CHAPTER XII

TWO CENTURIES OF SILENCE, PAGE 351

Policy of the Japanese government after the suppression of

Christianity.--Insulation of Japan.--The Hollanders at

Déshima.--Withdrawal of the English.--Relations with Korea.--Policy of

inclusion.--"A society impervious to foreign ideas."--Life within

stunted limits.--Canons of art and literature.--Philosophy made an

engine of government.--Esoteric law.--Social waste of

humanity.--Attempts to break down the wall--External and

internal.--Seekers after God.--The goal of the pilgrims.--The Déshima

Dutchman as pictured by enemies and rivals, _versus_ reality and

truth.--Eager spirits groping after God.--Morning stars of the Japanese

reformation.--Yokoi Héishiro.--The anti-Christian edicts.--The Buddhist

Inquisitors.--The Shin-gaku or New Learning movement.--The story of

nineteenth century Christianity, subterranean and interior before being

phenomenal.--Sabbath-day service on the U.S.S. Mississippi.--The first

missionaries.--Dr. J.C. Hepburn--Healing and the Bible.--Yedo becomes

Tōkiō.--Despatch of the Embassy round the world.--Eyes

opened.--The Acts of the Apostles in Japan.

NOTES, AUTHORITIES AND ILLUSTRATIONS, PAGE 375

INDEX, PAGE 451

CHAPTER I - PRIMITIVE FAITH: RELIGION BEFORE BOOKS

"The investigation of the beginnings of a religion is never the

work of infidels, but of the most reverent and conscientious

minds."

"We, the forty million souls of Japan, standing firmly and

persistently upon the basis of international justice, await

still further manifestations as to the morality of

Christianity,"--Hiraii, of Japan.

"When the Creator [through intermediaries that were apparently

animals] had finished treating this world of men, the good and

the bad Gods were all mixed together promiscuously, and began

disputing for the possession of this world."--The Aino Story of

the Creation.

"If the Japanese have few beast stories, the Ainos have

_apparently_ no popular tales of heroes ... The Aino mythologies

... lack all connection with morality.... Both lack priests and

prophets.... Both belong to a very primitive stage of mental

development ... Excepting stories ... and a few almost metreless

songs, the Ainos have no other literature at all."--Aino

Studies.

"I asked the earth, and it answered, 'I am not He;' and

whatsoever are therein made the same confession. I asked the sea

and the deep and the creeping things that lived, and they

replied, 'We are not thy God; seek higher than we.' ... And I

answered unto all things which stand about the door of my flesh,

'Ye have told me concerning my God, that ye are not he; tell me

something about him.' And with a loud voice they explained, 'It

is He who hath made us!'"--Augustine's Confessions.

"Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the

shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with

night; that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them

out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name."--Amos.

"That which hath been made was life in Him."--John.

CHAPTER I - PRIMITIVE FAITH: RELIGION BEFORE BOOKS

The Morse Lectureship and the Study of Comparative

Religion.

As a graduate of the Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York,

in the Class of 1877, your servant received and accepted with pleasure

the invitation of the President and Board of Trustees to deliver a

course of lectures upon the religions of Japan. In that country and in

several parts of it, I lived from 1870 to 1874. I was in the service

first of the feudal daimiō of Echizen and then of the national

government of Japan, helping to introduce that system of public schools

which is now the glory of the country. Those four years gave me

opportunities for close and constant observation of the outward side of

the religions of Japan, and facilities for the study of the ideas out of

which worship springs. Since 1867, however, when first as a student in

Rutgers College at New Brunswick, N.J., I met and instructed those

students from the far East, who, at risk of imprisonment and death had

come to America for the culture of Christendom, I have been deeply

interested in the study of the Japanese people and their thoughts.

To attempt a just and impartial survey of the religions of Japan may

seem a task that might well appall even a life-long Oriental scholar.

Yet it may be that an honest purpose, a deep sympathy and a gladly

avowed desire to help the East and the West, the Japanese and the

English-speaking people, to understand each other, are not wholly

useless in a study of religion, but for our purpose of real value. These

lectures are upon the Morse[1] foundation which has these specifications

written out by the founder:

The general subject of the lectures I desire to be: "The

Relation of the Bible to any of the Sciences, as Geography,

Geology, History, and Ethnology, ... and the relation of the

facts and truths contained in the Word of God, to the

principles, methods, and aims of any of the sciences."

Now, among the sciences which we must call to our aid are those of

geography and geology, by which are conditioned history and ethnology of

which we must largely treat; and, most of all, the science of

Comparative Religion.

This last is Christianity's own child. Other sciences, such as geography

and astronomy, may have been born among lands and nations outside of and

even before Christendom. Other sciences, such as geology, may have had

their rise in Christian time and in Christian lands, their foundation

lines laid and their main processes illustrated by Christian men, which

yet cannot be claimed by Christianity as her children bearing her own

likeness and image; but the science of Comparative Religion is the

direct offspring of the religion of Jesus. It is a distinctively

Christian science. "It is so because it is a product of Christian

civilization, and because it finds its impulse in that freedom of

inquiry which Christianity fosters."[2] Christian scholars began the

investigations, formulated the principles, collected the materials and

reared the already splendid fabric of the science of Comparative

Religion, because the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify

this. Jesus bade his disciples search, inquire, discern and compare.

Paul, the greatest of the apostolic Christian college, taught: "Prove

all things; hold fast that which is good." In our day one of Christ's

loving followers[3] expressed the spirit of her Master in her favorite

motto, "Truth for authority, not authority for truth." Well says Dr.

James Legge, a prince among scholars, and translator of the Chinese

classics, who has added several portly volumes to Professor Max Müller's

series of the "Sacred Books of the East," whose face to-day is bronzed

and whose hair is whitened by fifty years of service in southern China

where with his own hands he baptized six hundred Chinamen:[4]

The more that a man possesses the Christian spirit, and is

governed by Christian principle, the more anxious will he be to

do justice to every other system of religion, and to hold his

own without taint or fetter of bigotry.[5]

It was Christianity that, in a country where the religion of Jesus has

fullest liberty, called the Parliament of Religions, and this for

reasons clearly manifest. Only Christians had and have the requisites of

success, viz.: sufficient interest in other men and religions; the

necessary unity of faith and purpose; and above all, the brave and bold

disregard of the consequences. Christianity calls the Parliament of

Religions, following out the Divine audacity of Him who, so often,

confronting worldly wisdom and priestly cunning, said to his disciples,

"Think not, be not anxious, take no heed, be careful for nothing--only

for love and truth. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil."

Of all places therefore, the study of comparative religion is most

appropriate in a Christian theological seminary. We must know how our

fellow-men think and believe, in order to help them. It is our duty to

discover the pathways of approach to their minds and hearts. We must

show them, as our brethren and children of the same Heavenly Father, the

common ground on which we all stand. We must point them to the greater

truth in the Bible and in Christ Jesus, and demonstrate wherein both the

divinely inspired library and the truth written in a divine-human life

fulfil that which is lacking in their books and masters.

To know just how to do this is knowledge to be coveted as a most

excellent gift. An understanding of the religion of our fellow-men is

good, both for him who goes as a missionary and for him who at home

prays, "Thy kingdom come."

The theological seminary, which begins the systematic and sympathetic

study of Comparative Religion and fills the chair with a professor who

has a vital as well as academic interest in the welfare of his

fellow-men who as yet know not Jesus as Christ and Lord, is sure to lead

in effective missionary work. The students thus equipped will be

furnished as none others are, to begin at once the campaign of help and

warfare of love.

It may be that insight into and sympathy with the struggles of men who

are groping after God, if haply they may find him, will shorten the

polemic sword of the professional converter whose only purpose is

destructive hostility without tactics or strategy, or whose chief idea

of missionary success is in statistics, in blackening the character of

"the heathen," in sensational letters for home consumption and reports

properly cooked and served for the secretarial and sectarian palates.

Yet, if true in history, Greek, Roman, Japanese, it is also true in the

missionary wars, that "the race that shortens its weapons lengthens its

boundaries."[6]

Apart from the wit or the measure of truth in this sentence quoted, it

is a matter of truth in the generalizations of fact that the figure of

the "sword of the spirit, which is the word of God," used by Paul, and

also the figure of the "word of God, living and active, sharper than any

two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of the soul and

spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and

intents of the heart," of the writer to the Hebrews, had for their

original in iron the victorious _gladium_ of the Roman legionary--a

weapon both short and sharp. We may learn from this substance of fact

behind the shadow of the figure a lesson for our instant application.

The disciplined Romans scorned the long blades of the barbarians, whose

valor so often impetuous was also impotent against discipline. The

Romans measured their blades by inches, not by feet. For ages the

Japanese sword has been famed for its temper more than its weight.[7]

The Christian entering upon his Master's campaigns with as little

impediments of sectarian dogma as possible, should select a weapon that

is short, sure and divinely tempered.

To know exactly the defects of the religion we seek to abolish, modify,

supplement, supplant or fulfil, means wise economy of force. To get at

the secrets of its hold upon the people we hope to convert leads to a

right use of power. In a word, knowledge of the opposing religion, and

especially of alien language, literature and ways of feeling and

thinking, lengthens missionary life. A man who does not know the moulds

of thought of his hearers is like a swordsman trying to fight at long

range but only beating the air. Armed with knowledge and sympathy, the

missionary smites with effect at close quarters. He knows the vital

spots.

Let me fortify my own convictions and conclude this preliminary part of

my lectures by quoting again, not from academic authorities, but from

active missionaries who are or have been at the front and in the

field.[8]

The Rev. Samuel Beal, author of "Buddhism in China," said (p. 19) that

"it was plain to him that no real work could be done among the people

[of China and Japan] by missionaries until the system of their belief

was understood."

The Rev. James MacDonald, a veteran missionary in Africa, in the

concluding chapter of his very able work on "Religion and Myth," says:

The Church that first adopts for her intending missionaries the

study of Comparative Religion as a substitute for subjects now

taught will lead the van in the path of true progress.

The People of Japan.

In this faith then, in the spirit of Him who said, "I come not to

destroy but to fulfil," let us cast our eyes upon that part of the world

where lies the empire of Japan with its forty-one millions of souls.

Here we have not a country like India--a vast conglomeration of nations,

languages and religions occupying a peninsula itself like a continent,

whose history consists of a stratification of many civilizations. Nor

have we here a seemingly inert mass of humanity in a political structure

blending democracy and imperialism, as in China, so great in age, area

and numbers as to weary the imagination that strives to grasp the

details. On the contrary, in Dai Nippon, or Great Land of the Sun's

Origin, we have a little country easy of study. In geology it is one of

the youngest of lands. Its known history is comparatively modern. Its

area roughly reckoned as 150,000 square miles, is about that of our

Dakotas or of Great Britain and Ireland. The census completed December

31, 1892, illustrates here, as all over the world, nature's argument

against polygamy. It tells us that the relation between the sexes is,

numerically at least, normal. There were 20,752,366 males and 20,337,574

females, making a population of 41,089,940 souls. All these people are

subjects of the one emperor, and excepting fewer than twenty thousand

savages in the northern islands called Ainos, speak one language and

form substantially one race. Even the Riu Kiu islanders are Japanese in

language, customs and religion. In a word, except in minor differences

appreciable or at least important only to the special student, the

modern Japanese are a homogeneous people.

In origin and formation, this people is a composite of many tribes.

Roughly outlining the ethnology of Japan, we should say that the

aborigines were immigrants from the continent with Malay reinforcement

in the south, Koreans in the centre, and Ainos in the east and north,

with occasional strains of blood at different periods from various parts

of the Asian mainland. In brief, the Japanese are a very mixed race.

Authentic history before the Christian era is unknown. At some point of

time, probably later than A.D. 200, a conquering tribe, one of many from

the Asian mainland, began to be paramount on the main island. About the

fourth century something like historic events and personages begin to be

visible, but no Japanese writings are older than the early part of the

eighth century, though almanacs and means of measuring time are found in

the sixth century. Whatever Japan may be in legend and mythology, she is

in fact and in history younger than Christianity. Her line of rulers, as

alleged in old official documents and ostentatiously reaffirmed in the

first article of the constitution of 1889, to be "unbroken for ages

eternal," is no older than that of the popes. Let us not think of Aryan

or Chinese antiquity when we talk of Japan. Her history as a state began

when the Roman empire fell. The Germanic nations emerged into history

long before the Japanese.

