A NEW INTERPRETATION OF JAPANESE OF SHINTO DANIEL C. HOLTOM Japan Baptist Theological Seminary, This article undertakes an investigation of Shinto in the light of survivals of early practices and ideas connected with certain shrines and embodied in ancient literary records. From these it appears that the great deities at the head of the Shinto genealogies are an original sky-father and earth-mother, and that they and their offspring are animistic interpretations of elemental nature phenomena. The precise origin and function of these deities are carefully defined on the basis of the evidence available. One of the least desirable results of the modern contact between Japan and the West has been that, confronted with the stern necessity of either assimilating certain important elements of occidental civilization or of going down before it, Japanese scholarship has found comparatively little time or inclination for the critical examination of some of the phases of the domestic historical deposit. It is true that in recent years a reaction against this tendency has manifested itself, yet it needs to be recognized that Japanese students have not infrequently been the first to dismiss the investigation of their own culture as both unnecessary and unprofitable. This has been true of the attitude toward religious history as well as toward other aspects of the national life. Yet the field of Japanese religion and mythology is a rich one, with large areas still to be occupied, and wherein even some of the supposedly well-known spots may pay reworking. With some sixty sects and subsects of Buddhism; with thirteen officially recognized sects of Shinto, to say nothing of scores of subsects; with complicated cultural elements coming in from Asia and the South Pacific throughout long periods of the past, and more recently from Europe and America; with an indigenous religion at the center of the national life; with great stores of literature still awaiting investigation; with a folk religion prolific in magic, divination, weather lore, medical lore, mountain worship, tree worship, water worship, animal worship, and phallicism—with all this and much more flourishing in the living present, modern Japan holds out to the student of religion a manifold and unusual opportunity. This is particularly true of the study of Shinto, in its double aspect of state cult and popular faith. Herein the student may learn much that throws light on the origin and development of some of the most ancient of the ideas and practices of man. In Shinto, even on its official side, may be found a continuous preservation, from very ancient times down to the present, of the worship of deities essentially the same as those to be met with, for example, in old Teutonic mythology or in the nature pantheon of ancient Greece. In this respect Japan may be regarded as unique among the great states of the modern world. The situation offers exceptional opportunities for the first-hand study of certain phases of culture that are largely gone forever in European civilization and which, for the latter field, must be slowly recreated by historical study. These general statements necessarily require further definition. They lead to an important and debated question in the realm of Japanese religion, namely, what was the original nature of Shinto. Ancestor worship, nature worship, and various combinations of these two forms of interpretation have all been advanced as plausible explanations of beginnings. Japanese scholarship in general, supported, at least in the modern period, by official influences, has tended very decidedly in the direction of ancestralism. The orthodox Shintoist of today—and certainly as far as religion and ethics are concerned his influence is paramount in politics and education alike-finds the essentials of his creed in the worship of ancestors and national heroes. Such a posi tion naturally involves the propagation of the teaching that true and representative Shinto deities are actual historical Japanese ancestors, particularly those related to the imperial line. It is true that the well-informed Shintoist does not deny the presence of elements akin to nature worship in popular Shinto, but these are generally explained as more or less incidental survivals out of the matrix of popular superstition, or, in part, the result of syncretism with foreign religions. The best example of this ancestral tendency is to be found in the position accorded the great sun goddess, Amaterasu-omi-kami, in the worship of the nation. The strong genealogical interest of the Japanese people finds particular pride and satisfaction in the officially inspired tenet that the descent of the reigning emperor is to be traced back in an unbroken line through one hundred and twenty-two generations of rulers to the first emperor, Jimmu Tenno, who, according to the traditional chronology, ascended the throne in 660 B.C. Even with this wide step into the dim regions of the past—in the contemplation whereof we should not lose sight of the fact that the oldest extant Japanese historical