Tag: Ise

Donald Richie on Shinto

January 7, 2021 / John D. / 1 Comment

Donald Richie (left) handing over a signed copy of his book to one of his fans

Donald Richie was one of three American giants of Japanese culture in the postwar years, together with Donald Keene and Edward Seidensticker. He came to speak at my university and was kind enough to write a foreword for my book on Kyoto. Like many others, I loved his travel writing in The Inland Sea, and amongst the many thoughtful insights is a passage on Shinto that deserves wider recognition. So here it is, hung around a visit to an out of the way hillside shrine he had come across. (pages 25-27 in the Stone Bridge Press edition)

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Many Shinto shrines lie on heights. One goes up and up and up to worship. The steps lead straight into the sky and are always steep. It is work to reach such a shrine. The faithful must arrive puffing, gasping, senses reeling. This is as it should be. One arrives as though new born, helpless, vulnerable. One’s panting sounds in the ears because a shrine is very quiet, quieter than a church. A church is hushed because one is made to be quiet; a shrine is simply quiet. It is so far away that noise does not reach.

You yourself may be as noisy as you please. Gasps for breath, eventual shouts and laughter, are quickly swallowed up. You speak in a normal voice as you walk about, investigating everything, peering behind this door, into that box. The reverent, the hushed, the awed – these have small place in a shrine. If there is any restraint, it comes from nature itself. You may lower your voice, just as you naturally lower your voice in a grove or a gorge. If you feel like it, you impose a willing silence upon yourself.

Shinto prayer is not communal prayer. It is solitary and spontaneous. No one says when to begin or when to stop. You choose your own time. You speak to the gods in the way you might greet your hosts at a party. It is a discreet, friendly, happy, polite prayer.

Apparently no came to pray any more in this small shrine. The stone steps had been forced apart n places by roots of trees grown large after the shrine was built. the only motion in this tangle of bushes and weeds were the large red crabs that, looking already cooked, refused to move, menaced with waving cleft claws, and denied being afraid.

AT the top one is ready for the god. One is reeling, fainting, panting. And there, as though for reward, spread out like a banquet, is a view of the other side of the bay, the sea, the distant farther island, all gleaming in the setting sun, as though cast from bronze and floating on lacquer.

Here at the top it was still day, though below, back toward the village, the sea was clouded and the beach was darkening. The shrine, seen through a line of trees, gleamed a rich yellow, the color of cut wood in sunlight. It was silent. I heard the cicadas the moment they ceased.

Walking through the clinging weeds I crossed to the shrine and stood before the votive box. The god was just inside the closed doors in front of me. I pulled the rope of the god-summoning rattle. The sound was like that of a dry husk shaken. These gods have no bells – the only sound they know is this dusty sound of dried seeds shaken by the winds.

Shinto is nature. Perhaps animism – and Shinto is the only formal animistic religion left – is the true religion. It has roots deep in all of us. One recognizes this. It is the only religion that can inspire the feeling children know when the wind or a rock is made god for a week or a day. Its essence is unknown. The religion speaks to us, to something in us which is deep and permanent.

Once I had sounded the rattle, once its rasping cry, like the quiver of a cicada, had died, once the god was looking from his trellised door way, I was afraid not to give. The votive box looked hungry, its slats like teeth.

The Shinto gods are near us. they prefer money. I dropped a coin; then, not knowing what else to do, shook the rattle again. A dark shape stood for a second against the sky, whirled about me, was a speck of black in the darkening sky, was gone. It was a bat.

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One of the many buildings at Ise that is rebuilt every twenty years

Climbing slowly down the shadowed tones, I thought of Ise, the greatest shrine of all, the mother shrine, home of the Sun Goddess herself. A visit to any shrine, as humble and forgotten a one as this, leads one to consider such imponderables as life, death. Thoughts of ancient Ise led me to consider another – time.

Time for the West is a river. Down its changing yet forever unchanging length we float. In the East, however, the river is more. a symbol for life, our earthly span, the ukiyo, than it is for time itself.