Roughly outlining the political and religious life of the ancient

Japanese, we note that their first system of government was a rude sort

of feudalism imposed by the conquerors and was synchronous with

aboriginal fetichism, nature worship, ancestral sacrifices, sun-worship

and possibly but not probably, a very rude sort of monotheism akin to

the primitive Chinese cultus.[9] Almost contemporary with Buddhism, its

introduction and missionary development, was the struggle for

centralized imperialism borrowed from the Chinese and consolidated in

the period from the seventh to the twelfth century. During most of this

time Shintō, or the primitive religion, was overshadowed while the

Confucian ethics were taught. From the twelfth to this nineteenth

century feudalism in politics and Buddhism in religion prevailed, though

Confucianism furnished the social laws or rules of daily conduct. Since

the epochal year of 1868, with imperialism reestablished and the feudal

system abolished, Shintō has had a visible revival, being kept alive

by government patronage. Buddhism, though politically disestablished, is

still the popular religion with recent increase of life,[10] while

Confucianism is decidedly losing force. Christianity has begun its

promising career.

The Amalgam of Religions.

Yet in the imperial and constitutional Japan of our day it is still true

of probably at least thirty-eight millions of Japanese that their

religion is not one, Shintō, Confucianism or Buddhism, but an amalgam

of all three. There is not in every-day life that sharp distinction

between these religions which the native or foreign scholar makes, and

which both history and philosophy demand shall be made for the student

at least. Using the technical language of Christian theologians,

Shintō furnishes theology, Confucianism anthropology and Buddhism

soteriology. The average Japanese learns about the gods and draws

inspiration for his patriotism from Shintō, maxims for his ethical

and social life from Confucius, and his hope of what he regards as

salvation from Buddhism. Or, as a native scholar, Nobuta Kishimoto,[11]

expresses it,

In Japan these three different systems of religion and morality

are not only living together on friendly terms with one another,

but, in fact, they are blended together in the minds of the

people, who draw necessary nourishment from all of these

sources. One and the same Japanese is both a Shintōist, a

Confucianist, and a Buddhist. He plays a triple part, so to

speak ... Our religion may be likened to a triangle....

Shintōism furnishes the object, Confucianism offers the rules

of life, while Buddhism supplies the way of salvation; so you

see we Japanese are eclectic in everything, even in religion.

These three religious systems as at present constituted, are "book

religions." They rest, respectively, upon the Kojiki and other ancient

Japanese literature and the modern commentators; upon the Chinese

classics edited and commented on by Confucius and upon Chu Hi and other

mediaeval scholastics who commented upon Confucius; and upon the

shastras and sutras with which Gautama, the Buddha, had something to do.

Yet in primeval and prehistoric Nippon neither these books nor the

religions growing out of the books were extant. Furthermore, strictly

speaking, it is not with any or all of these three religions that the

Christian missionary comes first, oftenest or longest in contact. In

ancient, in mediaeval, and in modern times the student notices a great

undergrowth of superstition clinging parasitically to all religions,

though formally recognized by none. Whether we call it fetichism,

shamanism, nature worship or heathenism in its myriad forms, it is there

in awful reality. It is as omnipresent, as persistent, as hard to kill

as the scrub bamboo which both efficiently and sufficiently takes the

place of thorns and thistles as the curse of Japanese ground.

The book-religions can be more or less apprehended by those alien to

them, but to fully appreciate the depth, extent, influence and tenacity

of these archaic, unwritten and unformulated beliefs requires residence

upon the soil and life among the devotees. Disowned it may be by the

priests and sages, indignantly disclaimed or secretly approved in part

by the organized religions, this great undergrowth of superstition is as

apparent as the silicious bamboo grass which everywhere conditions and

modifies Japanese agriculture. Such prevalence of mental and spiritual

disease is the sad fact that confronts every lover of his fellow-men.

This paganism is more ancient and universal than any one of the

religions founded on writing or teachers of name and fame. Even the

applied science and the wonderful inventions imported from the West, so

far from eradicating it, only serve as the iron-clad man-of-war in warm

salt water serves the barnacles, furnishing them food and hold.

We propose to give in this our first lecture, a general or bird's-eye

view of this dead level of paganism above which the systems of

Shintō, Confucianism and Buddhism tower like mountains. It in by this

omnipresent superstition that the respectable religious have been

conditioned in their history and are modified at present, even as

Christianity has been influenced in its progress by ethnic or local

ideas and temperaments, and will be yet in its course of victory in the

Mikado's empire.

Just as the terms "heathen" (happily no longer, in the Revised Version

of the English Bible) and "pagan" suggest the heath-man of Northern

Europe and the isolated hamlet of the Roman empire, while the cities

were illuminated with Christian truth, so, in the main, the matted

superstitious of Chinese Asia are more suggestive of distances from

books and centres of knowledge, though still sufficiently rooted in the

crowded cities.

One to whom the boundary line between the Creator and his world is

perfectly clear, one who knows the eternal difference between mind and

matter, one born amid the triumphs of science can but faintly realize

the mental condition of the millions of Japan to whom there is no

unifying thought of the Creator-Father. Faith in the unity of law is the

foundation of all science, but the average Asiatic has not this thought

or faith. Appalled at his own insignificance amid the sublime mysteries

and awful immensities of nature, the shadows of his own mind become to

him real existences. As it is affirmed that the human skin, sensitive to

the effects of light, takes the photograph of the tree riven by

lightning, so, on the pagan mind lie in ineffaceable and exaggerated

grotesqueness the scars of impressions left by hereditary teaching, by

natural phenomena and by the memory of events and of landmarks. Out of

the soil of diseased imagination has sprung up a growth as terrible as

the drunkard's phantasies. The earthquake, flood, tidal wave, famine,

withering or devastating wind and poisonous gases, the geological

monsters and ravening bird, beast and fish, have their representatives

or supposed incarnations in mythical phantasms.

Frightful as these shadows of the mind appear, they are both very real

and, in a sense, very necessary to the ignorant man. He must have some

theory by which to explain the phenomena of nature and soothe his own

terrors. Hence he peoples the earth and water, not only with invisible

spirits more or less malevolent, but also with bodily presences usually

in terrific bestial form. To those who believe in one Spirit pervading,

ordering, governing all things, there is unity amid all phenomena, and

the universe is all order and beauty. To the mind which has not reached

this height of simplicity, instead of one cause there are many. The

diverse phenomena of nature are brought about by spirits innumerable,

warring and discordant. Instead of a unity to the mind, as of sun and

solar system, there is nothing but planets, asteroids and a constant

rain of shooting-stars.

Shamanism.

Glancing at some phases of the actual unwritten religions of Japan we

name Shamanism, Mythical Zoölogy, Fetichism, Phallicism, and Tree and

Serpent Worship.

In actual Shamanism or Animism there may or there may not be a belief in

or conception of a single all-powerful Creator above and beyond all.[12]

Usually there is not such a belief, though, even if there be, the actual

government of the physical world and its surroundings is believed to lie

in the hands of many spirits or gods benevolent and malevolent. Earth,

air, water, all things teem with beings that are malevolent and

constantly active. In time of disaster, famine, epidemic the universe

seems as overcrowded with them as stagnant water seems to be when the

solar microscope throw its contents into apparition upon the screen. It

is absolutely necessary to propitiate these spirits by magic rites and

incantations.

Among the tribes of the northern part of the Chinese Empire and the

Ainos of Japan this Shamanism exists as something like an organized

cultus. Indeed, it would be hard to find any part of Chinese Asia from

Korea to Annam or from Tibet to Formosa, not dominated by this belief in

the power and presence of minor spirits. The Ainos of Yezo may be called

Shamanists or Animists; that is, their minds are cramped and confused by

their belief in a multitude of inferior spirits whom they worship and

propitiate by rites and incantations through their medicine-man or

sorcerer. How they whittle sticks, keeping on the fringe of curled

shavings, and set up these, called _inao_ in places whence evil is

suspected to lurk, and how the shaman conducts his exorcisms and works

his healings, are told in the works of the traveller and the

missionary.[13] In the wand of shavings thus reared we see the same

motive as that which induced the Mikado in the eighth century to build

the great monasteries on Hiyéizan, northeast of Kiōto, this being the

quarter in which Buddhist superstition locates the path of advancing

evil, to ward off malevolence by litanies and incense. Or, the _inao_ is

a sort of lightning-rod conductor by which impending mischief may be led

harmlessly away.

Yet, besides the Ainos,[14] there are millions of Japanese who are

Shamanists, even though they know not the name or organized cult. And if

we make use of the term Shamanism instead of the more exact one of

Animism, it is for the very purpose of illustrating our contention that

the underlying paganisms of the Japanese archipelago, unwritten and

unformulated, are older than the religions founded on books; and that

these paganisms, still vital and persistent, constantly modify and

corrupt the recognized religious. The term Shaman, a Pali word, was

originally a pure Buddhist term meaning one who has separated from his

family and his passions. One of the designations of the Buddha was

Shamana-Gautama. The same word, Shamon, in Japanese still means a bonze,

or Buddhist priest. Its appropriation by the sorcerers, medicine-men,

and lords of the misrule of superstition in Mongolia and Manchuria shows

decisively how indigenous paganism has corrupted the Buddhism of

northern Asia even as it has caused its decay in Japan.

As out of Animism or Shamanism grows Fetichism in which a visible object

is found for the abode or medium of the spirit, so also, out of the same

soil arises what we may call Imaginary Zoölogy. In this mental growth,

the nightmare of the diseased imagination or of the mind unable to draw

the line between the real and the unreal, Chinese Asia differs notably

from the Aryan world. With the mythical monsters of India and Iran we

are acquainted, and with those of the Semitic and ancient European cycle

of ideas which furnished us with our ancients and classics we are

familiar. The lovely presences in human form, the semi-human and bestial

creations, sphinxes, naiads, satyrs, fauns, harpies, griffins, with

which the fancy of the Mediterranean nations populated glen, grotto,

mountain and stream, are probably outnumbered by the less beautiful and

even hideous mind-shadows of the Turanian world. Chief among these are

what in Chinese literature, so slavishly borrowed by the Japanese, are

called the four supernatural or spiritually endowed creatures--the Kirin

or Unicorn, the Phoenix, the Tortoise and the Dragon.[15]

Mythical Zoölogy.

Of the first species the _ki_ is the male, the _lin_ is the female,

hence the name Kilin. The Japanese having no _l_, pronounce this Kirin.

Its appearance on the earth is regarded as a happy portent of the advent

of good government or the birth of men who are to prove virtuous rulers.

It has the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and a single, soft horn.

As messenger of mercy and benevolence, the Kirin never treads on a live

insect or eats growing grass. Later philosophy made this imaginary beast

the incarnation of those five primordial elements--earth, air, water,

fire and ether of which all things, including man's body, are made and

which are symbolized in the shapes of the cube, globe, pyramid, saucer

and tuft of rays in the Japanese gravestones. It is said to attain the

age of a thousand years, to be the noblest form of the animal creation

and the emblem of perfect good. In Chinese and Japanese art this

creature holds a prominent place, and in literature even more so. It is

not only part of the repertoire of the artist's symbols in the Chinese

world of ideas, but is almost a necessity to the moulds of thought in

eastern Asia. Yet it is older than Confucius or the book-religions, and

its conception shows one of the nobler sides of Animism.

The Feng-hwang or Phoenix, Japanese Hō-wō, the second of the

incarnations of the spirits, is of wondrous form and mystic nature. The

rare advent of this bird upon the earth is, like that of the kirin or

unicorn, a presage of the advent of virtuous rulers and good government.

It has the head of a pheasant, the beak of a swallow, the neck of a

tortoise, and the features of the dragon and fish. Its colors and

streaming feathers are gorgeous with iridian sheen, combining the

splendors of the pheasant and the peacock. Its five colors symbolize the

cardinal virtues of uprightness of mind, obedience, justice, fidelity

and benevolence. The male bird _Hō_, and female _wō_, by their

inseparable fellowship furnish the artist, poet and literary writer with

the originals of the ten thousand references which are found in Chinese

and its derived literatures. Of this mystic Phoenix a Chinese dictionary

thus gives description:

The Phoenix is of the essence of water; it was born in the

vermilion cave; it perches not but on the most beautiful of all

trees; it eats not but of the seed of the bamboo; its body is

adorned with the five colors; its song contains the five notes;

as it walks it looks around; as it flies hosts of birds follow

it.

Older than the elaborate descriptions of it and its representations in

art, the Hō-wō is one of the creations of primitive Chinese

Animism.

The Kwei or Tortoise is not the actual horny reptile known to

naturalists and to common experience, but a spirit, an animated creature

that ages ago rose up out of the Yellow River, having on its carapace

the mystic writing out of which the legendary founder of Chinese

civilization deciphered the basis of moral teachings and the secrets of

the unseen. From this divine tortoise which conceived by thought alone,

all other tortoises sprang. In the elaboration of the myths and legends

concerning the tortoise we find many varieties of this scaly

incarnation. It lives a thousand years, hence it is emblem of longevity

in art and literature. It is the attendant of the god of the waters. It

has some of the qualities and energies of the dragon, it has the power

of transformation. In pictures and sculptures we are familiar with its

figure, often of colossal size, as forming the curb of a well, the base

of a monument or tablet. Yet, whatever its form in literature or art, it

is the later elaborated representation of ancient Animism which selected

the tortoise as one of the manifold incarnations or media of the myriad

spirits that populate the air.

