Amaterasu might then well have been a shaman, or manifest through the medium of a shaman.

Tribes descended from crows makes one think of North American totems, where ancestral kin are depicted as ravens and the ilk. Indeed, the Crow Clan is a common feature of shamanic cultures, based on the shaman’s flight into the spirit world and an acknowledgement of the animal nature of humans – an instinctual understanding of evolution, you might say.

Emperor Jimmu seeks help from the three-legged crow

In this respect it’s interesting that in Siberia I once witnessed a crow dance by a shaman near Lake Baikal, and when travelling across Manchuria I came across a shamanic pole in the imperial palace at Shenyang from the top of which, explained a noticeboard, used to be hung a container with ‘grains and grounded meat to feed the divine bird (crow) in gratitude.‘

Food and gratitude are germane to Shinto. Indeed, its rites have been characterised as ‘spirit feasts’, when food is put out for hungry kami. One theory about the etymology of ‘kami‘ is that it is cognate with ‘kamu’, meaning to chew or eat, and in mythological and ritual practice, sharing food is a means of communion. It’s why in Shinto you share food after rituals with the divine spirit. And it’s why Christians symbolically eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus.

Crow-gods, crow totems, crows as emissaries of the divine. We tend to look nowadays on the black-feathered bird as a rather annoying or comical creature, simply an urban pest. But in times past those loud cawings were the voice of another world and those beady eyes portals into the divine. We’ve lost the art of connecting with them. We’ve lost the sense of magic.

On this day of days then, all hail the Crow!! Caw, caw, caw, hop, hop hop……

Feathered performer at a festival in Tohoku’s Shirakami, remnant of a shamanic past

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For a detailed account of the festival, see John Nelson Enduring Identities p.104 and following.

Full moon rising

September 8, 2014 / John D. / 1 Comment

A bloated autumnal moon rising above one of the 36 peaks in Kyoto's Eastern Hills

Tonight’s the night!

Shrines in Kyoto will shortly be celebrating the autumn moon, and in the case of Shimogamo, the festivity showcases what to my mind is the very best of Shinto – the seasonal celebration of nature combined with the refinements of Japanese culture.

Koto and kagura provide the accompaniment to the rising of the harvest moon, as elegantly clad miko and hostesses perform the tea ceremony for paying guests. The emergence of the moon from behind the tree tops of the Tadasu no mori woods produces gasps of pleasure in the shrine compound, as the assembled crowd delight in the aesthetic pursuits of Heian aristocrats. Shinto, it should not be forgotten, is no less a guardian of the nation’s heritage than a religion derived from animism.

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For a previous account of the Shimogamo moon festival, complete with pictures of the tea ceremony and special ‘moon dumplings’ see this page. What follows below is an article from the Kyoto Visitors Guide for this month, accessible here:

No place could better suited for full moon viewing than timeless Kyoto. Of all the year’s 12 full moons, the autumn full moon, or harvest moon, is considered to be the most sublime.

Japanese refinement at its best - the elegant ritual of the tea ceremony

It is said that the moon viewing custom was introduced to Japan from China during the Nara (710-794) and Heian periods (794-1185). Harvest moon viewing took place on August 15th in the lunar calendar, and it was called jugoya, which means the night of the 15th. Jugoya in the present calendar changes every year and usually falls in September or October. The moon on jugoya is not always full, but it’s said that the moon on that night is the brightest and the most beautiful in the year.

In times past, and even today, it was not uncommon for people to set up small tables by the window to enjoy the full moon light while eating tsukimi dango (rice and sweet bean dumplings made specially for the occasion), and sato-imo (taro, a tropical root). Sprays of susuki (pampas grass), which resembles the rice plant, and other autumn grasses are displayed on the verandah, along with neat clusters of tiny rice dumplings. On a more public level, celebrations are held in temples and shrines.

The word, tsukimi (moon viewing), is used in Japanese food as well. For example, tsukimi soba and tsukimi udon are well-known. They aren’t food for moon viewing. Tsukimi refers to a cracked egg in Japanese cooking; the egg yolk represents the moon. Tsukimi udon/soba are hot udon/soba noodles served with raw egg toppings. McDonald’s in Japan even sells tsukimi burgers, which are hamburgers with fried egg fillings!

A full set of offerings and moon dumplings