Shinto and Japan

Japan has a very unique and interesting history that has influenced its culture immensely. The culture of Japan is one marked with assimilation and evolution of the many other forces and societies that have influenced it. The reason for this lay in its roots. The most significant of the beginnings of Japan is Shinto. Shinto is a religion that was given birth by the Japanese and their culture and now over many years of cultivation and growth Shinto is not a separate entity from the society, but rather, one in the same. It is through the ideas and influence of Shinto that the nation of Japan has interacted with the outside world in the past, and continues to do so even now in the present.

To understand Shinto, though, one might want to travel back a bit further and understand that Shinto can also be understood as an even more primal religion called Shamanism. What is Shamanism though? And if Shinto’s roots come from Shamanism, then where are the roots of Shamanism, and shouldn’t we start there at the “true” beginning? Well Shamanism, as anthropologists can tell, is “one of humankind’s most ancient traditions.” (1, pg. 13) Traces of this religion can be found throughout the world and Walsh believes that this occurs because of a common innate human tendency¹. This innate tendency is the logical mind of humans. Humans see things and can logically assume that all effects have causes. This is true in everything they can experience in the natural world. No phenomenon that occurs is always accompanied with a cause, a reason to why things happen or work. However, it proves to be a bother when humans cannot identify a cause to certain effects. Things such as disease or natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes must have been quite an enigma to the early humans. They did not have scientific instruments to analyze the plates underground or the specific weather patterns, or the microscopic germs that caused these horrors to early society. The only natural assumption they could come up with is that these phenomenon must have unseen causes. These “unseen forces” in turn could be persuaded not to wreak havoc and destruction upon the people. This is where the roots of Shamanism lie, in the logical minds of all capable and thinking human beings who had no other way to observe nature except with their own two eyes. Now let us take a look at Shinto.