Chief and leader of the four divinely constituted beasts is the Lung,

Japanese Riō, or Dragon, which has the power of transformation and of

making itself visible or invisible. At will it reduces itself to the

size of a silk-worm, or is swollen until it fills the space of heaven

and earth. This is the creature especially preeminent in art, literature

and rhetoric. There are nine kinds of dragons, all with various features

and functions, and artists and authors revel in their representation.

The celestial dragon guards the mansions of the gods and supports them

lest they fall; the spiritual dragon causes the winds to blow and rain

to descend for the service of mankind; the earth dragon marks out the

courses of rivers and streams; the dragon of the hidden treasures

watches over the wealth concealed from mortals, etc. Outwardly, the

dragon of superstition resembles the geological monsters brought to

resurrection by our paleontologists. He seems to incarnate all the

attributes and forces of animal life--vigor, rapidity of motion,

endurance, power of offence in horn, hoof, claw, tooth, nail, scale and

fiery breath. Being the embodiment of all force the dragon is especially

symbolical of the emperor. Usually associated with malevolence, one

sees, besides the conventional art and literature of civilization, the

primitive animistic idea of men to whose mind this mysterious universe

had no unity, who believed in myriad discordant spirits but knew not of

"one Law-giver, who is able both to save and to destroy." An

enlargement, possibly, of prehistoric man's reminiscence of now extinct

monsters, the dragon is, in its artistic development, a mythical

embodiment of all the powers of moisture to bless and to harm. We shall

see how, when Buddhism entered China, the cobra-de-capello, so often

figured in the Buddhistic representations of India, is replaced by the

dragon.

Yet besides these four incarnations of the spirits that misrule the

world there is a host, a menagerie of mythical monsters. In Korea, one

of the Asian countries richest in demonology, beast worship is very

prevalent. Mythical winged tigers and flying serpents with attributes of

fire, lightning and combinations of forces not found in any one

creature, are common to the popular fancy. In Japan, the _kappa_, half

monkey half tortoise, which seizes children bathing in the rivers, as

real to millions of the native common folk as is the shark or porpoise;

the flying-weasel, that moves in the whirlwind with sickle-like blades

on his claws, which cut the face of the unfortunate; the wind-god or imp

that lets loose the gale or storm; the thunder-imp or hairy, cat-like

creature that on the cloud-edges beats his drums in crash, roll, or

rattle; the earthquake-fish or subterranean bull-head or cat-fish that

wriggles and writhes, causing the earth to shiver, shudder and open; the

_ja_ or dragon centipede; the _tengu_ or long-nosed and winged mountain

sprite, which acts as the messenger of the gods, pulling out the tongues

of fibbing, lying children; besides the colossal spiders and mythical

creatures of the old story-books; the foxes, badgers, cats and other

creatures which transform themselves and "possess" human beings, still

influence the popular mind. These, once the old _kami_ of the primitive

Japanese, or _kamui_ of the aboriginal Aino, show the mental soil and

climate[16] which were to condition the growth of the seed imported from

other lands, whether of Buddhism or Christianity. It is very hard to

kill a god while the old mind that grew and nourished him still remains

the same. Banish or brand a phantom or mind-shadow once worshipped as

divine, and it will appear as a fairy, a demon, a mythical animal, or an

_oni_; but to annihilate it requires many centuries of higher culture.

As with the superstitions and survival of Animism and Fetichism from our

pagan ancestors among ourselves, many of the lingering beliefs may be

harmless, but over the mass of men in Japan and in Chinese Asia they

still exert a baleful influence. They make life full of distress; they

curtail human joy; they are a hindrance, to spiritual progress and to

civilization.

Fetichism.

The animistic tendency in that part of Asia dominated by the Chinese

world of ideas shows itself not only in a belief in messengers or

embodiments of divine malevolence or benevolence, but also in the

location of the spiritual influence in or upon an inanimate object or

fetich. Among men in Chinese Asia, from the clodhopper to the gentleman,

the inheritance of Fetichism from the primeval ages is constantly

noticeable. Let us glance at the term itself.

As the Chinaman's "Joss" is only his own pronunciation of the Portuguese

word _Deos_, or the Latin _Deus_, so the word "fetich" is but the

Portuguese modification of the Latin word _facticius_, that is

_feitiço_. Portugal, beginning nearly five hundred years ago, had the

honor of sending the first ships and crews to explore the coasts of

Africa and Asia, and her sailors by this word, now Englished as fetich,

described the native charms or talismans. The word "fetichism" came into

the European languages through the work of Charles de Brosses, who, in

1760, wrote on "Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches." In Fetichism, the "object

is treated as having personal consciousness and power, is talked with,

worshipped, prayed to, sacrificed to, petted or ill-treated with

reference to its past or future behavior to its votaries."

Let me draw a picture from actual observation. I look out of the windows

of my house in Fukui. Here is a peasant who comes back after the winter

to prepare his field for cultivation. The man's horizon of ideas, like

his vocabulary, is very limited. His view of actual life is bounded by a

few rice-fields, a range of hills, and the village near by. Possibly one

visit to a city or large town has enriched his experience. More

probably, however, the wind and clouds, the weather, the soil, crops and

taxes, his family and food and how to provide for them, are the main

thoughts that occupy his mind. Before he will strike mattock or spade in

the soil, lay axe to a tree, collect or burn underbrush, he will select

a stone, a slab of rock or a stick of wood, set it upon hill side or mud

field-boundary, and to this he will bow, prostrate himself or pray. To

him, this stone or stick is consecrated. It has power to placate the

spirits and ward off their evil. It is the medium of communication

between him and them. Now, having attended, as he thinks, to the

proprieties in the case, he proceeds to dig, plough, drain, put in order

and treat soil or water, tree or other growth as is most convenient for

his purpose. His fetich is erected to "the honorable spirits." Were this

not attended to, some known or unknown bad luck, sinister fortune, or

calamity would befall him. Here, then, is a fetich-worshipper. The stick

or stone is the medium of communication between the man and the spirits

who can bless or harm him, and which to his mind are as countlessly

numerous as the swarms of mosquitoes which he drives out of and away

from his summer cottage by smudge fires in August.

One need not travel in Yezo or Saghalin to see practical Fetichism. Go

where you will in Japan, there are fetich worshippers. Among the country

folk, the "_inaka_" of Japanese parlance, Fetichism is seen in its

grossest forms. Yet among probably millions of Buddhists, especially of

certain sects, the Nichiren for example, and even among the

rationalistic Confucians, there are fetich-worshippers. Rare is the

Japanese farmer, laborer, mechanic, ward-man, or _hei-min_ of any trade

who does not wear amulet, charm or other object which he regards with

more or less of reverence as having relation to the powers that help or

harm.[17] In most of the Buddhist temples these amulets are sold for the

benefit of the priests or of the shrine or monastery. Not a few even of

the gentry consider it best to be on the safe side and wear in pouch or

purse these protectors against evil.

Of the 7,817,570 houses in the empire, enumerated in the census of 1892,

it is probable that seven millions of them are subjects of insurance by

fetich.[18] They are guaranteed against fire, thieves, lightning, plague

and pestilence. It is because of money paid to the priests that the

wooden policies are duly nailed on the walls, and not on account of the

wise application of mathematical, financial or medical science. Examine

also the paper packages carefully tied and affixed above the transom,

decipher the writing in ink or the brand left by the hot iron on the

little slabs of pine-wood--there may be one or a score of them--and what

will you read? Names of the temples with date of issue and seal of

certificate from the priests, mottoes or titles from sacred books, often

only a Sanskrit letter or monogram, of which the priest-pedler may long

since have forgotten the meaning. To build a house, select a cemetery or

proceed to any of the ordinary events of life without making use of some

sort of material fetich, is unusual, extraordinary and is voted

heterodox.

Long after the brutish stage of thought is past the fetichistic instinct

remains in the sacredness attached to the mere letter or paper or

parchment of the sacred book or writing, when used as amulet, plaster or

medicine. The survivals, even in Buddhism, of ancient and prehistoric

Fetichism are many and often with undenied approval of the religious

authorities, especially in those sects which are themselves reversions

to primitive and lower types of religion.

Among the Ainos of Yezo and Saghalin the medicine-man or shaman is

decorated with fetichistic bric-à-brac of all sorts, and these bits of

shells, metals, and other clinking substances are believed to be media

of communication with mysterious influences and forces. In Korea

thousands of trees bedecked with fluttering rags, clinking scraps of

tin, metal or stone signify the same thing. In Japan these primitive

tinkling scraps and clinking bunches of glass have long since become the

_suzu_ or wind-bells seen on the pagoda which tintinabulate with every

passing breeze. The whittled sticks of the Aino, non-conductors of evil

and protectors of those who make and rear them, stuck up in every place

of awe or supposed danger, have in the slow evolution of centuries

become the innumerable flag-poles, banners and streamers which one sees

at their _matsuris_ or temple festivals. Millions of towels and

handkerchiefs still flutter over wells and on sacred trees. In old Japan

the banners of an army almost outnumbered the men who fought beneath

them. Today, at times they nearly conceal the temples from view.

The civilized Japanese, having passed far beyond the Aino's stage of

religion, still show their fetichistic instincts in the veneration

accorded to priestly inventions for raising revenue.[19] This instinct

lingers in the faith accorded to medicine in the form of decoction,

pill, bolus or poultice made from the sacred writing and piously

swallowed; in the reverence paid to the idol for its own sake, and in

the charm or amulet worn by the soldier in his cap or by the gentleman

in his pill-box, tobacco-pouch or purse.

As the will of the worshipper who selects the fetich makes it what it

is, so also, by the exercise of that will he imagines he can in a

certain measure be the equal or superior of his god. Like the Italian

peasant who beats or scolds his bambino when his prayers are not

answered or his wishes gratified, so the fetich is punished or not

allowed to know what is going on, by being covered up or hidden away.

Instances of such rough handling of their fetiches by the people are far

from unknown in the Land of Great Peace. At such childishness we may

wonder and imagine that fetich-worship is the very antipodes of

religion; and yet it requires but little study of the lower orders of

mind and conduct in Christendom to see how fetich-worship still lingers

among people called Christians, whether the fetich be the image of a

saint or the Virgin, or a verse of the Bible found at random and used

much as is a penny-toss to decide minor actions. Or, to look farther

south, what means the rabbit's foot carried in the pocket or the various

articles of faith now hanging in the limbo between religion and

folk-lore in various parts of our own country?

Phallicism.

Further illustrations of far Eastern Animism and Fetichism are seen in

forms once vastly more prevalent in Japan than now. Indeed, so far

improved off the face of the earth are they, that some are already

matters of memory or archæology, and their very existence even in former

days is nearly or wholly incredible to the generation born since

1868--when Old Japan began to vanish in dissolving views and New Japan

to emerge. What the author has seen with his own eyes, would amaze many

Japanese born since 1868 and the readers of the rhapsodies of tourists

who study Japan from the _jin-riki-sha_. Phases of tree and serpent

worship are still quite common, and will be probably for generations to

come; but the phallic shrines and emblems abolished by the government in

1872 have been so far invisible to most living travellers and natives,

that their once general existence and use are now scarcely suspected.

Even profound scholars of the Japanese language and literature whose

work dates from after the year 1872 have scarcely suspected the

universality of phallic worship. Yet what we could say of this cult and

its emblems, especially in treating of Shintō, the special ethnic

faith of Japan, would be from sight of our own eyes besides the

testimony of many witnesses.[20]

The cultus has been known in the Japanese archipelago from Riu Kin to

Yezo. Despite official edicts of abolition it is still secretly

practised by the "heathen," the _inaka_ of Japan. "Government law lasts

three days," is an ancient proverb in Nippon. Sharp eyes have, within

three months of the writing of this line, unearthed a phallic shrine

within a stone's-throw of Shintō's most sacred temples at Isé.

Formerly, however, these implements of worship were seen numerously--in

the cornucopia distributed in the temples, in the _matsuris_ or

religious processions and in representation by various plastic

material--and all this until 1872, to an extent that is absolutely

incredible to all except the eye-witnesses, some of whose written

testimonies we possess. What seems to our mind shocking and revolting

was once a part of our own ancestors' faith, and until very recently was

the perfectly natural and innocent creed of many millions of Japanese

and is yet the same for tens of thousands of them.

We may easily see why and how that which to us is a degrading cult was

not only closely allied to Shintō, but directly fostered by and

properly a part of it, as soon as we read the account of the creation of

the world, an contained in the national "Book of Ancient Traditions,"

the "Kojiki." Several of the opening paragraphs of this sacred book of

Shintō are phallic myths explaining cosmogony. Yet the myths and the

cult are older than the writing and are phases of primitive Japanese

faith. The mystery of fatherhood is to the primitive man the mystery of

creation also. To him neither the thought nor the word was at hand to

put difference and transcendental separation between him and what he

worshipped as a god.

