The Mikado refused to believe there was a land to the west, and declared that the gods spoke falsely. Soon afterwards the heavenly sovereign was struck dead.
Now the Empress Jingo was with child. Having received the instructions of the deities to conquer Korea for her son, she delayed his birth by taking a stone and attaching it to her waist with cords. Korea was subdued, the Empress having made use of the “Jewels of flood and ebb”, as related in a previous chapter. Her child was born after she returned to Japan.
Empress Jingo is further credited with subduing and uniting the Empire of Japan, and again establishing the central power at Yamato. She lived until she was 100 years old.
Her son Ojin Tenno,[16] who had a dragon’s tail, lived until he was 110 years old, and died in A.D. 310. He was worshipped after death as a war-god, and the patron of the Minamoto clan. His successor, Nin-toku, who died at the age of 110, was the last of the mythical monarchs, or of the monarchs regarding whom miraculous deeds are related. Japanese history begins and myth ends about the beginning of the fifth century of the Christian era.
The cult of Hachiman (Ojin Tenno) came into prominence in the ninth century with the rise of the Minamoto family; its original seat was Usa, in Buzen province. Hachiman’s shintai (“god body”) is a white stone, or a fly-brush, or a pillow, or an arm-rest. [[386]]
Jimmu Tenno, the Empress Jingo, and Yamato-Take were similarly deified and worshipped. A ninth century scholar, Sugahara Michizane, was deified as Temmangû, god of scholars. Living as well as dead Mikados were kami (deities). “The spirits of all the soldiers who died in battle,” writes Yei Ozaki,[17] “are worshipped as deified heroes at the Kudan shrine in Tokyo.”
The worship of human ancestors in Japan is due to Chinese influence, and had no place in old Shinto prior to the sixth century. In the Ko-ji-ki and Nihon-gi the ancestors of the Mikados and the ruling classes are the deities and their avatars. As we have seen, the Mikados were reputed to be descended from the sun-goddess, and from the daughter of the Dragon King of Ocean, called the “Abundant-Pearl Princess”, a Japanese Melusina.
It is far from correct, therefore, to refer, as has been done, to Shinto religion as “the worship of nature-gods and ancestors”. Even the term “nature-worship” is misleading. The adoration in sacred shrines of the mi-tama (the “August jewel”, or “Dragon-pearl”, or “spirit”, or “double”) of a deity is not “the worship of Nature”, but the worship of “the imperishable principle of life wherever found”. At Ise, the “Mecca” of Japan, the goddess cult is prominent. Both the sun-goddess and the food-goddess are forms of the Far Eastern Hathor, the personification of the pearl, the shell, the precious jewel containing “life substance”, the sun mirror, the sword, the pillow, the standing-stone, the holy tree, the medicinal herb, the fertilizing rain, &c. The Mikado, as her descendant, was the living Horus, an avatar of Osiris; after death the Mikado ascended, like Ra, to the celestial regions, or departed, like Osiris, to the Underworld of [[387]]the Dead. The Mikado of Japan, like the Pharaoh of Egypt, was a Son of Heaven.
After Buddhism had been introduced into Japan in the sixth century, it was fused with Shinto. The Shinto deities figured as avatars of Buddha in the cult of Ryobu-Shinto. Even the Mikados came under the spell of Buddhism.
In the eighteenth century began the movement known as the “Revival of Pure Shinto”. It was promoted chiefly by Motöori and his disciple Hirata. In time it did much to bring about the revolution which restored to supreme political power, as the hereditary high priest and living representative of the sun-goddess, the Mikado of Japan. Shinto is the official religion of modern Japan; but Buddhism, impregnated with Shinto elements, is the religion of the masses. “Pure Shinto”, however, was not “pure” in the sense that Motöori and Hirata professed to believe. It was undoubtedly a product of culture mixing in early times. “The Ko-ji-ki and Nihon-gi,” as Laufer says, “do not present a pure source of genuine Japanese thought, but are retrospective records largely written under Chinese and Korean influence, and echoing in a bewildering medley continental-Asiatic and Malayo-Polynesian traditions.”[18] In China, Korea, Polynesia, &c., a similar process of culture mixing can be traced. Buddha and Mohammed were not the earliest founders of cults which have left their impress on the religious systems of the Far East. Vast areas were influenced by the cultures of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia.