Intro 2.

The Characteristics of Shinto and its Encounter with Western Sentiments and Values.

It is impossible to think or talk about Japan and Japanese culture without mentioning Shinto, the focus of Japanese belief since historical times. Roughly speaking Shinto is an animistic nature worship which is thought to go back to the beginning of mankind but in Japan's case later developed in a typical Japanese way. This began with a belief in blood relationship and of the family as a group, and then with the formation of an agricultural society, and within the territorial community of villages and hamlets, developed as "ubusuna-gami belief" (tutelary deity-belief) and finally formed in the minds of the village people as an extra-ordinary social control mechanism. This strong secular ancestor connection seems to be characteristic of eastern Asia. Until now this nature and ancestor worship has been the basic attribute of Shinto, which kept its original form up until the time when the structure of society changed from an agricultural base to the industrial base of the 20th century.

There are two main currents in Shinto, one is the shrine group subject to veneration by the Imperial family, with the Grand Shrine at Ise as the fountain of the State, the other the Shinto of the common people. In ancient times the Imperial family was just another tribe but when it expanded its influence into the Kinki region (central Japan), the Grand Shrine at Ise, which was dedicated to Amaterasu Omikami the ancestor deity of the Imperial family, became the most respected shrine in Japan since the family that controlled it had become the most important family in Japan. The obedience of the ancestor deities of the other clans and of the strong native deities soon made Japan into a pacified country. The centre of this pacification was the clan deity of the Grand Shrine at Ise. From the Middle Ages this belief became widespread among the common people. In the same way the deities of other shrines became the subjects of veneration of the whole state, and were supported by various groups of followers, with the Grand Shrine of Ise always taking the lead.

Thus on the basis of this mythology the Imperial family naturally kept the leadership of the nation. According to what we read in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, which were compiled at the time of the formation of the modern state, the ancestors of the present Imperial family descended to earth on the orders of Amaterasu Omikami, were given the duty of subjugating the people and the obligation to worship the deities. It is here clearly written that the Emperor is the highest authority in the land, in both religious and secular matters, the beginning of the conception of the religiously and politically centralized state. This belief, together with the study of Confucianist morals which had become the national philosophy of Japan and the basis of Japanese family life, later became the focus of the ideology that brought about the Meiji Restoration. Throughout Japanese history Shinto has been the cement that bound the state together and the legitimation for the authority of the Emperor. In the eighty years fromthe Meiji Restoration until the democratization of Japan after its defeat in the second world war, Shinto has had the role of binding the entire nation firmly to the Emperor, the centre of a highly centralized state.

Shinto has two roles, one social and religious, the other political. The former functions in the social life of the people, the other gives the nation its political ideology, one big family with the Emperor at the centre. The two roles have influenced each other and combined to create the whole image of what is believed to be Shinto. What we have to guard against is the unification of the two, although there have been cases of rivalry between them.

Let us now consider some of the concrete characteristics of Shinto. First of all Shinto began as a form of nature worship.

There are four distinct seasons in Japan, which has a comparatively warm climate and a landscape like a miniature garden. This is especially so of the Kinki District where the ancient state was first established. In such surroundings the people banded together to construct and develop a rice growing agricultural society and the irrigation system that goes with it. In this kind of society the idea developed that nature was not something to fight against and conquer but was as one with the people whom it held in its arms and cradled like a beneficial deity with whom one could live intimately. Of course nature could sometimes be wild and do great damage to the people but this was the fault of the deities who could be calmed if worshipped properly. In this kind of nature worship it was thought desirable for man and nature to be united as if in one body.

This is why traditionally religious training was often carried out in a natural setting, on a mountain or in an area far from human beings.

Secondly, in ancient epics like the Kojiki, or collections of poetry like the Manyoshu, and in the prayers offered up to the deities in ancient times there can often be found expressions describing holiness as the beauty of nature, and the goodness and evil of the people are distinguished by concepts such as beautiful and ugly rather than as good or bad. The good heart is described as being clean and bright, the evil heart as being dirty. What can be understood here is that in the ethics of Shinto there is no absolute standard, no contract with an absolute god. The ethics of Shinto were formed rather by the conditions of the time and the needs of the community. If there was one universal standard it was the concept of beauty, where good equalled beauty and cleanliness.