Into the details of the former display and carriage of these now obscene

symbols in the popular celebrations; of the behavior of even respectable

citizens during the excitement and frenzy of the festivals; of their

presence in the wayside shrines; of the philosophy, hideousness or

pathos of the subject, we cannot here enter. We simply call attention to

their existence, and to a form of thought, if not of religion, properly

so-called, which has survived all imported systems of faith and which

shows what the native or indigenous idea of divinity really is--an idea

that profoundly affects the organization of society. To the enlightened

Buddhist, Confucian, and even the modern Shintoist the

phallus-worshipper is a "heathen," a "pagan," and yet he still practises

his faith and rites. It is for us to hint at the powerful influence such

persistent ideas have upon Japanese morals and civilization. Still

further, we illustrate the basic fact which all foreign religions and

all missionaries, Confucian, Buddhist, Mahometan or Christian must deal

with, viz.: That the Eastern Asiatic mind runs to pantheism as surely as

the body of flesh and blood seeks food.

Tree and Serpent Worship.

In prehistoric and medieval Japan, as among the Ainos to-day, trees and

serpents as well as rocks, rivers and other inanimate objects were

worshipped, because such of them as were supposed for reasons known and

felt to be awe-inspiring or wonderful were "kami," that is, above the

common, wonderful.[21] This word kami is usually translated god or

deity, but the term does not conform to our ideas, by a great gulf of

difference. It is more than probable that the Japanese term kami is the

same as the Aino word _kamui_, and that the despised and conquered

aboriginal savage has furnished the mould of the ordinary Japanese idea

of god--which even to-day with them means anything wonderful or

extraordinary.[22] From the days before history the people have

worshipped trees, and do so yet, considering them as the abodes of and

as means of communication with supernatural powers. On them the people

hang their votive offerings, twist on the branches their prayers written

on paper, avoid cutting down, breaking or in any way injuring certain

trees. The _sakaki_ tree is especially sacred, even to this day, in

funeral or Shintō services. To wound or defile a tree sacred to a

particular god was to call forth the vengeance of the insulted deity

upon the insulter, or as the hearer of prayer upon another to whom guilt

was imputed and punishment was due.

Thus, in the days older than this present generation, but still within

this century, as the writer has witnessed, it was the custom of women

betrayed by their lovers to perform the religious act of vengeance

called _Ushi toki mairi_, or going to the temple at the hour of the ox,

that is at 2 A.M. First making an image or manikin of straw, she set out

on her errand of revenge, with nails held in her mouth and with hammer

in one hand and straw figure in the other, sometimes also having on her

head a reversed tripod in which were stuck three lighted candles.

Arriving at the shrine she selected a tree dedicated to a god, and then

nailed the straw simulacrum of her betrayer to the trunk, invoking the

kami to curse and annihilate the destroyer of her peace. She adjures the

god to save his tree, impute the guilt of desecration to the traitor and

visit him with deadly vengeance. The visit is repeated and nails are

driven until the object of the incantation sickens and dies, or is at

least supposed to do so. I have more than once seen such trees and straw

images upon them, and have observed others in which the large number of

rusted nails and fragments of straw showed how tenaciously the

superstition lingered.[23]

In instances more pleasant to witness, may be seen trees festooned with

the symbolical rice-straw in cords and fringes. With these the people

honor the trees as the abode of the kami, or as evidence of their faith

in the renown accredited in the past.

In common with most human beings the Japanese consider the serpent an

object of mystery and awe, but most of them go further and pay the

ophidian a reverence and awe which is worship. Their oldest literature

shows how large a part the serpent played in the so-called divine age,

how it acted as progenitress of the Mikado's ancestry, and how it

afforded means of incarnation for the kami or gods. Ten species of

ophidia are known in the Japanese islands, but in the larger number of

more or less imaginary varieties which figure in the ancient books we

shall find plenty of material for fetich-worship. In perusing the

"Kojiki" one scarcely knows, when he begins a story, whether the

character which to all appearance is a man or woman is to end as a

snake, or whether the mother after delivering her child will or will not

glide into the marsh or slide away into the sea, leaving behind a trail

of slime. A dragon is three-fourths serpent, and both the dragon and the

serpent are prominent figures, perhaps the most prominent of the kami or

gods in human or animal form in the "Kojiki" and other early legends of

the gods, though the crocodile, crow, deer, dog, and other animals are

kami.[24] It is therefore no wonder that serpents have been and are

still worshipped by the people, that some of their gods and goddesses

are liable at any time to slip away in scaly form, that famous temples

are built on sites noted as being the abode or visible place of the

actual water or land snake of natural history, and that the spot where a

serpent is seen to-day is usually marked with a sacred emblem or a

shrine.[25] We shall see how this snake-worship became not only a part

of Shintō but even a notable feature in corrupt Buddhism.

Pantheism's Destruction of Boundaries.[26]

In its rudest forms, this pantheism branches out into animism or

shamanism, fetichism and phallicism. In its higher forms, it becomes

polytheism, idolatry and defective philosophy. Having centuries ago

corrupted Buddhism it is the malaria which, unseen and unfelt, is ready

to poison and corrupt Christianity. Indeed, it has already given over to

disease and spiritual death more than one once hopeful Christian

believer, teacher and preacher in the Japan of our decade.

To assault and remove the incubus, to replace and refill the mind, to

lift up and enlighten the Japanese peasant, science as already known and

faith in one God, Creator and Father of all things, must go hand in

hand. Education and civilization will do much for the ignorant _inaka_

or boors, but for the cultured whose minds waver and whose feet

flounder, as well as for the unlearned and priest-ridden, there is no

surer help and healing than that faith in the Heavenly Father which

gives the unifying thought to him who looks into creation.

Keep the boundary line clear between God and his world and all is order

and discrimination. Obliterate that boundary and all is pathless morass,

black chaos and on the mind the phantasms which belong to the victim of

_delirium tremens_.

There is one Lawgiver. In the beginning, God. In the end, God, all in

all.

CHAPTER II - SHINTŌ: MYTHS AND RITUAL

"In the great days of old,

When o'er the land the gods held sov'reign sway,

Our fathers lov'd to say

That the bright gods with tender care enfold

The fortunes of Japan,

Blessing the land with many an holy spell:

And what they loved to tell,

We of this later age ourselves do prove;

For every living man

May feast his eyes on tokens of their love."

--Poem of Yamagami-no Okura,

A.D. 733.

Baal: "While I on towers and banging terraces,

In shaft and obelisk, behold my sign.

Creative, shape of first imperious law."

--Bayard Taylor's "Masque of the Gods."

"Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my

silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of

men, and didst commit whoredom with them, and tookest thy

broidered garments, and coveredst them: and thou hast set mine

oil and mine incense before them. My meat also which I gave

thee, fine flour, and oil, and honey, wherewith I fed thee, thou

hast even set it before them for a sweet savor: and thus it was,

saith the Lord GOD."--Ezekiel.

If it be said (as has been the case), 'Shintoism has nothing in

it,' we should be inclined to answer, 'So much the better, there

is less error to counteract.' But there _is_ something in it,

and that ... of a kind of which we may well avail ourselves when

making known the second commandment, and the 'fountain of

cleansing from all sin.'"--E.W. Syle.

"If Shintō has a dogma, it is purity."--Kaburagi.

"I will wash my hands in innocency, O Lord: and so will I go to

thine altar."--Ps. xxvi. 6.

CHAPTER II - SHINTŌ: MYTHS AND RITUAL

The Japanese a Young Nation.

What impresses us in the study of the history of Japan is that, compared

with China and Korea, she is young. Her history is as the story of

yesterday. The nation is modern. The Japanese are as younger children in

the great family of Asia's historic people. Broadly speaking, Japan is

no older than England, and authentic Japanese history no more ancient

than British history. In Albion, as in the Honorable Country, there are

traditions and mythologies that project their shadows aeons back of

genuine records; but if we consider that English history begins in the

fifth, and English literature in the eighth century, then there are

other reasons besides those commonly given for calling Japan "the

England of the East."

No trustworthy traditions exist which carry the known history of Japan

farther back than the fifth century. The means for measuring and

recording time were probably not in use until the sixth century. The

oldest documents in the Japanese language, excepting a few fragments of

the seventh century, do not antedate the year 712, and even in these the

Chinese characters are in many instances used phonetically, because the

meaning of the words thus transliterated had already been forgotten.

Hence their interpretation in detail is still largely a matter of

conjecture.

Yet the Japanese Archipelago was inhabited long before the dawn of

history. The concurrent testimony of the earliest literary monuments, of

the indigenous mythology, of folk-lore, of shell-heaps and of

kitchen-middens shows that the occupation by human beings of the main

islands must be ascribed to times long before the Christian era. Before

written records or ritual of worship, religion existed on its active or

devotional side, and there were mature growths of thought preserved and

expressed orally. Poems, songs, chants and _norito_ or liturgies were

kept alive in the human memory, and there was a system of worship, the

_name_ of which was given long after the introduction of Buddhism. This

descriptive term, Kami no Michi in Japanese, and Shin-tō in the

Chinese as pronounced by Japanese, means the Way of the Gods, the tō

or final syllable being the same as tao in Taoism. We may say that

Shintō means, literally, theoslogos, theology. The customs and

practices existed centuries before contact with Chinese letters, and

long previous to the Shintō literature which is now extant.

Whether Kami no Michi is wholly the product of Japanese soil, or whether

its rudimentary ideas were imported from the neighboring Asian continent

and more or less allied to the primitive Chinese religion, is still an

open question. The preponderance of argument tends, however, to show

that it was an importation as to its origin, for not a few events

outlined in the Japanese mythology cast shadows of reminiscence upon

Korea or the Asian mainland. In its development, however, the cultus is

almost wholly Japanese. The modern forms of Shintō, as moulded by the

revivalists of the eighteenth century, are at many points notably

different from the ancient faith. At the World's Parliament of Religions

at Chicago, Shintō seemed to be the only one, and probably the last,

of the purely provincial religions.

In order to gain a picture of life in Japan before the introduction of

Chinese civilization, we must consult those photographs of the minds of

the ancient islanders which still exist in their earliest literature.

The fruits of the study of ethnology, anthropology and archaeology

greatly assist us in picturing the day-break of human life in the

Morning Land. In preparing materials for the student of the religions of

Japan many laborers have wrought in various fields, but the chief

literary honors have been taken by the English scholars, Messrs.

Satow,[1] Aston,[2] and Chamberlain.[3] These untiring workers have

opened the treasures of ancient thought in the Altaic world.[4]

Although even these archaic Japanese compositions, readable to-day only

by special scholars, are more or less affected by Chinese influences,

ideas and modes of expression, yet they are in the main faithful

reflections of the ancient life before the primitive faith of the

Japanese people was either disturbed or reduced to system in presence of

an imported religion. These monuments of history, poetry and liturgies

are the "Kojiki," or Notices of Ancient Things; the "Manyöshu" or Myriad

Leaves or Poems, and the "Norito," or Liturgies.

The Ancient Documents.

The first book, the "Kojiki," gives us the theology, cosmogony,

mythology, and very probably, in its later portions, some outlines of

history of the ancient Japanese. The "Kojiki" is the real, the dogmatic

exponent, or, if we may so say, the Bible, of Shintō. The

"Manyōshu," or Book of Myriad Poems, expresses the thoughts and

feelings; reflects the manners and customs of the primitive generations,

and, in the same sense as do the Sagas of the Scandinavians, furnishes

us unchronological but interesting and more or less real narratives of

events which have been glorified by the poets and artists. The ancient

codes of law and of ceremonial procedure are of great value, while the

"Norito" are excellent mirrors in which to see reflected the religion

called Shintō on the more active side of worship.

