Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation

by Lafcadio Hearn

It would thus appear that every person was supposed to be the subject, servant, or retainer of some Ujigami, both during life and after death. There were, of course, various grades of these clan-gods, just as there were various grades of living rulers, lords of the soil. Above ordinary Ujigami ranked the deities worshipped in the chief Shinto temples of the various provinces, which temples were termed Ichi-no-miya, or temples of the first grade. These deities appear to have been in many cases spirits of princes or greater daimyo, formerly, ruling extensive districts; but all were not of this category. Among them were deities of elements or elemental forces,—Wind, Fire, and Sea,—deities also of longevity, of destiny, and of harvests,—clan-gods, perhaps, originally, though their real history had been long forgotten. But above all other Shinto divinities ranked the gods of the Imperial Cult,—the supposed ancestors of the Mikados.

Of the higher forms of Shinto worship, that of the imperial ancestors proper is the most important, being the State cult; but it is not the oldest. There are two supreme cults: that of the Sun-goddess, [122] represented by the famous shrines of Ise; and the Izumo cult, represented by the great temple of Kitzuki. This Izumo temple is the centre of the more ancient cult. It is dedicated to Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami, first ruler of the Province of the Gods, and offspring of the brother of the Sun-goddess. Dispossessed of his realm in favour of the founder of the imperial dynasty, Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami became the ruler of the Unseen World,—that is to say the World of Ghosts. Unto his shadowy dominion the spirits of all men proceed after death; and he rules over all of the Ujigami. We may therefore term him the Emperor of the Dead. "You cannot hope," Hirata says, "to live more than a hundred years, under the most favourable circumstances; but as you will go to the Unseen Realm of Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami after death, and be subject to him, learn betimes to bow down before him." … That weird fancy expressed in the wonderful fragment by Coleridge, "The Wanderings of Cain," would therefore seem to have actually formed an article of ancient Shinto faith: "The Lord is God of the living only: the dead have another God." …

The God of the Living in Old Japan was, of course, the Mikado,—the deity incarnate, Arahito-gami,—and his palace was the national sanctuary, the Holy of Holies. Within the precincts of that [123] palace was the Kashiko-Dokoro ("Place of Awe"), the private shrine of the Imperial Ancestors, where only the court could worship,—the public form of the same cult being maintained at Ise. But the Imperial House worshipped also by deputy (and still so worships) both at Kitzuki and Ise, and likewise at various other great sanctuaries. Formerly a great number of temples were maintained, or partly maintained, from the imperial revenues. All Shinto temples of importance used to be classed as greater and lesser shrines. There were 304 of the first rank, and 2828 of the second rank. But multitudes of temples were not included in this official classification, and depended upon local support. The recorded total of Shinto shrines to-day is upwards of 195,000.

We have thus—without counting the great Izumo cult of Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami—four classes of ancestor-worship: the domestic religion, the religion of the Ujigami, the worship at the chief shrines [Ichi-no-miya] of the several provinces, and the national cult at Ise. All these cults are now linked together by tradition; and the devout Shintoist worships the divinities of all, collectively, in his daily morning prayer. Occasionally he visits the chief shrine of his province; and he makes a pilgrimage to Ise if he can. Every Japanese is expected to visit the shrines of Ise once in his lifetime, [124] or to send thither a deputy. Inhabitants of remote districts are not all able, of course, to make the pilgrimage; but there is no village which does not, at certain intervals, send pilgrims either to Kitzuki or to Ise on behalf of the community, the expense of such representation being defrayed by local subscription. And, furthermore, every Japanese can worship the supreme divinities of Shinto in his own house, where upon a "god-shelf" (Kamidana) are tablets inscribed with the assurance of their divine protection,—holy charms obtained from the priests of Ise or of Kitzuki. In the case of the Ise cult, such tablets are commonly made from the wood of the holy shrines themselves, which, according to primal custom, must be rebuilt every twenty years,—the timber of the demolished structures being then cut into tablets for distribution throughout the country.