Time has no symbol in this Asia where almost everyone, at least formerly, lived in a continuous and unvarying present. If it had one, it might be a symbol as startlingly up-to-date as the oscillating current. The reason this occurs is Ise – not only one of the great religious complexes of the world but the only answer yet discovered to man’s universal wish either to invent the perfect perpetual-motion machine or, else, to stop time entirely.

The way to stop time, the Japanese discovered, is letting it have its own way Just as the shape of nature is observed, revered, so is the contour of time. Every twenty years – and for over a thousand years – the shrine at Ise is razed and a new one is erected on an adjacent plot reserved for that purpose. After only two decades, the beam-ends barely weathered, the copper turned to palest green, the shrine is destroyed. Only twenty generations of spiders have spun their webs, only four or five generations of swallows have built their nests, not even a single blink has covered the great staring eye of eternity – yet down come the great cross-beams, off come the reed roofs, and the pillars are carried off to be reused in other parts of the shrine grounds.

On the adjacent plot is constructed a shrine that is in all ways similar to the one just dismantled. More, it is identical. Something dies, something is born, and the two things are the same. This ceremony, the sengushiki is a living exemplar of the greatest of religious mysteries, the most profound of human truths.

And time at last comes to a stop. Forever old, forever new, the shrines stand there for all eternity. This – and not the building of pyramids, or ziggurats, not the erection of Empire State Building or Tokyo Towers – is the way to stop time and make immortal that mortality which we cherish.

Is Shinto a religion?

December 8, 2019 / John D. / 0 Comments

It’s a question that has vexed many a person over the years. Is Shinto a religion or a way of life? It begs a further question: does it matter? At certain times in history it’s been a matter of vital importance, and as can be seen from the article below, it remains a puzzling issue even in the present. (The excerpt below is taken from a longer piece in the Asahi Shimbun about the Chichibu Festival.)

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Many Japanese freely mix religions depending on the occasion, visiting a Shinto shrine at New Year’s, holding a Buddhist funeral or getting married in a Christian wedding, a popular option even though only 1% of the population is Christian.

“I don’t know if that means we’re flexible or if we don’t have convictions,” Yamashita said.

Kyoto’s Gion Festival. For most it is more a matter of tradition than religion.

RELIGION SEEN DIFFERENTLY
Roaming the streets in the afternoon, a group of high school girls decked out in festival jackets and headbands who later joined in pulling the floats [at Chichibu Festival] said the festival wasn’t religious at all for them. And yet they emphatically said they believed the story about the two gods meeting that evening

“It’s romantic!” said Rea Kobayashi, 17. The girls also said they would celebrate Christmas with a decorated tree and gift-giving and didn’t see any problem mixing religions. “No problem! That’s normal. Most Japanese do that,” said Rio Nishimiya, 18. “We’re good at that. If it’s fun, that’s all that matters.”

“Japanese are flexible,” said her friend, Meiri Shimada, also 18. “That’s a good thing!” Such views are shared by many Japanese. Attitudes toward religion are ambiguous. Many would say they aren’t religious–and yet every year millions of Japanese visit Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples across Japan and have little shrines in their homes where they pray.

Religion is viewed differently in Japan, and in some other parts of Asia, than in the West or the Islamic world, where there is an emphasis on individual faith and a set of beliefs, or a creed, based on a sacred text such as the Bible or Koran.

In Japan, religion is more of a cultural, communal and ritualistic thing than a personal faith. Shinto has no sacred text or clearly defined theology, and many Japanese would be hard-pressed to summarize it, including many visitors to this festival.

“It’s a religion of life,” said Sonoda, the chief priest, in an attempt to summarize Shinto. “It’s something inherited from ancestors that provides a spirituality passed on from parent to child. And this isn’t just for humans, but we are also linked to animals and all living things. It’s because of them that we’re alive. Worldview may be a better way to describe it,” he said.