Among the ceremonies of Shinto the most universal and important is that of purification (Oharai). This is a ceremony in which the mind and body are purified and cleansed of sin and filth. It can be an independant ceremony or the part that is always carried out at the beginning of all religious ceremonies.

It shows that the most important idea in Shinto is the purification of body and mind.

The third characteristic of Shinto is its politheistic belief in nature. All kinds of things are given a divine character.

Generally one can say that anything abnormal or powerful can be a deity. Moreover deities bring not only happiness but also disaster. Festivals are the people's attempts to please the deities and and in a sense get on their good side. There is no dogma of absolutism or any feeling that in religion there can be only one god. The fact that in their history the Japanese have been able to accept and absorb many foreign religions and many different foreign cultures is due to the generosity and magnani mity of Shinto.

Nature worship is inclined to foster a belief in superstition, magical rites and complicated manners which hinder the acceptance of a modern, scientific culture. But in Japan there is no such problem. Today scientific rationalism and unscientific Shinto manners co-exist naturally. for instance, at the construction site of a nuclear power plant a Shinto priest will perform a special ground breaking ceremony to calm the spirits of the land which is to form the site, and a Japanese will take his new car to a shrine or temple to have it blessed so that it will be free from accidents. This comes from the influence of Confucianism which was introduced into Japan from China in the middle of the fifth century and was made important as a discipline for civil servants at the end of the nineteenth century. Confucianism, which was founded in China in 5th century BC, is basically the study of politics based on morals and manners. Confucius denied the belief in any religion but believed in the use of religious manners and courtesy in politics. In China at this time the people believed in God, demons and ancestor worship. Confucius taught that God should be kept at a distance and that there was no substance in superstition and magical rites. For this reason from olden times Confucianism was accepted as basic common sense for civil servants and religion and rationalism were able to coexist, at least among intellectuals.

In this way we can understand why the Japanese gave ranks to the deities that protected the nation, and strengthened political control by incorporating into politics tradition and religious ceremonies. Of course the ancient Japanese practiced divination in government and there were many professional diviners and fortune-tellers, a lot from China, in fact divination and fortune-telling became especially popular in the Heian Period, but basically the rational influence of Confucianism on the religious policy of the government and the religious consciousness of the people can be considered to be very great.

Secondly, let us consider ancestor worship. It has its base in the belief that the spirit of the dead is united with its ancestors and after a certain period of time becomes a deity which in turn protects the descendants. Therefore we finish up with the secular concept that by giving thanks to the spirits of our ancestors we can live safely, guaranteed protection by them, in this world. Shinto doesn't have any concept of another world after death, but stresses the present life and offers prayers for materialistic productivity and the joy of a spiritual life. This secular concept resulted in the popular belief that building shrines would enhance the prosperity and profit of the people.

Ancestor worship stresses the relationship between parent and child, grandparent and grandchild and strengthens the unity of the family and of kinship groups. Japanese agriculture was based on the cooperative labour of families and villages made up of family groups. For this reason Japanase society is strongly family oriented and cooperative. This kind of human relationship together with secularism can be seen in modern Japanese business administration which is often based on a family structure, with an employment system based on promotion according to seniority, and a productive will that only serves to improve the quality of the goods, all characteristic of Japanese management and administration. This family feeling also united master and servant and with its base in Confucianism created the "bushido" (the Way of the warrior) of modern Japanese history. It also made possible the concept of a nation that felt and acted as a large family.

The third characteristic of Shinto is that of the belief in the community. Shinto is a religion based on belief in communal groups such as the family, kinship groups and villages. There is no possibility of the individual having a contract with God, or of the individual making a decision to become a conscious believer in Shinto. The individual is imbued with the belief at birth and becomes part of his natural environment and social system.

In Shinto the community takes priority over the individual and the criterion is whether something benefits the community as a whole. Individual consciousness in the western sense is hard for a Japanese to comprehend, and as they consider themselves a homogeneous group it is particularly hard for them to understand a society in which life is determined by contract, which is why it is hard for Japanese to distinguish public from private life.

Of course it is a fact that many Japanese came to accept western individualism with the adoption of democracy after the war, as a result of an increase in the international exchange of ideas and the growth of a modern economy.

