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.
Gods of Classes of Men
In the older Shinto, gods of types or classes occupy a fairly prominent position. They represent the hereditary corporations by which the government of Japan was carried on in early times. The officials of the Mikado’s Court had their mythical counterparts in the ministers of the Sun-goddess, who were supposed to be their ancestors. Thus the Nakatomi family, who besides holding other high offices, were the recognised vicars of the Mikado in the discharge of his priestly functions, traced their descent from Koyane, a deity who, by reading a liturgy in honour of the Sun-goddess, helped to entice her from the dark Rock-cave of heaven. The Imbe, who provided the offerings for the state Shinto ceremonies, recognised as their ancestor a god called Futo-dama (great offering), who fulfilled the same office in heaven. Uzume, the Dread Female of heaven, had descendants in the female officials of the palace. There is a norito in her honour, in which she is besought to preserve order among the courtiers of all ranks. May we not trace a relationship between her and our own ‘Dread Female’ deity, Mrs. Grundy? The mirror-makers of the palace had their prototype in Ishikoridome, the jewellers in Toyotama (rich-jewel), and so on.
Gods of Human Qualities
Students of Far-Eastern mythology and literature have observed the feeble grasp of personality which distinguishes them from the similar products of the Western mind.[1] They are characterised by a certain poverty of imagination which is manifested in various directions, and more especially by the almost total absence of personified abstractions of human qualities. We look in vain for such conceptions as Age, Youth, Love, Fear, Patience, Hope, Charity, and a host of other personified qualities. Ta-jikara no wo (hand-strength-male) is one of the few examples of this class. He it was who, when the Sun-goddess partly opened the door of the Rock-cave to which she had retired, took her by the hand and dragged her out. But he is little worshipped, and indeed is only a poetical adjunct to the mythical narrative. In this respect he greatly resembles the Kratos and Bia of Hesiod and Æschylus.
[1] See Percival Lowell’s Soul of the Far East.
Phallic Gods.—Far more important are the Sahe no Kami, or phallic deities. Their symbols were a familiar sight by the roadsides and at crossings in ancient Japan. They might be seen even in the busy thoroughfares of the capital itself. At first representatives of the procreative, life-giving power, they were used as magical appliances for promoting fertility. But they became symbolical of life generally—the enemy of death and disease—and, on the well-known principle of magic that the symbol possesses something of the actual physical virtue of the thing which it represents, were employed as prophylactics against death and pestilence. For their services in this capacity they were deified. Their cult has long ago disappeared from the state religion, but it still lingers in the out-of-the-way parts of Eastern Japan.