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.

Shinto

Shamanism was a religion for a hunter and gatherer society. Shinto is shamanism in an agricultural setting. It is the only known religion to adapt Shamanism to this setting. It is this ability of adaptation that makes Japan infinitely unique in the way that their culture has been affected by those outside of the island. So now that we know the roots of Shinto let us take a further look into some of the details. Shinto is derived from two Chinese words, not Japanese the two words are Shen and Tao; Shen meaning god or kami and Tao meaning “the way.” Together they can be literally translated as the way of the gods, or the way of the kami². Since the beginnings of Shinto come from Shamanism it is only natural to assume that Shinto also has a developed a special reverence to nature. They believe that these kami embodied nature and animals and filled people with a sense of “wonder and awe.” (3, pg. 105-106) Shinto, being a religion of action and external symbolism, venerated these kami through carefully performed rituals and ceremonies. The Shinto Priests that performed these rituals were cleansed and had to be pure in front of the kami as to not insult or anger them. This sense of purity and cleanliness was a fundamental component of Shinto. Things that were offered up to the kami had to be appropriate. Things like fish, rice, vegetables, and salt were common offerings but blood and meats were seen as impure and unfit gifts⁴. The places in which they held the ceremonies and the kami were honored had to be pure and sacred places as well. These “jinja” were to be well kept and maintained for these purposes. Many kagura, ceremonial dances, and kagura-uta, songs to accompany those dances were performed in ritualistic manners as well³. Along with the ideas of purity and reverence to nature, two other characteristics stand to define Shinto. One is continuity, which I will discuss later and the other is the concept of festival. Matsuri, literally means festival in Japan, however, there are some festivals celebrated in modern times that do not have their roots in Shinto. The ones associated with Shinto are usually the festivals grew out of rice culture rituals. These rituals were used to protect the rice crops and to help them grow. It is in these rituals where one would normally see the practices and offering mentioned above and eventually these rituals turned into festivals to celebrate different things like the rice harvest³. This concept was to further the acting of spontaneous joy and represented the breaking through of pure goodness. Through the festivals, the Japanese sought to see the pure positive-ness of life and to reconnect with those aspects of life. Through this reconnection the Japanese developed a sense of duty and honor and this was all a part of the development of both Shinto and how Shinto affected and still affects Japanese culture. The last characteristic of Shinto was the idea of continuity. This idea is not only how Shinto has survived in modern day Japan, but also how the Japanese society has been able to keep old ideas and new ideas, and how they have been able to combine the two in a meaningful way.

In the late 4^th century Japan was comprised of many courts and families that ruled the people of Japan. Usually the bigger families were associated with a specific deity of one sort or another and the Yamato court, worshippers of the sun deity, established dominance over the other clans at this time. This clan has later become and is still the royal family of Japan⁵. They set up the Ritsturyo system of government. This was essentially the same as the system of the Chinese Government and the Japanese basically continued the “implementation of Chinese moral and political value begun by Shotoku Taishi.” (3, pg. 177) This system of Government was based on Confucian philosophies and the Shinto rituals and external practices fit into the system well. This made it so that Shinto not only survived through this government which lasted roughly 967 years⁵ but it endured beyond it as well.

To the Japanese “Shinto is preparation for life; religions are preparation for death.” (4, pg. 92) Shinto was a way for the Japanese to express and enjoy their lives. They saw many of the other Western “religions” as almost always pertaining to what would happen after this lifetime. The Japanese were more concerned about what would happen in their lives and what might help them live a more enjoyable and meaningful and valuable life and to really be a part of life. Shinto, through its many religious practices and traditions, gave them the ritualistic and external action-based religion they sought.

Since then though, Shinto has been broken up into many different sects and cultic groups. The two main categories that Shinto was split into were the national religion and the ethnic religion. “The former is not officially regarded as a religion, but rather as a state cult, whereas the latter, with its church organizations, is regarded as a religion and is placed on the same footing as the Buddhist and Christian churches.” (6, pg. 15) The state didn’t appoint any of the priests in the Shinto religion and therefore does not pay them either. Most of their support comes from individual support and a very low percentage of their pay comes from the government⁶. At one point, though, there were many movements for the ethnic Shinto to be the lifted to be the state religion of Japan. This has resulted in a sectarian Shinto. In the detailed and intricate history of Shinto you can see both the evolution in both the religion of Shinto and the nation of Japan¹³. The reason for this being is because of the influences from other nations and religions, the two most prominent ones being Buddhism and China.

Shinto in the Present

Buddhism can be considered the dominant religion of Japan in present times. This religion came over from mainly China and Korea. There was some hesitation before the people of Japan would accept this new religion, but they eventually took it on and it has changed the face of the Japanese and how the people and their religious beliefs have changed. One might think that the Shinto practice is the majority in Japan, and they would be right as well. The reason why Buddhism was so widely accepted into Japanese culture is because of how it could be integrated into Shinto beliefs. Buddhism, as it came into Japan had its gods that weren’t much defined yet. At the same time, the Shinto gods had never been described in detail to form. Because of these two facts, it was only natural for the Japanese to conceive “the Shinto deities as the derivative manifestations of the Buddhist divinities, which were the original entities, and to assign to each Shinto god a Buddha or Bodhisattva as his original.” (6, pg. 21) This meant that Shinto and Buddhism in a sense, “merged” together to form a religion that was both still uniquely “Buddhist” and “Japanese.”