The community in general exists in the real society in a concrete form, but sometimes become conceptualized and a politic ideoloy. In ancient times Japan was a state where politics and religion were under the control of the same person and this made it possible to consider it one big family with the Emperor at the centre, a concept often considered to be the ideal form for Japanese politics in the modern age. This concept, which has its basis in mythology and requires the most responsible person in politics and religion to be the same person, is obviously closely related to Shinto. The headquarters in control of all the shrines in Japan is trying to realize this ideal.

So now let us think about the characteristics of Shinto in comparison with western values. When speaking about western values one can never overlook the deep influence of Christianity, a religion based on the concept of a contract between God and the individual. (God and I are the two basic items in Christianity.) In a primitive community man lives as part of the community without being aware of it but Christianity consciously separates the invidual from the community and requires him to get in touch with God or the Holy Spirit. Therefore Christianity has a universality that goes beyond the natural or rational community and makes it possible to establish the sense of self in the individual. This is why Christianity can in general be called a world religion. With the development of modern society came individuals with a stronger idea of self and these caused a break down in the communal life of urban societies, social relationships were destroyed and the people no longer had a community to which they could belong. 18th century thought focussed on the liberation of self, in the 19th century the main task of society was to bring a sense of the community back to the individuals that had become separated and alienated from it.

The biggest contribution western culture has made to mankind is that it developed science on the basis of scientific rationalism. This scientific rationalism was based on the Christian conviction of the absolute God. That is that the existence of God was indispensable to prove the rational existentional structure of the universe. On the other hand scientific rationalism destroyed the quiet Christian world of medieval times and encouraged the process of secularization and the formation of the modern individual with the result that it produced a crisis for Christianity. The secularization of the world through the development of science destroyed the relationship between God and I, to the extent that at the end of the 19th centry even the death of God was proclaimed causing the people great anxiety.

Christianity fostered individualism and scientific rationalism, two western values, that in their turn caused a crisis for Christianity. The realization of the individual self was an indispensable premise for the establishment of a modern society and for the development of science, but overcoming the alienation of the human being and restoring a sense of community have been the task of philoshophy from early times. In more recent scholarship, for instance theories in ecology and human science have stressed that it is impossible to separate man from nature and vice versa. The findings of quantum mechanics and uncer tainty in the element particle theory suggest that the existence of the universe itself is relative. The development of world history through the progress of transportation and the division of labour promoted the meeting and exchange between races, cultures, religions and senses of value, and caused interdependance between various peoples of the world. This destroyed the idea of the superiority of the western sense of values and replaced it with a pluralistic one. Thus the western sense of values has been obliged to undergo modifications on account of results which its own research established. These modifications indicated that from now on it might be more meaningful to move from the importance of the establishment of the self to the regeneration of the community, to a change from the absolute faith in western civilization to a more pluralistic sense of values, from an endless trust in science to a revaluation of the mental aspect of man, from an emphasis on the importance of rationality to a re-evaluation of experience.

This direction has become clearer in every field and in the world of religion it can be seen in the trend toward religions established on a communal base, those that have a pluralistic sense of values without dogma, those that stress the mystical mental aspect of man, and those based on the unity of man in the community and nature. All these features are charasteristics of Shinto that have been discussed above. This is one reason that in recent years people in charge of Japanese studies have become interested in Shinto as the basis of Japanese culture, as a way of showing new possibilities in religion. But the Japanese, as believers and followers have always looked upon Shinto as a custom or way of life, as one of the traditions of the people.

They are thus not used to looking at Shinto objectively or theorizing about it. So it is foreign scholars that are trying to study Shinto and look at it with a global view. Unfortunately the fact exists that the community consciousness and family aspects of Shinto are more self centered and have caused Shinto to obstruct the realization of self, and hindered the establishment of a civil society and of a real democracy. In this respect Shinto can not be considered as a mature religion with possibilites for the future.

If Shinto is to become a mature religion with real possiblities for the future it must overcome its pre-modernness and gain by its encounter with the western sense of values. It should also understand consciously the way of human existence which it has kept unconsciously, since the time it was a primitive religion. It is also necessary to regenerate Shinto and make it an international religion that has possibilities reaching beyond the limits of races. In a world which in future is going to be more pluralistic and complicated the study of Shinto is an indispensable way of making human communities on a global scale and of creating a peaceful world through the mutual understanding and the mutual reliance of mankind.