Deified Individual Men
Though all the greater gods of the old Shinto were Nature-gods, we cannot affirm that none of the numerous obscure deities mentioned in the Kojiki and Nihongi were deified individual men. The impulse to exalt human beings to the rank of deity has always existed, and may have left traces in the older Shinto, though the evidence that this was so in any particular case is not forthcoming.
Take-minakata, the god of Suha, in the province of Shinano, may be a deity of this class. He was a son of Ohonamochi, who refused allegiance to the Sun-goddess and fled to Suha, where he was obliged to surrender. Tradition says that the present high priests of his shrine are his direct descendants. They are held to be his incarnation, and are called Ikigami or ‘live deities.’ There are at the present day shrines to Suha Sama in many parts of Japan.
Hachiman is not mentioned in the Kojiki or Nihongi. His history is a curious one. The original place of his worship was Usa in Kiushiu, near the Straits of Shimonoseki, an old, perhaps the oldest, Shinto centre of Japan. He first came into notice in 720, when he helped to repel a piratical descent by Koreans. At a somewhat later period he became associated with the great Minamoto family, and attained to popularity as a War-god. But his cult is deeply tinctured with Buddhism. In his oracles he calls himself by the Buddhist title of Bosatsu (Boddhisattwa), something like our ‘saint,’ and ordains humanitarian festivals for the release of living things, a thoroughly Buddhist institution, and quite incongruous with his character as a Japanese Mars. It is explained that the reason for his deification as a War-god is that he was an unborn child in his mother Jingo’s womb when she achieved her famous conquest of Korea. His identification with the Emperor Ôjin, however, dates from long after he became popular.
Temmangu, the God of Learning and Caligraphy. If we pass over the honours paid to living and dead Mikados as of doubtful religious quality, the first genuine deified human being on the Shinto record is Sugahara Michizane, who was raised to divine rank under the name of Temmangu. Michizane was born in 845. His family had a hereditary reputation for learning, and traced its descent from the Sun-goddess herself. His erudition gained him high rank in the government, and a system of national education which he established acquired for him the gratitude of the people, who called him the ‘Father of letters.’ But owing to the calumnies of a rival he was banished to Kiushiu, where he died in exile. Great calamities followed, which were attributed to the wrath of Michizane’s ghost, and it was not until his sentence had been formally cancelled, shrines erected, and other honours paid him that it ceased to plague his enemies and the nation. The story has come down to us enriched with a profuse embroidery of legendary details drawn from Buddhist and Chinese sources.
Temmangu is, or was until recently, one of the most widely worshipped of Shinto deities, especially by pedagogues and school-boys. In 1820, there were twenty-five shrines to him in Yedo and its neighbourhood. His cult was probably suggested, and was certainly promoted, by the corresponding Chinese honours to Confucius.
Later Deifications.—In the Kojiki and Nihongi, a sort of titular divinity is ascribed to some of the Mikados. It was not until a later period that they had shrines or regular offerings. Chief among deified Mikados are Jimmu, Jingo, and Kwammu, the founder of Kioto. Takechi no Sukune, Jingo’s chief counsellor; Prince Yamatodake, the legendary hero who, in the second century of our era, subdued the eastern parts of Japan to the Mikado’s rule; Nomi no Sukune, the patron deity of wrestlers; Hitomaro, the poet and Sotoörihime, the poetess, though treated as ordinary human beings in the old records, were deified in subsequent times. Quasi-divine honours are paid to Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty of Shōguns, and to many other distinguished men. Strange to say, a kind of religious cult is rendered to remarkable criminals, such as the famous robber Kumazaka Chōhan, and to Nishi no Buntaro, who in our own day assassinated the Minister of Education, Mori Arinori, because he raised with his walking-stick a curtain which screened off part of the shrine of Ise from vulgar gaze.