Another development of ancestor-worship—the cult of gods presiding over crafts and callings—deserves special study. Unfortunately we are as yet little informed upon the subject. Anciently this worship must have been more definitely ordered and maintained than it is now. Occupations were hereditary; artizans were grouped into guilds—perhaps we might even say castes;—and each guild or caste then probably had in patron-deity. In some cases the craft-gods may have been ancestors [125] of Japanese craftsmen; in other cases they were perhaps of Korean or Chinese origin,—ancestral gods of immigrant artizans, who brought their cults with them to Japan. Not much is known about them. But it is tolerably safe to assume that most, if not all of the guilds, were at one time religiously organized, and that apprentices were adopted not only in a craft, but into a cult. There were corporations of weavers, potters, carpenters, arrow-makers, bow-makers, smiths, boat-builders, and other tradesmen; and the past religious organization of these is suggested by the fact that certain occupations assume a religious character even to-day. For example, the carpenter still builds according to Shinto tradition: he dons a priestly costume at a certain stage of the work, performs rites, and chants invocations, and places the new house under the protection of the gods. But the occupation of the swordsmith was in old days the most sacred of crafts: he worked in priestly garb, and practised Shinto) rites of purification while engaged in the making of a good blade. Before his smithy was then suspended the sacred rope of rice-straw (shime-nawa), which is the oldest symbol of Shinto: none even of his family might enter there, or speak to him; and he ate only of food cooked with holy fire.

The 195,000 shrines of Shinto represent, however, more than clan-cults or guild-cults or national-cults …. [126] Many are dedicated to different spirits of the same god; for Shinto holds that the spirit of either a man or a god may divide itself into several spirits, each with a different character. Such separated spirits are called waka-mi-tama ("august-divided-spirits"). Thus the spirit of the Goddess of Food, Toyo-uke-bime, separated itself into the God of Trees, Kukunochi-no-Kami, and into the Goddess of Grasses, Kayanu-hime-no-Kami. Gods and men were supposed to have also a Rough Spirit and a Gentle Spirit; and Hirata remarks that the Rough Spirit of Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami was worshipped at one temple, and his Gentle Spirit at another.*… Also we have to remember that great numbers of Ujigami temples are dedicated to the same divinity. These duplications or multiplications are again offset by the fact that in some of the principal temples a multitude of different deities are enshrined. Thus the number of Shinto temples in actual existence affords no indication whatever of the actual number of gods worshipped, nor of the variety of their cults. Almost every deity mentioned in the Ko-ji-ki or Nihongi has a shrine somewhere; and hundreds of others—including many later apotheoses—have their temples. Numbers of temples have been dedicated, for example, to [127] historical personages,—to spirits of great ministers, captains, rulers, scholars, heroes, and statesmen. The famous minister of the Empress Jingo, Takeno-uji-no-Sukune,—who served under six successive sovereigns, and lived to the age of three hundred years,—is now invoked in many a temple as a giver of long life and great wisdom. The spirit of Sugiwara-no-Michizane, once minister to the Emperor Daigo, is worshipped as the god of calligraphy, under the name of Tenjin, or Temmangu: children everywhere offer to him the first examples of their handwriting, and deposit in receptacles, placed before his shrine, their worn-out writing-brushes. The Soga brothers, victims and heroes of a famous twelfth-century tragedy, have become gods to whom people pray for the maintenance of fraternal harmony. Kato Kiyomasa, the determined enemy of Jesuit Christianity, and Hideyoshi's greatest captain, has been apotheosized both by Buddhism and by Shinto. Iyeyasu is worshipped under the appellation of Toshogu. In fact most of the great men of Japanese history have had temples erected to them; and the spirits of the daimyo were, in former years, regularly worshipped by the subjects of their descendants and successors.

[*Even men had the Rough and the Gentle Spirit; but a god had three
distinct spirits,—the Rough, the Gentle, and the
Bestowing,—respectively termed Ara-mi-tama, Nigi-mi-tama, and
Saki-mi-tama.—[See SATOW's Revival of Pure Shintau.]

Besides temples to deities presiding over industries and agriculture,—or deities especially invoked by the peasants, such as the goddess of silkworms, [128] the goddess of rice, the gods of wind and weather,—there are to be found in almost every part of the country what I may call propitiatory temples. These latter Shinto shrines have been erected by way of compensation to spirits of persons who suffered great injustice or misfortune. In these cases the worship assumes a very curious character, the worshipper always appealing for protection against the same kind of calamity or trouble as that from which the apotheosized person suffered during life. In Izumo, for example, I found a temple dedicated to the spirit of a woman, once a prince's favourite. She had been driven to suicide by the intrigues of jealous rivals. The story is that she had very beautiful hair; but it was not quite black, and her enemies used to reproach her with its color. Now mothers having children with brownish hair pray to her that the brown may be changed to black; and offerings are made to her of tresses of hair and Tokyo coloured prints, for it is still remembered that she was fond of such prints. In the same province there is a shrine erected to the spirit of a young wife, who pined away for grief at the absence of her lord. She used to climb a hill to watch for his return, and the shrine was built upon the place where she waited; and wives pray there to her for the safe return of absent husbands …. An almost similar kind of propitiatory worship is practised in cemeteries. Public pity seeks to apotheosize those [129] urged to suicide by cruelty, or those executed for offences which, although legally criminal, were inspired by patriotic or other motives commanding sympathy. Before their graves offerings are laid and prayers are murmured. Spirits of unhappy lovers are commonly invoked by young people who suffer from the same cause …. And, among other forms of propitiatory worship I must mention the old custom of erecting small shrines to spirits of animals,—chiefly domestic animals,—either in recognition of dumb service rendered and ill-rewarded, or as a compensation for pain unjustly inflicted.