There are no definitive numbers on Shinto believers in Japan simply because there’s nothing definite to count. “We don’t use the phrase ‘believers,’” Sonoda said. There are no weekly services and no missionaries to spread Shinto.

COEXISTENCE
Sonoda said other folk religions share traits with Shinto. He recalls visiting a Hopi native American community years ago. They were holding a festival giving thanks to the spirits that lived in a nearby mountain and came down every spring to help the people with the planting season, and in winter would return to the mountain, he said. “That made a big impression on me,” he said.

There are more than 80,000 Shinto shrines across Japan, and nearly as many Buddhist temples, and the two have generally coexisted peacefully after Buddhism’s introduction to Japan in the 6th century, along with Confucian thought from China.

That long history of coexistence is one key reason behind Japanese attitudes toward religion.

“Each religion had a different role, and these three–Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism–shaped Japanese culture,” said Susumu Shimazono, a professor of religion at Tokyo’s Sophia University, a Jesuit school. “There was some dogma, but none of these religions stressed exclusiveness. This sort of combination of ideas and philosophies is typical of East Asia.”

Experts say interest in Shinto among ordinary Japanese is holding steady or even increasing. As one measure of this, visitors to the Ise Grand Shrine, Japan’s most important shrine, have grown in recent years, running to 8.9 million through November, up from 7.8 million during the same period last year and 8.5 million for all of 2017.

Amaterasu – was her primacy in Meiji times an attempt to replicate Western monotheism?

Shinto is also closely entwined with the Japanese imperial family, holding that the emperor is a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami.

It also has a dark recent past. During World War II, Shinto was elevated to the state religion and the war effort was fought in the name of the emperor, who was considered divine. After the war, the emperor was stripped of his divine stature, and the U.S.-drafted Constitution ensures freedom of religion and the separation of religion and state.

IMPERIAL FAMILY
But Shinto’s ties to the imperial family, and some religious rituals performed by the emperor, have generated controversy.

Buildings used in this year’s Daijosai were made open to the public (photo by Green Shinto reader, Esben Andreasen)

Last month, newly enthroned Emperor Naruhito spent the night in a makeshift shrine built (and which will later be demolished) with public funds in a ceremony called Daijosai, or the Great Thanksgiving. According to authorities, in this most important succession rite, he gave thanks for harvests, prayed for the peace and safety of the nation and hosted the imperial family’s ancestral gods.

All told, the event will cost 2.7 billion yen ($25 million) in public money. A group of 200 people filed a lawsuit last year against the government over the expenditure.

Crown Prince Akishino, Naruhito’s younger brother, said last year that he was against using state money for the ritual and raised questions about whether this was permissible under the separation of religion and state.

Visitors to the Chichibu festival were divided over the issue. “It’s a waste of money,” said 27-year-old Naoko Osada, of the ritual. “According to the Constitution, using public money for this is out of bounds,” said Akihiko Suzuki, a 73-year-old retired man. “But as Japanese, we entrust these sorts of things to authorities.”

Others said they believed Naruhito was fulfilling his duties as symbolic head of the country and that spending public money on such rites was acceptable so long as Shinto isn’t imposed on people.

“He’s our symbol, and it’s important to keep this tradition. So I don’t think it violates the Constitution,” said Nobuyuki Negishi, 44. “It’s OK for them to use state funds as long as they don’t use too much.”

SHINTO’S TWO ASPECTS
Sophia’s Shimazono said it’s helpful to view Shinto today as having two parts: state Shinto as a lingering political philosophy and the Shinto of the masses who go to shrines at New Year’s.

“State Shinto was rejected as a state religion after the war, but some of that sentiment remains today,” he said. “It has a large influence in politics.”

Rightwing groups such as Nippon Kaigi, which has ties to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is a special adviser to the group, would like to revise Japan’s pacifist Constitution and see Shinto increase its prominence.

That includes official visits to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan’s war dead, including war criminals, are memorialized. Politicians have avoided visiting Yasukuni because China and South Korea say that doing so glorifies Japan’s wartime leaders and past.

Steps to the Naiku at Ise, open to all who wish to worship at the shrine of the emperor’s ancestor, Amaterasu omikami

Abe drew attention to Shinto by hosting the 2016 Group of Seven summit in Ise-Shima and took fellow leaders to visit the Ise Grand Shrine, dedicated to the sun goddess. He also attended a once-every-20-years event at Ise in 2013, only the second prime minister to do so.

When you combine those political undercurrents with the cultural traditions maintained by millions who visit shrines every year — most of whom likely embrace freedom of religion — Shinto still “has a fairly large role in Japanese society,” Shimazono said.

Such political or even religious convictions, however, were far from the minds of most visitors to the Chichibu Night Festival. None of the two dozen people interviewed wanted a return to state Shinto, and few said the festival held religious significance for them, although some would say it held spiritual meaning.

“It’s so majestic!” exclaimed Tsuyoshi Koyama, a 47-year-old onlooker as all six huge floats with glowing lanterns gathered in the park at the festival’s climax and fireworks filled the sky. “Every day we have these mundane lives, and to see something this grand really stirs my heart.”

Koyama said he doesn’t consider himself devout and “prays only when I need help.” But he does believe that spirits live in the natural world around us, and “feels something spiritual in the atmosphere here.”

“Westerners tend to embrace one religion, but if you reduce it to one, that can cause conflicts,” he said. “The good part about Japan is that there are many gods, and they share generously with us.”

Mark Teeuwen on Ise Jingu

June 12, 2018 / John D. / 4 Comments

The main shrine at Ise, known as Naiku

Leading Shinto scholar Mark Teeuwen, has written several influential books on matters related to Japan’s indigenous faith. He’s known in particular for disputing the idea that there was such a thing as ‘Shinto’ in Japan’s ancient past, but that it was a later construct. His new publication, A Social History of the Ise Shrines, co-written with John Breen, has proved ground-breaking in terms of English language works on the subject. It was a great delight therefore to hear him talk last Sunday on the changes Ise has been through in its long history.

The Dutch scholar Mark Teeuwen, currently professor at the University of Oslo

First some interesting statistics. The Ise complex comprises 125 shrines. There are 120 priests (nearly ten times more than at other major shrines) and 500 auxiliary staff. The shrine owns forests as far away as Kyushu, has four museums as well as offices, educational facilities and residences, in addition to which it hosts facilities to produce rice, salt, timber etc. In short, this is a major enterprise, which moreover is committed to a twenty-year rebuilding cycle estimated to cost 57 billion yen. Small wonder that it needs substantial income, for since the end of World War Two it has been stripped of state support. It comes as little surprise then to learn that the Association of Ise Worshippers is headed by the ex-president of Toyota and that the top ranks are filled with big business magnates.Visitors to Ise may think it’s all about trees and wood, but money is a major concern!

The twenty year rebuilding cycle brings with it renewed focus and a surge of tourism. A comparison of 1993 and 2013 is instructive in this respect. Given that 9 million visitors in 2014 descended on a town of only 130,000, the management of shrine visitors and tourism is a consideration for local residents, and in 1993 much attention was given to a new motorway to the area. At the same time there were protests and even bombs against the imperial trappings and reenforcement of state ties. These were much more evident in 2013, when prime minister Shinzo Abe and eight of his cabinet ministers attended the sengyo no gi rite, in which the sacred mirror of Amaterasu is transferred from the old shrine to the new. The last time a prime minister had attended was in 1929 during the time of State Shinto, yet this won almost no attention in the mass media or from the populace at large. One wonders if it reflects political apathy, or perhaps it is simply an illustration of the drift to the right which has happened under Abe.

A Jinja Honcho campaign to go and worship at Ise

Standard descriptions of Ise like to suggest it has always been supreme and a centre of imperial worship. Mark T. however showed that this was far from the truth, and he identified six major historical periods with quite different values and business models. The shrine dates back to the late seventh century when an angry deity named Amateru (sic) disrupted the imperial household and was ejected, ending up at Ise. Mark T. believes that at this time the deity was male, and that it was only under the influence of Empress Jito (r.686-697) that the deity was feminised by Kojiki mythologisers in her honour (there are parallels between Amaterasu’s son and grandson with those of Jito).