In a critical study, either of the general body of national tradition or

of the ancient documents, we must continually be on our guard against

the usual assumption that Chinese civilization came in earlier than it

really did. This assumption colors all modern Japanese popular ideas,

art and literature. The vice of the pupil nations surrounding the Middle

Kingdom is their desire to have it believed that Chinese letters and

culture among them is an nearly coeval with those of China as can be

made truly or falsely to appear. The Koreans, for example, would have us

believe that their civilization, based on letters and introduced by

Kishi, is "four thousand years old" and contemporaneous with China's

own, and that "the Koreans are among the oldest people of the world."[5]

The average modern Japanese wishes the date of authentic or official

history projected as far back as possible. Yet he is a modest man

compared with his mediæval ancestor, who constructed chronology out of

ink-stones. Over a thousand years ago a deliberate forgery was

officially put on paper. A whole line of emperors who never lived was

canonized, and clever penmen set down in ink long chapters which

describe what never happened.[6] Furthermore, even after, and only eight

years after the fairly honest "Kojiki" had been compiled, the book

called "Nihongi," or Chronicles of Japan, was written. All the internal

and not a little external evidence shows that the object of this book is

to give the impression that Chinese ideas, culture and learning had long

been domesticated in Japan. The "Nihongi" gives dates of events supposed

to have happened fifteen hundred years before, with an accuracy which

may be called villainous; while the "Kojiki" states that Wani, a Korean

teacher, brought the "Thousand Character Classic" to Japan in A.D. 285,

though that famous Chinese book was not composed until the sixth

century, or A.D. 550.[7]

Even to this day it is nearly impossible for an American to get a Korean

"frog in the well"[8] to understand why the genuine native life and

history, language and learning of his own peninsular country is of

greater value to the student than the pedantry borrowed from China. Why

these possess any interest to a "scholar" is a mystery to the head in

the horsehair net. Anything of value, he thinks, _must_ be on the

Chinese model. What is not Chinese is foolish and fit for women and

children only. Furthermore, Korea "always had" Chinese learning. This is

the sum of the arguments of the Korean literati, even as it used to be

of the old-time hatless Yedo scholar of shaven skull and topknot.

Despite Japanese independence and even arrogance in certain other lines,

the thought of the demolition of cherished notions of vast antiquity is

very painful. Critical study of ancient traditions is still dangerous,

even in parliamentary Nippon. Hence the unbiassed student must depend on

his own reading of and judgment upon the ancient records, assisted by

the thorough work done by the English scholars Aston, Satow,

Chamberlain, Bramsen and others.

It was the coming of Buddhism in the sixth century, and the implanting

on the soil of Japan of a system of religion in which were temples with

all that was attractive to the eye, gorgeous ritual, scriptures,

priesthood, codes of morals, rigid discipline, a system of dogmatics in

which all was made positive and clear, that made the variant myths and

legends somewhat uniform. The faith of Shaka, by winning adherents both

at the court and among the leading men of intelligence, reacted upon the

national traditions so as to compel their collection and arrangemeut

into definite formulas. In due time the mythology, poetry and ritual

was, as we have seen, committed to writing and the whole system called

Shintō, in distinction from Butsudō, the Way of the Gods from the

Way of the Buddhas. Thus we can see more clearly the outward and visible

manifestations of Shintō. In forming our judgment, however, we must

put aside those descriptions which are found in the works of European

writers, from Marco Polo and Mendez Pinto down to the year 1870. Though

these were good observers, they were often necessarily mistaken in their

deductions. For, as we shall see in our lecture on Riyōbu or Mixed

Buddhism, Shintō was, from the ninth century until late into the

nineteenth century, absorbed in Buddhism so as to be next to invisible.

Origins of the Japanese People.

Without detailing processes, but giving only results, our view of the

origin of the Japanese people and of their religion is in the main as

follows:

The oldest seats of human habitation in the Japanese Archipelago lie

between the thirtieth and thirty-eighth parallels of north latitude.

South of the thirty-fourth parallel, it seems, though without proof of

writing or from tradition, that the Malay type and blood from the far

south probably predominated, with, however, much infusion from the

northern Asian mainland.

Between the thirty-fourth and thirty-sixth parallels, and west of the

one hundred and thirty-eighth meridian of longitude, may be found what

is still the choicest, richest and most populous part of The Country

Between Heaven and Earth. Here the prevailing element was Korean and

Tartar.

To the north and east of this fair country lay the Emishi savages, or

Ainos.

In "the world" within the ken of the prehistoric dwellers in what is now

the three islands, Hondo, Kiushiu and Shikoku, there was no island of

Yezu and no China; while Korea was but slightly known, and the lands

farther westward were unheard of except as the home of distant tribes.

Three distinct lines of tradition point to the near peninsula or the

west coast of Japan as the "Heaven" whence descended the tribe which

finally grew to be dominant. The islands of Tsushima and Iki were the

stepping-stones of the migration out of which rose what may be called

the southern or Tsukushi cycle of legend, Tsukushi being the ancient

name of Kiushiu.

Idzumo is the holy land whence issued the second stream of tradition.

The third course of myth and legend leads us into Yamato, whence we

behold the conquest of the Mikado's home-land and the extension of his

name and influence into the regions east of the Hakoné Mountains,

including the great plain of Yedo, where modern Tōkiō now stands.

We shall take the term "Yamato" as the synonym of the prehistoric but

discernible beginnings of national life. It represents the seat of the

tribe whose valor and genius ultimately produced the Mikado system. It

was through this house or tribe that Japanese history took form. The

reverence for the ruler long afterward entitled "Son of Heaven" is the

strongest force in the national history. The spirit and prowess of these

early conquerors have left an indelible impress upon the language and

the mind of the nation in the phrase Yamato Damashi--the spirit of

(Divine and unconquerable) Japan.

The story of the conquest of the land, in its many phases, recalls that

of the Aryans in India, of the Hebrews in Canaan, of the Romans in

Europe and of the Germanic races in North America. The Yamato men

gradually advanced to conquest under the impulse, as they believed, of a

divine command.[9] They were sent from Takama-no-hara, the High Plain of

Heaven. Theirs was the war, of men with a nobler creed, having

agriculture and a feudal system of organization which furnished

resources for long campaigns, against hunters and fishermen. They had

improved artillery and used iron against stone. Yet they conquered and

pacified not only by superior strategy, tactics, weapons and valor, but

also by advanced fetiches and dogma. They captured the religion of their

enemies as well as their bodies, lands and resources. They claimed that

their ancestors were from Heaven, that the Sun was their kinswoman and

that their chief, or Mikado, was vicegerent of the Heavenly gods, but

that those whom they conquered were earth-born or sprung from the

terrestrial divinities.

Mikadoism the Heart of Shintō.

As success came to their arms and their chief's power was made more

sure, they developed further the dogma of the Mikado's divinity and made

worship centre in him as the earthly representative of the Sun and

Heaven. His fellow-conquerors and ministers, as fast as they were put in

lordship over conquered provinces, or indigenous chieftains who

submitted obediently to his sway or yielded graciously to his prowess,

were named as founders of temples and in later generations worshipped

and became gods.[10] One of the motives for, and one of the guiding

principles in the selections of the floating myths, was that the

ancestry of the chieftains loyal to the Mikado might be shown to be from

the heavenly gods. Both the narratives of the "Kojiki" and the liturgies

show this clearly.

The nature-worship, which was probably practised throughout the whole

archipelago, became part of the system as government and society were

made uniform on the Yamato model. It seems at least possible, if

Buddhism had not come in so soon, that the ordinary features of a

religion, dogmatic and ethical codes, would have been developed. In a

word, the Kami no Michi, or religion of the islanders in prehistoric

times before the rise of Mikadoism, must be carefully distinguished from

the politico-ecclesiasticism which the system called Shintō reveals

and demands. The early religion, first in the hands of politicians and

later under the pens and voices of writers and teachers at the Imperial

Court, became something very different from its original form. As surely

as Kōbō later captured Shintō, making material for Buddhism out

of it and overlaying it in Riyōbu, so the Yamato men made political

capital out of their own religion and that of the subject tribes. The

divine sovereign of Japan and his political church did exactly what the

state churches of Europe, both pagan and Christian, have done before and

since the Christian era.

Further, in studying the "Kojiki," we must remember that the sacred

writings sprang out of the religion, and that the system was not an

evolution from the book. Customs, ritual, faith and prayer existed long

before they were written about or recorded in ink. Moreover, the

philosophy came later than the practice, the deeds before the myths, and

the joy and terror of the visible universe before the cosmogony or

theogony, while the book-preface was probably written last of all.

The sun was first, and then came the wonder, admiration and worship of

men. The personification and pedigree of the sun were late figments. To

connect their ancestors with the sun-goddess and the heavenly gods, was

a still later enterprise of the "Mikado reverencers" of this earlier

time. Both the god-way in its early forms and Shintō in its later

development, were to them political as well as ecclesiastical institutes

of dogma. Both the religion which they themselves brought and cultivated

and the aboriginal religion which the Yamato men found, were used as

engines in the making of Mikadoism, which is the heart of Shintō.

Not until two centuries after the coming of Buddhism and of Asiatic

civilization did it occur to the Japanese to reduce to writing the

floating legends and various cycles of tradition which had grown up

luxuriantly in different parts of "the empire," or to express in the

Chinese character the prayers and thanksgivings which had been handed

down orally through many generations. These norito had already assumed

elegant literary form, rich in poetic merit, long before Chinese writing

was known. They, far more than the less certain philosophy of the

"Kojiki," are of undoubted native origin. It is nearly certain that the

prehistoric Japanese did not borrow the literary forms of the god-way

from China, as any one familiar with the short, evenly balanced and

antithetical sentences of Chinese style can see at once. The norito are

expressions, in the rhythmical and rhetorical form of worship, of the

articles of faith set forth in the historic summary which we have given.

We propose to illustrate the dogmas by quoting from the rituals in Mr.

Satow's masterly translation. The following was addressed to the

sun-goddess (Amatérasŭ no Mikami, or the

From-Heaven-Shining-Great-Deity) by the priest-envoy of the priestly

Nakatomi family sent annually to the temples at Isé, the Mecca of

Shintō. The _sevran_ referred to in the ritual is the Mikado. This

word and all the others printed in capitals are so rendered in order to

express in English the force of "an untranslatable honorific syllable,

supposed to be originally identical with a root meaning 'true,' but no

longer possessing that signification." Instead of the word "earth," that

of "country" (Japan) is used as the correlative of Heaven.

Ritual in Praise of the Sun-goddess.

He (the priest-envoy) says: Hear all of you, ministers of the

gods and sanctifiers of offerings, the great ritual, the

heavenly ritual, declared in the great presence of the

From-Heaven-Shining-Great-DEITY, whose praises are fulfilled by

setting up the stout pillars of the great HOUSE, and exalting

the cross-beams to the plain of high heaven at the sources of

the Isuzu River at Uji in Watarai.

He says: It is the sovran's great WORD. Hear all of you,

ministers of the gods and sanctifiers of offerings, the

fulfilling of praises on this seventeenth day of the sixth moon

of this year, as the morning sun goes up in glory, of the

Oho-Nakatomi, who--having abundantly piled up like a range of

hills the TRIBUTE thread and sanctified LIQUOR and FOOD

presented as of usage by the people of the deity's houses

attributed to her in the three departments and in various

countries and places, so that she deign to bless his [the

Mikado's] LIFE as a long LIFE, and his AGE as a luxuriant AGE

eternally and unchangingly as multitudinous piles of rock; may

deign to bless the CHILDREN who are born to him, and deigning to

cause to flourish the five kinds of grain which the men of a

hundred functions and the peasants of the countries in the four

quarters of the region under heaven long and peacefully

cultivate and eat, and guarding and benefiting them to deign to

bless them--is hidden by the great offering-wands.

In the Imperial City the ritual services were very imposing. Those in

expectation of the harvest were held in the great hall of the

Jin-Gi-Kuan, or Council of the Gods of Heaven and Earth. The description

of the ceremonial is given by Mr. Satow.[11] In the prayers offered to

the sun-goddess for harvest, and in thanksgiving to her for bestowing

dominion over land and sea upon her descendant the Mikado, occurs the

following passage:

I declare in the great presence of the

From-Heaven-Shining-Great-DEITY who sits in Isé. Because the

sovran great GODDESS bestows on him the countries of the four

quarters over which her glance extends, as far as the limit

where heaven stands up like a wall, as far as the bounds where

the country stands up distant, as far as the limit where the

blue clouds spread flat, as far as the bounds where the white

clouds lie away fallen--the blue sea plain as far as the limit

whither come the prows of the ships without drying poles or

paddles, the ships which continuously crowd on the great sea

plain, and the road which men travel by land, as far as the

limit whither come the horses' hoofs, with the baggage-cords

tied tightly, treading the uneven rocks and tree-roots and

standing up continuously in a long path without a break--making

the narrow countries wide and the hilly countries plain, and as

it were drawing together the distant countries by throwing many

tons of ropes over them--he will pile up the first-fruits like a

range of hills in the great presence of the sovran great

GODDESS, and will peacefully enjoy the remainder.

Phallic Symbols.

To form one's impression of the Kami no Michi wholly from the poetic

liturgies, the austere simplicity of the miyas or shrines, or the

worship at the palace or capital, would be as misleading as to gather

our ideas of the status of popular education from knowing only of the

scholars at court. Among the common people the real basis of the god-way

was ancestor-worship. From the very first this trait and habit of the

Japanese can be discerned. Their tenacity in holding to it made the

Confucian ethics more welcome when they came. Furthermore, this

reverence for the dead profoundly influenced and modified Buddhism, so

that today the altars of both religions exist in the same house, the

dead ancestors becoming both kami and buddhas.