One thing that is interesting though, is that Japan as a whole does not seem to recognize Shinto anymore. Rather let us take the word “Shinto” and replace it with “Japanese.” It is a religion that permeates through the entirety of modern day Japan. Since Shinto has been a part of their culture for so long, Japan’s identity is now also found in Shinto as well.

Shinto is as old as the Japanese nation herself and will have its existence as long as the nation endures. The religion of ancient Greece died out, as the Greek nation perished, the religion of ancient Rome is no more, the Roman people having ceased to be. The case is the same with the ancient religions of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, etc. the Japanese nation, however, has never ceased, so her own religion maintains herself. (7, pg. 88)

The idea here is that as a national religion the religion finds its identity and history and value from the nation of its birth. If the nation ceases to exist, then the value of the religion diminishes and losing its value, it ceases to exist. In turn, the country finds parts of its heritage and identity in the religion. As World War II showed, it was impossible to separate the nation of Japan from their heritage as Shinto⁶. “The creation of something out of nothing in Shinto does not mean everything was created out of nothingness at the beginning of existence. It means the ‘creative process’ is still continuing.” (4, pg 17) This is basically telling why Japan can so willingly accept new ideas. They believe that they are ever changing and so that even the nation of Japan and its religion, namely Shinto, is always in the middle of this “creative process.” It is this ability to adapt that makes it so that the Japanese culture can assume new ideas and combine them with old traditions and beliefs to continue to “create” new ideas and become processed into something more. This is continued to be expressed in present day Japan where you can see a great deal of innovation from Japanese companies. The Japanese have not necessarily created or invented new ideas but have taken things from other countries and improved upon them and made them much better. An example of this would be to take a look at the Japanese automobile industry and the advancements they have made in engine efficiency and performance compared to other European and American car companies. This type of improvement and innovation also shows through technology and video games. Both Sony and Squaresoft are two companies that are dominating the market in video games and electronic devices such as laptop computers, cameras, phones, and video recorders. Another reason that Japan has been one of the only societies in the world to be able to do this is to look at the fundamental characteristics of Shinto once again, and what it means to the Japanese people. It is this issue of continuity that we can see is a prevailing factor of Shinto¹⁰. Because the idea that the longer one has a connection or relationship with another, the more value it has exists, this makes it harder and harder to throw away the traditions and rituals of Shinto the longer it is around.

A big factor for the Japanese has been to truly identify themselves after 1945. “The subordination of the individual to the group has so long been a part of the life of Japan that Japanese are hardly aware of it until they experience the contrast in a country more individually oriented.” (12, pg 169) Ross meant that in a world where societies around the world are trying to bring back the importance of the group over the individual, Japan is a culture in which the individual must be stressed more than the group. This is because for the Japanese, “it is hard for a sense of individual responsibility to emerge [to the state].” (12, pg. 170) As the Japanese continue to find themselves and how they will continue to develop in this post world war nation, Shinto continues to be immersed in their culture and play a very significant role to the nation.

Shinto was used as a way to promote nationalism within the country and now it can be the strand that still holds the Japanese nation together. It is apparent in every part of Japanese culture. It is an important part of their history that can be used as a defining force for the Japanese. Shinto to the Japanese can be analogous to the founding of the Americas based on a Christian background. The only exception would be that Japan has kept its roots much more intact than America has with its own in an external and ritualistic way. Shinto can be seen not only in the rituals still performed but in the other cultural aspects of society as well. An example would be in Japanese business. The way the nation handles its business partners and contracts is in a very Shinto like way. Deals and agreements with the Japanese can be made much smoother if there is a sense of a relationship and kinship between the two parties. In dealing with Western cultures, the Japanese confuse some western folk because foreigners don’t understand this Japanese mentality of a “friendship.” It is not a one time meeting type of occasion but to the Japanese it is the longevity in the relationship and continuity throughout the years of doing business with certain companies.

Japan has also taken the stance in keeping Shinto alive within their youth as well. If you take a look at Japanese television, specifically anime, you will see the themes of Shinto over and over. Many of the anime, though dealing with a range of topics from bread making, to being ninjas and “soul reapers” that harvest dead people to the other world, have very apparent Shinto themes dealing with nature and using character names that have many Shinto subtleties that cannot be denied. Children are growing with these themes of Shinto and are being raised to not see the difference between what we Westerners would call “religion” and what the Japanese would simply call their life.

In this modern era of Japan, it is the first time in which the Shinto priests and shrines have true freedom. In the Meiji restoration, the government continually tried to manage and take control of the growth of the religion as a way to control the populace and the people. This freedom, that was promised by the Meiji Restoration, but never actually given, is something where Shinto and Japan can freely express themselves and see the change it brings. As Japan continues to interact more and more with the outside world and influences, Japan is coming to a crossroad. It is a decision in which to accept these new ideas and to do as it has always done in cultivating these new ideas and combining them with the old to form a new Japanese product or it would be to give in, like the rest of the world, to the growing Western influences in that of politics, economics and society. Japan can become a bridge between Western and Eastern culture if it can adapt once again, not only in a religious context as Shinto has allowed it to do, but a social one as well¹¹.