A Brief Comment on Shintou, Buddhism, and “Japanese” Culture
Most Westerners today have a sweeping, wrinklefree impression of Japanese culture, or what they think is traditional Japanese culture—persistent even in the impermanence of the society that surrounds it, descending the ages as an unbroken thread through peasant-hutted village to neon towered cities. One sees the still thriving traditions of O-inari (fox kami) shrines in 21st century metropolitan areas, seasonal tea ceremonies in far-off mountain gardens, kimono-clad matsuri, the fierce visages of Buddhist deities on the backs of yakuza.
A few might be aware of the syncretic character of popular Japanese religion today, but the sense is still that it “always has been like this”—Japanese culture has always been this harmonious, if not complimentary admixture of “native” Japanese Shintou and Chinese-imported Buddhism from India. Another few may even be aware of the actual native people to the region, the Ainu, and their animist concept of greater spirits called kamuy, of remarkable similarity linguistically and conceptually to the Shintou kami.
But still. Japanese culture is always Japanese culture, and it has been that way for centuries. So the assumption goes.
Forgotten are the blind female shamans integrated into “working” society via a grueling, institutionalised mortification in a convent of the fellow blind women; the experimental, Confucianist-influenced Shintou funerals of the 17th century; the less-glamorous-than-the-fox blind spearmen kami of the pigsty chute latrine. The grand mochi feasts to celebrate the construction of new fishing boats were sentenced to death by the victual demands of the Second World War, and few still remember why they knock on their boats twice before and after cleaning, if they still even knock—if you can find a reference to this practice after 1960, I’d be happy to amend this. (It is a courtesy to the kami of the boat to let them know to exit and enter the vessel.) The ecstatic and erotic dances of itinerant sacred whores (aruki miko), disenfranchised from their patron courts, have been transformed into highly regular, sanitised tourist-oriented performances by students working part-time to supplement their income; the psychic work of the miko was outlawed by the Imperial court in 1873 under the Miko Kindanrei (巫女禁断令).
Few can even imagine violent schisms between Buddhists and Shintouists in Japan, or know that the Imperial court, attempting to consolidate its power, waged campaigns of extermination against the Buddhist strongholds of the feuding warlords. (Buddhist temples doubled as civil organs for the shougun, taking censuses and levying onerous taxes on the commoners living on the lord’s domain. Westerners may note this mirrors the consolidation of power the Ancient Roman Imperial court, converting to and utilising monotheistic Christianity to legitimise an absolute rule, and its persecution of the Pagan Senators.) Or know that the Imperial court assumed an opposite stance two centuries on, mobilising the Zen Buddhist leaders of the country to create a doctrine of perfect obedience and to militarise the faith and the faithful for the Japanese equivalent of God and Country.
The various schools of Buddhism and Shintou in the country had their own vociferous, bitter disagreements, amongst themselves and against their rival religions. The vexed grief of a Shintou priest unable to tend to his father’s body due to the pollution of death, his shame at leaving it to a Buddhist monk—“Being a Shintou priest is utterly impotent”—the private disapproval of another Shintou priest at other Shintou sects for attempting to establish a tradition of their own funerals, holding his tongue because “I will be seen as pro-Buddhist if I say this aloud”.
(Fortunately for him, the ceremonies failed to catch on—90% of funerals done today are Buddhist, even when the deceased is Shintouist.)
When someone speaks of a “traditional Japanese” culture, one should shake their head and imagine the notion of a “traditional Italian” culture, or a “traditional German” one. Or a traditional “Christian” one, if one imagines there to be a “traditional Shintou” culture! (Try to reconcile the Lutherans with the Catholics. I’ll watch.) There are no such things. Even the food one speaks of—especially the food—the red japonica rice considered sacred in Shintou (the sekihan of celebrations) now persists only as a roadside weed or a curiosity—comes under the same pressures economical, cultural, and social as every other aspect of society, particular to that time period, and transform into unique expressions of the social conditions that existed at the time.
To buy into the myth of a monolithic Japanese tradition is to be incurious and pitifully—it really is pitiful—ignorant of the real variety and multicoloured texture of human behaviour and history.
When you go to Japan, know that you see modern Japanese culture—and appreciate it as the unique, peculiar crystallisation of a particular time and place. For that too shall pass.