Yet another class of tutelar divinities remains to be noticed,—those who dwell within or about the houses of men. Some are mentioned in the old mythology, and are probably developments of Japanese ancestor-worship; some are of alien origin; some do not appear to have any temples; and some represent little more than what is called Animism. This class of divinities corresponds rather to the Roman dii genitales than to the Greek (Greek daemones). Suijin-Sarna, the God of Wells; Kojin, the God of the Cooking-range (in almost every kitchen there is either a tiny shrine for him, or a written charm bearing his name); the gods of the Cauldron and Saucepan, Kudo-no-Kami and Kobe-no-Kami (anciently called Okitsuhiko and Okitsuhime); the Master of Ponds, Ike-no-Nushi, [130] supposed to make apparition in the form of a serpent; the Goddess of the Rice-pot, O-Kama-Sama; the Gods of the Latrina, who first taught men how to fertilize their fields (these are commonly represented by little figures of paper, having the forms of a man and a woman, but faceless); the Gods of Wood and Fire and Metal; the Gods likewise of Gardens, Fields, Scarecrows, Bridges, Hills, Woods, and Streams; and also the Spirits of Trees (for Japanese mythology has its dryads): most of these are undoubtedly of Shinto. On the other hand, we find the roads under the protection of Buddhist deities chiefly. I have not been able to learn anything regarding gods of boundaries,—termes, as the Latins called them; and one sees only images of the Buddhas at the limits of village territories. But in almost every garden, on the north side, there is a little Shinto shrine, facing what is called the Ki-Mon, or "Demon-Gate,"—that is to say, the direction from which, according to Chinese teaching, all evils come; and these little shrines, dedicated to various Shinto deities, are supposed to protect the home from evil spirits. The belief in the Ki-Mon is obviously a Chinese importation. One may doubt, however, if Chinese influence alone developed the belief that every part of a house,—every beam of it,—and every domestic utensil has its invisible guardian. Considering this belief, it is not surprising that the building of a [131] house—unless the house be in foreign style—is still a religious act, and that the functions of a master-builder include those of a priest.

This brings us to the subject of Animism. (I doubt whether any evolutionist of the contemporary school holds to the old-fashioned notion that animism preceded ancestor-worship,—a theory involving the assumption that belief in the spirits of inanimate objects was evolved before the idea of a human ghost had yet been developed.) In Japan it is now as difficult to draw the line between animistic beliefs and the lowest forms of Shinto, as to establish a demarcation between the vegetable and the animal worlds; but the earliest Shinto literature gives no evidence of such a developed animism as that now existing. Probably the development was gradual, and largely influenced by Chinese beliefs. Still, we read in the Ko-ji-ki of "evil gods who glittered like fireflies or were disorderly as mayflies," and of "demons who made rocks, and stumps of trees, and the foam of the green waters to speak,"—showing that animistic or fetichistic notions were prevalent to some extent before the period of Chinese influence. And it is significant that where animism is associated with persistent worship (as in the matter of the reverence paid to strangely shaped stones or trees), the form of the worship is, in most cases, Shinto. Before such objects there is usually [132] to be seen the model of a Shinto gateway,—torii…. With the development of animism, under Chinese and Korean influence, the man of Old Japan found himself truly in a world of spirits and demons. They spoke to him in the sound of tides and of cataracts in the moaning of wind and the whispers of leafage, in the crying of birds, and the trilling of insects, in all the voices of nature. For him all visible motion—whether of waves or grasses or shifting mist or drifting cloud—was ghostly; and the never moving rocks—nay, the very stones by the wayside—were informed with viewless and awful being.