During its subsequent history Ise took many guises. It came as a surprise to learn that at one time it was the seat of Enma, lord of the underworld, and indulgences were sold so as to avoid going to hell. At another time it was closely associated with the samurai (the court made pilgrimages to Kumano instead). Shop councils and inn keepers promoted the pilgrimage business through prayer masters called oshi, and the millions of Edo-era pilgrims who headed for the Outer Shrine were concerned with enjoyment and praying for agricultural success. There was little if any awareness of the emperor at the time, for the Tokugawa were all-powerful (and Ieyasu deified). Only with the development of the Kokugaku movement in the later Edo Period was there a revival in sentiment for the emperor.

It was the Meiji Period which brought major changes to Ise. The era is associated now with ‘the invention of tradition’, and Ise provides a striking example as it was transformed into the ancestral shrine of the emperor and given primacy in religious terms. For a start the oshi business, which had long sustained Ise, was banned. Hereditary priests were ousted and appointees installed. Fences were put up and shrines rearranged in a more rational and imperial manner. The Outer Shrine, for example whose deity was Amenonakanushi, lord of creation, was recast as sanctuary of a food deity serving Amaterasu,

Part of the rebranding was to have the emperor make personal visits to Ise as his ancestral shrine and Emperor Meiji is said to have visited four times. Far from following tradition, he was in fact starting a new ‘tradition’ for no emperor had ever visited the shrine before (Empress Jito in the eighth century is said in the Kojiki to have visited ‘Ise Province’). At the same time throughout Japan shrines were amalgamated, mirrors added, and imperial ancestors installed as kami to replace the old gods. In this way Ise came to take its present form as head of an emperor-centred ideology, and despite the change from nationalised institution to private after WW2, essentially nothing has changed. Still today most of the resources of the Association of Shrines (Jinja Honcho) go into supporting Ise’s primacy, even to the extent of passing on money from poorer shrines (some close to bankrupt).

There is no dogma in Shinto, noted Mark, though Jinja Honcho has one clear dogma: Ise is supreme.

Mark (right) putting over a point in his fact-filled overview of Ise’s many historical guises

In contrast to the solemnity nowadays, Edo-era pilgrims were bent on enjoying themselves and even took pets along, if this officially sanctioned picture is to be believed. The humorous saying, ‘You should take advantage of the Ise pilgrimage to drop in at Ise too’ shows that other matters held priority.

Abe, Ise and rural shrines (G7)

May 26, 2016 / John D. / 0 Comments

With the G7 leaders about to be taken to Ise Shrine by prime minister Shinzo Abe, the focus is increasingly being turned on Shinto and its role in Japan. In this rather rambling overview, the author notes Abe’s political intentions as well as the declining state of rural shrines. Alarmingly, 40% of them are thought to be at risk of going out of existence.

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Abe treads fine line in Ise Shrine tour as Shinto religion faces challenges

by Isabel Reynolds May 25, 2016 Japan Times

Ise Shrine is considered one of the holiest sites in Shinto, a faith whose rituals have been woven into Japan’s culture for centuries.

Located more than 300 km southwest of Tokyo, the historic complex of wooden buildings set in a deep forest is dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu, from whom the emperors are said to be descended.

Ise Jingu, as it is known in Japanese, is also fraught with political meaning this week for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who hosts the Group of Seven summit on the nearby and secluded Kashikojima Island. Despite constitutional restrictions, Abe would like to see the indigenous religion play a more prominent role in Japanese society.

As ‘the Vatican of Shinto’, Ise is keen to boost its international standing

Yet as the international spotlight falls on Shinto’s equivalent of the Vatican, which draws 7 million or more visitors annually, Japan’s lesser shrines face a protracted financial crisis amid a decelerating population and younger generations far less attached to traditional rituals.

Abe is expected to take his guests to the shrine, in the latest instance of his promotion of Shintoism. He has held New Year’s news conferences at Ise and, in 2013, was the first prime minister since 1929 to take part in a rebuilding ceremony held there every 20 years, according to John Breen, a history professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies.

“Abe is much more focused on Shinto than almost any other postwar prime minister,” said Breen. “He is a key member of Shinto Seiji Renmei, a political association that has as its aim the location of Shinto at the heart of government,” he added.

Ise is less controversial than Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japan’s war dead as well as World War II leaders convicted as Class-A war criminals. Visits to Yasukuni by Japanese leaders, including Abe, have sparked anger in China and South Korea, which suffered under Japan’s aggression in the first half of the 20th century.

Nevertheless, Abe’s 2013 participation in the Ise ceremony drew criticism from Christians in Japan, who said it violated a constitutional ban on the government favoring any particular religion. For some, Shinto is still associated with past nationalism, even though the U.S. and its allies removed its status as the national religion at the end of the war.

“There’s no doubt that Shinto was used by the government during the war,” said Katsuji Iwahashi, public relations chief at the Association of Shinto Shrines in Tokyo. “But is there a religion that has not been used as a reason for fighting? Shrines in themselves are not aggressive.”

Iwahashi Katsuji, international spokesman for Jinja Honcho, who studied for an MA under John Breen at London University

Ise Shrine employs about 600 people and, according to Diamond business magazine, spent about ¥55 billion on replacing all its buildings and artifacts in 2013 — the 62nd time it had carried out this ritual. Its high priests and priestesses are relatives of the Imperial family, and past visitors have included Queen Elizabeth II.

On a visit two weeks ahead of the G-7 summit that kicks off Thursday, dozens of police clad in rain gear were already patrolling the shrine’s grounds among a steady stream of visitors.

For those who run the other 80,000 or so shrines in Japan, life can be hard. The country has only 20,000 priests, meaning many of them supervise more than one shrine.

Small shrines rely on visitors’ offerings or fees for blessings for everything from marriages to new buildings and cars. Priests often combine their religious duties with a job as a teacher or government employee, according to Iwahashi. Older priests are also increasingly struggling to find successors.

About 41 percent of Japan’s shrines are in danger of disappearing along with the rural communities that support them, estimates Kenji Ishii, a professor of religious studies at Kokugakuin University, one of only two Shinto colleges in Japan.

While the same trend is hitting Buddhist temples in rural areas, shrines are even worse off, according to Hidenori Ukai, a Buddhist priest and author of “Vanishing Temples — the Loss of Regional Areas and Religion.” That’s because temples charge their parishioners for the maintenance of family graves, he said.

“We joke that we take people’s bones hostage,” Ukai said. “Things are hard for temples in areas with shrinking populations, but it’s worse for shrines,” which do not conduct burial rites or offer graveyards, he added.

Tadaki Hattori, the 51-year-old chief priest of the tiny, 200 sq.-meter Koami Shrine in the busy Nihonbashi area of central Tokyo, said he often tells his fellow priests that making a success of a shrine comes down to sheer effort. He decided to take a shot at full-time priesthood five years ago, after inheriting the 550-year-old shrine from his father.

What was once a lonely spot hemmed in by a parking lot Hattori’s father used to supplement his income, is now bustling with visitors. The rundown buildings have been spruced up with a new bronze roof paid for by donations, and paper lanterns sponsored by businesses hang at the entrance. Far from worrying over a successor, Hattori said all four of his children are interested in qualifying as priests.

Providing a warm welcome and being willing to explain the shrine to visitors or listen to their problems is key to creating good word-of-mouth, Hattori said. An English-language Web page has also helped bring in some of the record numbers of foreign tourists in Tokyo.

“If people put in a bit more effort, I think things could improve,” Hattori said. “They give up too easily. They think they can’t make money, but you don’t know until you try. I think this is a trend in Japanese society as a whole — everyone is a bit weedy these days.”