B - Notes on Shintô

Summary

Scholars hesitate to decide whether Shintô is or is not “a genuine product of Japanese soil.” The Japanese call their ancient religion kami no michi (the way of the gods); foreigners adopt the Chinese form of the same, and call it Shintô. By Shintô is meant the primitive religion which was found spread over Japan when the Buddhist propagandists arrived in the sixth century, and which, at the restoration of the Mikado to full temporal power, in 1868, became once more the “State religion.” By “Pure Shintô” is meant the ancient faith as distinguished from that mixture of it with Buddhism and Confucianism which is known as Riyôbu Shintô, and it is of pure Shintô that I present my readers with a few notes, in order, if possible, to make the religious allusions in foregoing letters interesting and intelligible.

Japanese cosmogony and mythology are one, and in both Japan is the Universe. There are three confused mythical periods, during which the islands of Japan and many gods were called into being. The third of these begins with the supremacy of Amaterasu, the Sun-Goddess, the great divinity of the Shintô religion. This “heaven-lighting” divinity, finding that Japan was disturbed by the unending feuds of the earthly gods, among whom Okuninushi, their ruler, could not keep order, despatched Ninigi-no-Mikoto, a heavenly god, to Higa in Kiushiu, and compelled Okuninushi to resign his disorderly rule into his hands.