document dates from 611 A.D. -we have not yet reached the personage to whom modern religionists and educators attribute the merit of actually founding the state. For this we must go back five generations beyond Jimmu Tenno to the greatest of all the kami, that is, to Amaterasu-o-mi-kami, through whose words of command to her grandson, Ninigi-no-mikoto, in sending him down from the High Plain of Heaven to the Land of Fresh Rice Ears, the Japanese empire was established. These words of Amaterasuo-mi-kami whereby the characteristic form of the state life was fixed are regarded with particular reverence by all loyal Japanese. As found in the early records they may be rendered: "This Luxuriant Reed-plain Land of Fresh Rice Ears is the land over which my descendants shall reign. Do thou, Imperial Offspring, go and rule over it. And the prosperity of the Imperial Succession of Heaven shall be as everlasting as Heaven and Earth." The above words are classed by Japanese authorities as an imperial rescript and, in fact, are generally given first place among imperial utterances. The educational system of the country, especially that affecting children in the primary grades, continues this exaltation of Amaterasu-o-mi-kami. The extraordinary reverence accorded her is best seen, however, in the great shrine at Yamada in the province of Ise, where, in a setting of great natural beauty and dignity, expressive of the chaste simplicity of Japanese aesthetic taste at its best, she is enshrined as the great progenitrix of the imperial line. Herein we have the very center of modern Shinto as an official cult. From here it reaches out and ramifies throughout the length and breadth of the land in a well co-ordinated system of lesser shrines that are graded from the great institutions of the central government and of prefectures down to small local shrines of villages and hamlets. Hereby the spiritual life of the nation is unified at the core and a corresponding stability is imparted to the political and social régime, for, to a Japanese, reaction against the sacred spirits of the ancestors is unspeakable, and this becomes equally impossible as directed against those living offspring of the gods who preside over the destinies of the state in the present. This brief summary may suffice to give point to the remark that, from the governmental standpoint, Shinto constitutes an indispensable support for the existing Japanese national organization. It follows that the establishment of an ancestral character for the great deities of the system, regardless of their actual origin, especially for those that are made to stand in the direct line of royal descent, becomes altogether essential to the maintenance of the influence and self-respect of the state religion. Accordingly, interpretations of the origin and the nature of the ancient deities tend to follow along the well-beaten and officially surveyed paths. In so far as the evi dence of the ancient mythology is drawn upon, a diligent effort is put forth to discover and appropriate to the needs of modern nationalistic education such social and political facts as will best support the ancestral thesis. It is not to be denied that much valuable historical data has thus been elucidated, pointing to the early appearance in Japanese political life of centralization under a line of powerful rulers from whom the reigning royal family is descended. But this does not exhaust the resources of the ancient records, nor can it be said to arrive at final and complete explanations of origins. On the other hand a large residuum is left that can only be adequately accounted for by reference to ancient experiences with the cosmos-to such wonders as thunder, lightning, rain, wind, moon, sun, earth, sky, and the mysterious seasonal changes of vegetation. There are reasons for believing that these and similar aspects of nature furnished the original experiences that called many of the Japanese deities into being. What is proposed, therefore, in the remaining sections of the discussion is a new examination both of certain survivals found in some of the existing shrines of Shinto and of the oldest extant literary records, in the hope that thereby the characteristic form of the early mythology that lies at the basis of an understanding of what Shinto originally was may be more clearly differentiated. We turn first, then, to the consideration of evidence obtained from the shrines of two practically unknown deities of modern Shinto. These shrines are selected for particular reasons from among a large number of others, since they furnish us with an important clue to the investigation in hand. They open, as it were, a side gate into the old mythology, whence a fair view of the original ground-plan of the whole may be obtained. The shrines are situated far away from the ordinary contacts of Japanese life, in the mountains of Nara Prefecture, below the well-known city of the same name. They are, first, the Upper Nifu Kawakami shrine of Kawakami village, Yoshino County, where the deity Taka-okami-no-kami is wor |