Modern taste has removed from sight what were once the common people's

symbols of the god-way, that is of ancestor worship. The extent of the

phallus cult and its close and even vital connection with the god-way,

and the general and innocent use of the now prohibited emblems, tax

severely the credulity of the Occidental reader. The processes of the

ancient mind can hardly be understood except by vigorous power of the

imagination and by sympathy with the primeval man. To the critical

student, however, who has lived among the people and the temples devoted

to this worship, who knows how innocent and how truly sincere and even

reverent and devout in the use of these symbols the worshippers are, the

matter is measurably clear. He can understand the soil, root and flower

even while the most strange specimen is abhorrent to his taste, and

while he is most active in destroying that mental climate in which such

worship, whether native or exotic, can exist and flourish.

In none of the instances in which I have been eyewitness of the cult, of

the person officiating or of the emblem, have I had any reason to doubt

the sincerity of the worshipper. I have never had reason to look upon

the implements or the system as anything else than the endeavor of man

to solve the mystery of Being and Power. In making use of these emblems,

the Japanese worshipper simply professes his faith in such solution as

has seemed to him attainable.

That this cultus was quite general in pre-Buddhistic Japan, as in many

other ancient countries, is certain from the proofs of language,

literature, external monuments and relics which are sufficiently

numerous. Its organic connection with the god-way may be clearly shown.

To go farther back in point of time than the "Kojiki," we find that even

before the development of art in very ancient Japan, the male gods were

represented by a symbol which thus became an image of the deity himself.

This token was usually made of stone, though often of wood, and in later

times of terra-cotta, of cast and wrought iron and even of gold.[12]

Under the direct influence of such a cult, other objects appealed to the

imagination or served the temporary purpose of the worshipper as

_ex-voto_ to hang up in the shrines, such as the mushroom, awabi,

various other shells and possibly the fire-drill. It is only in the

decay of the cultus, in the change of view and centre of thought

compelled by another religion, that representations of the old emblems

ally themselves with sensualism or immorality. It is that natural

degradation of one man's god into another man's devil, which conversion

must almost of necessity bring, that makes the once revered symbol

"obscene," and talk about it become, in a descending scale, dirty, foul,

filthy, nasty. That the Japanese suffer from the moral effluvia of a

decayed cult which was once as the very vertebral column of the national

body of religion, is evident to every one who acquaints himself with

their popular speech and literature.

How closely and directly phallicism is connected with the god-way, and

why there were so many Shintō temples devoted to this latter cult and

furnished with symbols, is shown by study of the "Kojiki." The two

opening sections of this book treat of kami that were in the minds even

of the makers of the myths little more than mud and water[13]--the mere

bioplasm of deity. The seven divine generations are "born," but do

nothing except that they give Izanagi and Izanami a jewelled spear. With

this pair come differentiation of sex. It is immediately on the

apparition of the consciousness of sex that motion, action and creation

begin, and the progress of things visible ensues. The details cannot be

put into English, but it is enough, besides noting the conversation and

union of the pair, to say that the term meaning giving birth to, refers

to inanimate as well as animate things. It is used in reference to the

islands which compose the archipelago as well as to the various kami

which seem, in many cases, to be nothing more than the names of things

or places.

Fire-myths and Ritual.

Fire is, in a sense, the foundation and first necessity of civilization,

and it is interesting to study the myths as to the origin of fire, and

possibly even more interesting to compare the Greek and Japanese

stories. As we know, old-time popular etymology makes Prometheus the

fore-thinker and brother of Epimetheus the after-thinker. He is the

stealer of the fire from heaven, in order to make men share the secret

of the gods. Comparative philology tells us, however, that the Sanskrit

_Pramantha_ is a stick that produces fire. The "Kojiki" does indeed

contain what is probably the later form of the fire-myth about two

brothers, Prince Fire-Shine and Fire-Fade, which suggests both the later

Greek myth of the fore- and after-thinker and a tradition of a flood.

The first, and most probably older, myth in giving the origin of fire

does it in true Japanese style, with details of parturition. After

numerous other deities had been born of Izanagi and Izanami, it is said

"that they gave birth to the Fire-Burning-Swift-Male-Deity, another name

for whom is the Deity-Fire-Shining-Prince, and another name is the

Deity-Fire-Shining-Elder." In the other ancient literature this fire-god

is called Ho-musubi, the Fire-Producer.

Izanami yielded up her life upon the birth of her son, the fire-god; or,

as the sacred text declares, she "divinely retired"[14] into Hades. From

her corpse sprang up the pairs of gods of clay, of metal, and other kami

that possessed the potency of calming or subduing fire, for clay resists

and water extinguishes. Between the mythical and the liturgical forms of

the original narrative there is considerable variation.

The Norito entitled the "Quieting of Fire" gives the ritual form of the

myth. It contains, like so many Norito, less the form of prayer to the

Fire-Producer than a promise of offerings. Not so much by petitions as

by the inducements of gifts did the ancient worshippers hope to save the

palace of the Mikado from the fire-god's wrath. We omit from the text

those details which are offensive to modern and western taste.

I declare with the great ritual, the heavenly ritual, which was

bestowed on him at the time when, by the WORD of the Sovran's

dear progenitor and progenitrix, who divinely remain in the

plain of high heaven, they bestowed on him the region under

heaven, saying:

"Let the Sovran GRANDCHILD'S augustness tranquilly rule over the

country of fresh spikes which flourishes in the midst of the

reed-moor as a peaceful region."

When ... Izanami ... had deigned to bear the many hundred

myriads of gods, she also deigned to bear her dear youngest

child of all, the Fire-producer god, ... and said:

"My dear elder brother's augustness shall rule the upper

country; I will rule the lower country," she deigned to hide in

the rocks; and having come to the flat hills of darkness, she

thought and said: "I have come hither, having borne and left a

bad-hearted child in the upper country, ruled over by my

illustrious elder brother's augustness," and going back she bore

other children. Having borne the water-goddess, the gourd, the

river-weed, and the clay-hill maiden, four sorts of things, she

taught them with words, and made them to know, saying: "If the

heart of this bad-hearted child becomes violent, let the

water-goddess take the gourd, and the clay-hill maiden take the

river-weed, and pacify him."

In consequence of this I fulfil his praises, and say that for

the things set up, so that he may deign not to be awfully quick

of heart in the great place of the Sovran GRANDCHILD'S

augustness, there are provided bright cloth, glittering cloth,

soft cloth, and coarse cloth, and the five kinds of things; as

to things which dwell in the blue-sea plain, there are things

wide of fin and narrow of fin, down to the weeds of the shore;

as to LIQUOR, raising high the beer-jars, filling and ranging in

rows the bellies of the beer-jars, piling the offerings up, even

to rice in grain and rice in ear, like a range of hills, I

fulfil his praises with the great ritual, the heavenly ritual.

Izanagi, after shedding tears over his consort, whose death was caused

by the birth of the fire-god, slays the fire-god, and follows her into

the Root-land, or Hades, whereupon begins another round of wonderful

stories of the birth of many gods. Among these, though evidently out of

another cycle of legends, is the story of the birth of the three

gods--Fire-Shine, Fire-Climax and Fire-Fade, to which we have already

referred.

The fire-drill mentioned in the "Kojiki" suggests easily the same line

of thought with the myths of cosmogony and theogony, and it is

interesting to note that this archaic implement is still used at the

sacred temples of Isé to produce fire. After the virgin priestesses

perform the sacred dances in honor of local deities the water for their

bath is heated by fires kindled by heaps of old _harai_ or amulets made

from temple-wood bought at the Mecca of Japan. It is even probable that

the retention of the fire-drill in the service of Shintō is but a

survival of phallicism.

The liturgy for the pacification of the gods of fire is worth noticing.

The full form of the ritual, when compared with a legend in the

"Nihongi," shows that a myth was "partly devised to explain the

connection of an hereditary family of priests with the god whose shrine

they served; it is possible that the claim to be directly descended from

the god had been disputed." The Norito first recites poetically the

descent of Ninigi, the grandchild of the sun-goddess from heaven, and

the quieting of the turbulent kami.

I (the diviner), declare: When by the WORD of the progenitor and

progenitrix, who divinely remaining in the plain of high heaven,

deigned to make the beginning of things, they divinely deigned

to assemble the many hundred myriads of gods in the high city of

heaven, and deigned divinely to take counsel in council, saying:

"When we cause our Sovran GRANDCHILD'S augustness to leave

heaven's eternal seat, to cleave a path with might through

heaven's manifold clouds, and to descend from heaven, with

orders tranquilly to rule the country of fresh spikes, which

flourishes in the midst of the reed-moor as a peaceful country,

what god shall we send first to divinely sweep away, sweep away

and subdue the gods who are turbulent in the country of fresh

spikes;" all the gods pondered and declared: "You shall send

Aménohohi's augustness, and subdue them," declared

they. Wherefore they sent him down from heaven, but he did not

declare an answer; and having next sent Takémikuma's augustness,

he also, obeying his father's words, did not declare an

answer. Amé-no-waka-hiko also, whom they sent, did not declare

an answer, but immediately perished by the calamity of a bird on

high. Wherefore they pondered afresh by the WORD of the heavenly

gods, and having deigned to send down from heaven the two

pillars of gods, Futsunushi and Takémika-dzuchi's augustness,

who having deigned divinely to sweep away, and sweep away, and

deigned divinely to soften, and soften the gods who were

turbulent, and silenced the rocks, trees, and the least leaf of

herbs likewise that had spoken, they caused the Sovran

GRANDCHILD'S augustness to descend from heaven.

I fulfil your praises, saying: As to the OFFERINGS set up, so

that the sovran gods who come into the heavenly HOUSE of the

Sovran GRANDCHILD'S augustness, which, after he had fixed upon

as a peaceful country--the country of great Yamato where the sun

is high, as the centre of the countries of the four quarters

bestowed upon him when he was thus sent down from

heaven--stoutly planting the HOUSE-pillars on the bottom-most

rocks, and exalting the cross-beams to the plain of high heaven,

the builders had made for his SHADE from the heavens and SHADE

from the sun, and wherein he will tranquilly rule the country as

a peaceful country--may, without deigning to be turbulent,

deigning to be fierce, and deigning to hurt, knowing, by virtue

of their divinity, the things which were begun in the plain of

high heaven, deigning to correct with Divine-correcting and

Great-correcting, remove hence out to the clean places of the

mountain-streams which look far away over the four quarters, and

rule them as their own place. Let the Sovran gods tranquilly

take with clear HEARTS, as peaceful OFFERINGS and sufficient

OFFERINGS the great OFFERINGS which I set up, piling them upon

the tables like a range of hills, providing bright cloth,

glittering cloth, soft cloth, and coarse cloth; as a thing to

see plain in--a mirror: as things to play with--beads: as things

to shoot off with--a bow and arrows: as a thing to strike and

cut with--a sword: as a thing which gallops out--a horse; as to

LIQUOR--raising high the beer-jars, filling and ranging in rows

the bellies of the beer-jars, with grains of rice and ears; as

to the things which dwell in the hills--things soft of hair, and

things rough of hair; as to the things which grow in the great

field plain--sweet herbs and bitter herbs; as to the things

which dwell in the blue sea plain--things broad of fin and

things narrow of fin, down to weeds of the offing and weeds of

the shore, and without deigning to be turbulent, deigning to be

fierce, and deigning to hurt, remove out to the wide and clean

places of the mountain-streams, and by virtue of their divinity

be tranquil.

In this ritual we find the origin of evil attributed to wicked kami, or

gods. To get rid of them is to be free from the troubles of life. The

object of the ritual worship was to compel the turbulent and malevolent

kami to go out from human habitations to the mountain solitudes and rest

there. The dogmas of both god-possession and of the power of exorcism

were not, however, held exclusively by the high functionaries of the

official religion, but were part of the faith of all the people. To this

day both the tenets and the practices are popular under various forms.

Besides the twenty-seven Norito which are found in the Yengishiki,

published at the opening of the tenth century, there are many others

composed for single occasions. Examples of these are found in the

Government Gazettes. One celebrates the Mikado's removal from Kiōto

to Tōkiō, another was written and recited to add greater solemnity

to the oath which he took to govern according to modern liberal

principles and to form a national parliament. To those Japanese whose

first idea of duty is loyalty to the emperor, Shintō thus becomes a

system of patriotism exalted to the rank of a religion. Even Christian

natives of Japan can use much of the phraseology of the Norito while

addressing their petitions on behalf of their chief magistrate to the

King of kings.

The primitive worship of the sun, of light, of fire, has left its

impress upon the language and in vernacular art and customs. Among

scores of derivations of Japanese words (often more pleasing than

scientific), in which the general term _hi_ enters, is that which finds

in the word for man, _hito_, the meaning of "light-bearer." On the face

of the broad terminal tiles of the house-roofs, we still see moulded the

river-weed, with which the Clay-Hill Maiden pacified the Fire-God. On

the frontlet of the warrior's helmet, in the old days of arrow and

armor, glittered in brass on either side of his crest the same symbol of

power and victory.

Having glanced at the ritual of Shintō, let us now examine the

teachings of its oldest book.

CHAPTER III - "THE KOJIKI" AND ITS TEACHINGS

"Japan is not a land where men need pray,

For 'tis itself divine:

Yet do I lift my voice in prayer..."

Hitomaro, + A.D. 737.

"Now when chaos had begun to condense, but force and form were

not yet manifest, and there was naught named, naught done, who

could know its shape? Nevertheless Heaven and Earth first

parted, and the three Deities performed the commencement of

creation; the Passive and Active Essences then developed, and

the Two Spirits became the ancestors of all things."--Preface of

Yasumarō (A.D. 712) to the "Kojiki."

"These, the 'Kojiki' and 'Nihongi' are their [the Shintōists]

canonical books, ... and almost their every word is considered

undeniable truth."

"The Shintō faith teaches that God inspired the foundation of

the Mikadoate, and that it is therefore sacred."--Kaburagi.

"We now reverently make our prayer to Them [Our Imperial

Ancestors] and to our Illustrious Father [Komei, + 1867], and

implore the help of Their Sacred Spirits, and make to Them

solemn oath never at this time nor in the future to fail to be

an example to Our subjects in the observance of the Law

[Constitution] hereby established."--Imperial oath of the

Emperor Mutsuhito in the sanctuary in the Imperial Palace,

Tōkiō, February 11, 1889.

"Shintō is not our national religion. A faith existed before

it, which was its source. It grew out of superstitious teaching

and mistaken tradition. The history of the rise of Shintō

proves this."--T. Matsugami.

"Makoto wo moté KAMI NO MICHI wo oshiyuréba nari." (Thou

teachest the way of God in truth.)--Mark xii. 14.

"Ware wa Micni nuri, Mukoto nari, Inochi nari."--John

xiv. 6.--The New Testament in Japanese.

CHAPTER III - "THE KOJIKI" AND ITS TEACHINGS

"The Kojiki" mid its Myths of Cosmogony.

As to the origin of the "Kojiki," we have in the closing sentences of

the author's preface the sole documentary authority explaining its scope

and certifying to its authenticity. Briefly the statement is this: The

"Heavenly Sovereign" or Mikado, Temmu (A.D. 673-686), lamenting that the

records possessed by the chief families were "mostly amplified by empty

falsehoods," and fearing that "the grand foundation of the monarchy"

would be destroyed, resolved to preserve the truth. He therefore had the

records carefully examined, compared, and their errors eliminated. There

happened to be in his household a man of marvellous memory, named Hiyéda

Aré, who could repeat, without mistake, the contents of any document he

had ever seen, and never forgot anything which he had heard. This person

was duly instructed in the genuine traditions and old language of former

ages, and made to repeat them until he had the whole by heart. "Before

the undertaking was completed," which probably means before it could be

committed to writing, "the emperor died, and for twenty-five years Aré's

memory was the sole depository of what afterwards received the title of

'Kojiki.' ... At the end of this interval the Empress Gemmiō ordered

Yasumarō to write it down from the mouth of Aré, which accounts for

the completion of the manuscript in so short a time as four months and a

half,"[1] in A.D. 712.

It is from the "Kojiki" that we obtain most of our ideas of ancient life

and thought. The "Nihongi," or Chronicles of Japan, expressed very

largely in Chinese phrases and with Chinese technical and philosophical

terms, further assists us to get a measurably correct idea of what is

called The Divine Age. Of the two books, however, the "Kojiki" is much

more valuable as a true record, because, though rude in style and

exceedingly naïve in expression, and by no means free from Chinese

thoughts and phrases, it is marked by a genuinely Japanese cast of

thought and method of composition. Instead of the terse, carefully

measured, balanced, and antithetical sentences of correct Chinese, those

of the "Kojiki" are long and involved, and without much logical

connection. The "Kojiki" contains the real notions, feelings, and

beliefs of Japanese who lived before the eighth century.

Remembering that prefaces are, like porticos, usually added last of all,

we find that in the beginning all things were in chaos. Heaven and earth

were not separated. The world substance floated in the cosmic mass, like

oil on water or a fish in the sea. Motion in some way began. The

ethereal portions sublimed and formed the heavens; the heavier residuum

became the present earth. In the plain of high heaven, when the heaven

and earth began, were born three kami who "hid their bodies," that is,

passed away or died. Out of the warm mould of the earth a germ sprouted,

and from this were born two kami, who also were born alone, and died.

After these heavenly kami came forth what are called the seven divine

generations, or line of seven kami.[2]

To express the opening lines of the "Kojiki" in terms of our own speech

and in the moulds of Western thought, we may say that matter existed

before mind and the gods came forth, as it were, by spontaneous

evolution. The first thing that appeared out of the warm earth-muck was

like a rush-sprout, and this became a kami, or god. From this being came

forth others, which also produced beings, until there were perfect

bodies, sex and differentiation of powers. The "Nihongi," however, not

only gives a different view of this evolution basing it upon the dualism

of Chinese philosophy--that is, of the active and passive

principles--and uses Chinese technical terminology, but gives lists of

kami that differ notably from those in the "Kojiki." This latter fact

seems to have escaped the attention of those who write freely about what

they imagine to be the early religion of the Japanese.[3]

After this introduction, in which "Dualities, Trinities, and Supreme

Deities" have been discovered by writers unfamiliar with the genius of

the Japanese language, there follows an account of the creation of the

habitable earth by Izanami and Izanagi, whose names mean the

Male-Who-Invites and the Female-Who-Invites. The heavenly kami commanded

these two gods to consolidate and give birth to the drifting land.

Standing on the floating bridge of heaven, the male plunged his

jewel-spear into the unstable waters beneath, stirring them until they

gurgled and congealed. When he drew forth the spear, the drops trickling

from its point formed an island, ever afterward called Onokoro-jima, or

the Island of the Congealed Drop. Upon this island they descended. The

creative pair, or divine man and woman, now separated to make a journey

round the island, the male to the left, the female to the right. At

their meeting the female spoke first: "How joyful to meet a lovely man!"

The male, offended that the woman had spoken first, required the circuit

to be repeated. On their second meeting, the man cried out: "How joyful

to meet a lovely woman!" This island on which they had descended was the

first of several which they brought into being. In poetry it is the

Island of the Congealed Drop. In common geography it is identified as

Awaji, at the entrance of the Inland Sea. Thence followed the creation

of the other visible objects in nature.

Izanagi's Visit to Hades and Results.

After the birth of the god of fire, which nearly destroyed the mother's

life, Izanami fled to the land of roots or of darkness, that is into

Hades. Izanagi, like a true Orpheus, followed his Eurydice and beseeched

her to come back to earth to complete with him the work of creation. She

parleyed so long with the gods of the underworld that her consort,

breaking off a tooth of his comb, lighted it as a torch and rushed in.

He found her putrefied body, out of which had been born the eight gods

of thunder. Horrified at the awful foulness which he found in the

underworld, he rushed up and out, pursued by the Ugly-Female-of-Hades.

By artifices that bear a wonderful resemblance to those in Teutonic

fairy tales, he blocked up the way. His head-dress, thrown at his

pursuer, turned into grapes which she stopped to eat. The teeth of his

comb sprouted into a bamboo forest, which detained her. The three

peaches were used as projectiles; his staff which stuck up in the ground

became a gate, and a mighty rock was used to block up the narrow pass

through the mountains. Each of these objects has its relation to

place-names in Idzumo or to superstitions that are still extant. The

peaches and the rocks became gods, and on this incident, by which the

beings in Hades were prevented from advance and successful mischief on

earth, is founded one of the norito which Mr. Satow gives in condensed

form. The names of the three gods,[4] Youth and Maiden of the Many

Road-forkings, and Come-no-further Gate, are expressed and invoked in

the praises bestowed on them in connection with the offerings.

He (the priest) says: I declare in the presence of the sovran

gods, who like innumerable piles of rocks sit closing up the way

in the multitudinous road-forkings.... I fulfil your praises by

declaring your NAMES, Youth and Maiden of the Many Road-forkings

and Come-no-further Gate, and say: for the OFFERINGS set up that

you may prevent [the servants of the monarch] from being

poisoned by and agreeing with the things which shall come

roughly-acting and hating from the Root-country, the

Bottom-country, that you may guard the bottom (of the gate) when

they come from the bottom, guard the top when they come from the

top, guarding with nightly guard and with daily guard, and may

praise them--peacefully take the great OFFERINGS which are set

up by piling them up like a range of hills, that is to say,

providing bright cloth, etc., ... and sitting closing-up the way

like innumerable piles of rock in the multitudinous

road-forkings, deign to praise the sovran GRANDCHILD'S

augustness eternally and unchangingly, and to bless his age as a

luxuriant AGE.

Retreating to another part of the world--that is, into southwestern

Japan--Izanami purified himself by bathing in a stream. While washing

himself,[5] many kami were borne from the rinsings of his person, one of

them, from the left eye (the left in Japanese is always the honorable

side), being the far-shining or heaven-illuminating kami, whose name,

Amatérasŭ, or Heaven-shiner, is usually translated "The Sun-goddess."

This personage is the centre of the system of Shintō. The creation of

gods by a process of cleansing has had a powerful effect on the

Japanese, who usually associate cleanliness of the body (less moral,

than physical) with godliness.

It is not necessary to detail further the various stories which make up

the Japanese mythology. Some of these are lovely and beautiful, but

others are horrible and disgusting, while the dominant note throughout

is abundant filthiness.

Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, who has done the world such good

service in translating into English the whole of the Kojiki, and

furnishing it with learned commentary and notes, has well said:

"The shocking obscenity of word and act to which the 'Records'

bear witness is another ugly feature which must not quite be

passed over in silence. It is true that decency, as we

understand it, is a very modern product, and it is not to be

looked for in any society in the barbarous stage. At the same

time, the whole range of literature might perhaps be ransacked

for a parallel to the naïve filthiness of the passage forming

Sec. IV. of the following translation, or to the extraordinary

topic which the hero Yamato-Také and his mistress Miyadzŭ are

made to select as the theme of poetical repartee. One passage

likewise would lead us to suppose that the most beastly crimes

were commonly committed."[6]

Indeed, it happens in several instances that the thread by which the

marvellous patchwork of unrelated and varying local myths is joined

together, is an indecent love story.

A thousand years after the traditions of the Kojiki had been committed

to writing, and orthodox Shintō commentators had learned science from

the Dutch at Nagasaki, the stirring of the world mud by Izanagi's

spear[7] was gravely asserted to be the cause of the diurnal revolution

of the earth upon its axis, the point of the axis being still the jewel

spear.[8] Onogoro-jima, or the Island of the Congealed Drop, was

formerly at the north pole,[9] but subsequently removed to its present

position. How this happened is not told.

Life in Japan During the Divine Age.

Now that the Kojiki is in English and all may read it, we can clearly

see who and what were the Japanese in the ages before letters and

Chinese civilization; for these stories of the kami are but legendary

and mythical accounts of men and women. One could scarcely recognize in

the islanders of eleven or twelve hundred years ago, the polished,

brilliant, and interesting people of to-day. Yet truth compels us to say

that social morals in Dai Nippon, even with telegraphs and railways, are

still more like those of ancient days than readers of rhapsodies by

summer tourists might suppose. These early Japanese, indeed, were

possibly in a stage of civilization somewhat above that of the most

advanced of the American Indians when first met by Europeans, for they

had a rude system of agriculture and knew the art of fashioning iron

into tools and weapons. Still, they were very barbarous, certainly as

much so as our Germanic "forbears." They lived in huts. They were

without writing or commerce, and were able to count only to ten.[10]

Their cruelty was as revolting as that of the savage tribes of America.

The family was in its most rudimentary stage, with little or no

restraint upon the passions of men. Children of the same father, but not

of the same mother, could intermarry. The instances of men marrying

their sisters or aunts were very common. There was no art, unless the

making of clay images, to take the place of the living human victims

buried up to their necks in earth and left to starve on the death of

their masters,[11] may be designated as such.

The Magatama, or curved jewels, being made of ground and polished stone

may be called jewelry; but since some of these prehistoric ornaments dug

up from the ground are found to be of jade, a mineral which does not

occur in Japan, it is evident that some of these tokens of culture came

from the continent. Many other things produced by more or less skilled

mechanics, the origin of which is poetically recounted in the story of

the dancing of Uzumé before the cave in which the Sun-goddess had hid

herself,[12] were of continental origin. Evidently these men of the

god-way had passed the "stone age," and, probably without going through

the intermediate bronze age, were artificers of iron and skilled in its

use. Most of the names of metals and of many other substances, and the

terms used in the arts and sciences, betray by their tell-tale etymology

their Chinese origin. Indeed, it is evident that some of the leading

kami were born in Korea or Tartary.

Then as now the people in Japan loved nature, and were quickly sensitive

to her beauty and profoundly in sympathy with her varied phenomena. In

the mediæval ages, Japanese Wordsworths are not unknown.[13] Sincerely

they loved nature, and in some respects they seemed to understand the

character of their country far better than the alien does or can. Though

a land of wonderful beauty, the Country of Peaceful Shores is enfolded

in powers of awful destructiveness. With the earthquake and volcano, the

typhoon and the tidal wave, beauty and horror alternate with a swiftness

that is amazing.

Probably in no portion of the earth are the people and the land more

like each other or apparently better acquainted with each other. Nowhere

are thought and speech more reflective of the features of the landscape.

Even after ten centuries, the Japanese are, in temperament, what the

Kojiki reveals them to have been in their early simplicity. Indeed, just

as the modern Frenchman, down beneath his outward environments and his

habiliments cut and fitted yesterday, is intrinsically the same Gaul

whom Julius Cæsar described eighteen hundred years ago, so the gentleman

of Tōkiō or Kiōto is, in his mental make-up, wonderfully like

his ancestors described by the first Japanese Stanley, who shed the

light of letters upon the night of unlettered Japan and darkest Dai

Nippon.

The Kojiki reveals to us, likewise, the childlike religious ideas of the

islanders. Heaven lay, not about but above them in their infancy, yet

not far away. Although in the "Notices," it is "the high plain of

heaven," yet it is just over their heads, and once a single pillar

joined it and the earth. Later, the idea was, that it was held up by the

pillar-gods of the wind, and to them norito were recited. "The great

plain of the blue sea" and "the land of luxuriant reeds" form "the

world"--which means Japan. The gods are only men of prowess or renown. A

kami is anything wonderful--god or man, rock or stream, bird or snake,

whatever is surprising, sensational, or phenomenal, as in the little

child's world of to-day. There is no sharp line dividing gods from men,

the natural from the supernatural, even as with the normal uneducated

Japanese of to-day. As for the kami or gods, they have all sorts of

characters; some of them being rude and ill-mannered, many of them

beastly and filthy, while others are noble and benevolent. The

attributes of moral purity, wisdom and holiness, cannot be, and in the

original writings are not, ascribed to them; but they were strong and

had power. In so far as they had power they were called kami or gods,

whether celestial or terrestrial. Among the kami--the one term under

which they are all included--there were heavenly bodies, mountains,

rivers, trees, rocks and animals, because those also were supposed to

possess force, or at least some kind of influence for good or evil. Even

peaches, as we have seen, when transformed into rocks, became gods.[14]

That there was worship with awe, reverence, and fear, and that the

festivals and sacrifices had two purposes, one of propitiating the

offended Kami and the other of purifying the worshipper, may be seen in

the norito or liturgies, some of which are exceedingly beautiful.[15] In

them the feelings of the gods are often referred to. Sometimes their

characters are described. Yet one looks in vain in either the "Notices,"

poems, or liturgies for anything definite in regard to these deities, or

concerning morals or doctrines to be held as dogmas. The first gods come

into existence after evolution of the matter of which they are composed

has taken place. The later gods are sometimes able to tell who are their

progenitors, sometimes not. They live and fight, eat and drink, and give

vent to their appetites and passions, and then they die; but exactly

what becomes of them after they die, the record does not state. Some are

in heaven, some on the earth, some in Hades. The underworld of the first

cycle of tradition is by no means that of the second.[16] Some of the

kami are in the water, or on the water, or in the air. As for man, there

is no clear statement as to whether he is to have any future life or

what is to become of him, though the custom or jun-shi, or dying with

the master, points to a sort of immortality such as the early Greeks and

the Iroquois believed in.

It would task the keenest and ablest Shintōist to deduce or construct

a system of theology, or of ethics, or of anthropology from the mass of

tradition so full of gaps and discord as that found in the Kojiki, and

none has done it. Nor do the inaccurate, distorted, and often almost

wholly factitious translations, so-called, of French and other writers,

who make versions which hit the taste of their occidental readers far

better than they express the truth, yield the desired information. Like

the end strands of a new spider's web, the lines of information on most

vital points are still "in the air."

The Ethics of the God-way.

There are no codes of morals inculcated in the god-way, for even its

modern revivalists and exponents consider that morals are the invention

of wicked people like the Chinese; while the ancient Japanese were pure

in thought and act. They revered the gods and obeyed the Mikado, and

that was the chief end of man, in those ancient times when Japan was the

world and Heaven was just above the earth. Not exactly on Paul's

principle of "where there is no law there is no transgression," but

utterly scouting the idea that formulated ethics were necessary for

these pure-minded people, the modern revivalists of Shintō teach that

all that is "of faith" now is to revere the gods, keep the heart pure,

and follow its dictates.[17] The naïveté of the representatives of

Shintō at Chicago in A.D. 1893, was almost as great as that of the

revivalists who wrote when Japan was a hermit nation.

The very fact that there was no moral commandments, not even of loyalty

or obedience such as Confucianism afterward promulgated and formulated,

is proof to the modern Shintōist that the primeval Japanese were pure

and holy; they did right, naturally, and hence he does not hesitate to

call Japan, the Land of the Gods, the Country of the Holy Spirits, the

Region Between Heaven and Earth, the Island of the Congealed Drop, the

Sun's Nest, the Princess Country, the Land of Great Peace, the Land of

Great Gentleness, the Mikado's Empire, the Country ruled by a Theocratic

Dynasty. He considers that only with the vice brought over from the

Continent of Asia were ethics both imported and made necessary.[18]

All this has been solemnly taught by famous Shintō scholars of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is still practically

promulgated in the polemic Shintō literature of to-day, even after

the Kojiki has been studied and translated into European languages. The

Kojiki shows that whatever the men may have been or done, the gods were

abominably obscene, and both in word and deed were foul and revolting,

utterly opposed in act to those reserves of modesty or standards of

shame that exist even among the cultivated Japanese to-day.[19] Even

among the Ainos, whom the Japanese look upon as savages, there is still

much of the obscenity of speech which belongs to all society[20] in a

state of barbarism; but it has been proved that genuine modesty is a

characteristic of the Aino women.[21] A literal English translation of

the Kojiki, however, requires an abundant use of Latin in order to

protect it from the grasp of the law in English-speaking Christendom. In

Chamberlain's version, the numerous cesspools are thus filled up with a

dead language, and the road is constructed for the reader, who likes the

language of Edmund Spencer, of William Tyndale and of John Ruskin kept

unsoiled.

The cruelty which marks this early stage shows that though moral codes

did not exist, the Buddhist and Confucian missionary were for Japan

necessities of the first order. Comparing the result to-day with the

state of things in the early times, one must award high praise to

Buddhism that it has made the Japanese gentle, and to Confucianism that

it has taught the proprieties of life, so that the polished Japanese

gentleman, as to courtesy, is in many respects the peer and at some

external points the superior, of his European confrère.

Another fact, made repulsively clear, about life in ancient Japan, is

that the high ideals of truth and honor, characteristic at least of the

Samurai of modern times, were utterly unknown in the days of the kami.

Treachery was common. Instances multiply on the pages of the Kojiki

where friend betrayed friend. The most sacred relations of life were

violated. Altogether these were the darkest ages of Japan, though, as

among the red men of America, there were not wanting many noble examples

of stoical endurance, of courage, and of power nobly exerted for the

benefit of others.

The Rise of Mikadoism.

Nevertheless we must not forget that the men of the early age of the

Kami no Michi conquered the aborigines by superior dogmas and fetiches,

as well as by superior weapons. The entrance of these heroes, invaders

from the highlands of the Asian continent, by way of Korea, was

relatively a very influential factor of progress, though not so

important as was the Aryan descent upon India, or the Norman invasion of

England, for the aboriginal tribes were vastly lower in the scale of

humanity than their subduers. Where they found savagery they introduced

barbarism, which, though unlettered and based on the sword, was a vast

improvement over what may be called the geological state of man, in

which he is but slightly raised above the brutes.

For the proofs from the shell heaps, combined with the reflected

evidences of folk-lore, show, that cannibalism[22] was common in the

early ages, and that among the aboriginal hill tribes it lingered after

the inhabitants of the plain and shore had been subdued. The conquerors,

who made themselves paramount over the other tribes and who developed

the Kami religion, abolished this relic of savagery, and gave order

where there had been chronic war. Another thing that impresses us

because of its abundant illustrations, is the prevalence of human

sacrifices. The very ancient folk-lore shows that beautiful maidens were

demanded by the "sea-gods" in propitiation, or were devoured by the

"dragons." These human victims were either chosen or voluntarily

offered, and in some instances were rescued from their fate by

chivalrous heroes[23] from among the invaders.

These gods of the sea, who anciently were propitiated by the sacrifice

of human beings, are the same to whom Japanese sailors still pray,

despite their Buddhism. The title of the efficient victims was

_hitoga-shira_, or human pillars. Instances of this ceremony, where men

were lowered into the water and drowned in order to make the sure

foundation for bridges, piers or sea-walls, or where they were buried

alive in the earth in order to lay the right bases for walls or castles,

are quite numerous, and most of the local histories contain specific

traditions.[24] These traditions, now transfigured, still survive in

customs that are as beautiful as they are harmless. To reformers of

pre-Buddhistic days, belongs the credit of the abolition of jun-shi, or

dying with the master by burial alive, as well as of the sacrifice to

dragons and sea-gods.

Strange as it may seem, before Buddhism captured and made use of

Shintō for its own purposes (just as it stands ready to-day to absorb

Christianity by making Jesus one of the Palestinian avatars of the

Buddha), the house or tribe of Yamato, with its claim to descent from

the heavenly gods, and with its Mikado or god-ruler, had given to the

Buddhists a precedent and potent example. Shintō, as a state religion

or union of politics and piety, with its system of shrines and

festivals, and in short the whole Kami no Michi, or Shintō as we know

it, from the sixth to the eighth century, was in itself (in part at

least), a case of the absorption of one religion by another.

In short, the Mikado tribe or Yamato clan did, in reality, capture the

aboriginal religion, and turn it into a great political machine. They

attempted syncretism and succeeded in their scheme. They added to their

own stock of dogma and fetich that of the natives. Only, while

recognizing the (earth) gods of the aborigines they proclaimed the

superiority of the Mikado as representative and vicegerent of Heaven,

and demanded that even the gods of the earth, mountain, river, wind, and

thunder and lightning should obey him. Not content, however, with

absorbing and corrupting for political purposes the primitive faith of

the aborigines, the invaders corrupted their own religion by carrying

the dogma of the divinity and infallibility of the Mikado too far.

Stopping short of no absurdity, they declared their chief greater even

than the heavenly gods, and made their religion centre in him rather

than in his alleged heavenly ancestors, or "heaven." In the interest of

politics and conquest, and for the sake of maintaining the prestige of

their tribe and clan, these "Mikado-reverencers" of early ages advanced

from dogma to dogma, until their leader was virtually chief god in a

great pantheon.

A critical native Japanese, student of the Kojiki and of the early

writings, Professor Kumi, formerly of the Imperial University in

Tōkiō, has brought to light abundant evidence to show that the

aboriginal religion found by the Yamato conquerors was markedly

different at many vital points, from that which was long afterward

called Shintō.

If the view of recent students of anthropology be correct, that the

elements dominating the population in ancient Japan were in the south,

Malay; in the north, Aino; and in the central region, or that occupied

by the Yamato men, Korean; then, these continental invaders may have

been worshippers of Heaven and have possessed a religion closely akin to

that of ancient China with its monotheism. It is very probable also that

they came into contact with tribes or colonies of their

fellow-continentals from Asia. These tribes, hunters, fishermen, or rude

agriculturists--who had previously reached Japan--practised many rites

and ceremonies which were much like those of the new invaders. It is

certain also, as we have seen, that the Yamato men made ultimate

conquest and unification of all the islanders, not merely by the

superiority of their valor and of their weapons of iron, but also by

their dogmas. After success in battle, and the first beginnings of rude

government, they taught their conquered subjects or over-awed vassals,

that they were the descendants of the heavenly gods; that their

ancestors had come down from heaven; find that their chief or Mikado was

a god. According to the same dogmatics, the aborigines were descendants

of the earth-born gods, and as such must obey the descendants of the

heavenly gods, and their vicegerent upon the earth, the Mikado.

Purification of Offences.

These heaven-descended Yamato people were in the main agriculturists,

though of a rude order, while the outlying tribes were mostly hunters

and fishermen; and many of the rituals show the class of crimes which

nomads, or men of unsettled life, would naturally commit against their

neighbors living in comparatively settled order. It is to be noted that

in the god-way the origin of evil is to be ascribed to evil gods. These

kami pollute, and pollution is iniquity. From this iniquity the people

are to be purged by the gods of purification, to whom offerings are duly

made.

He who would understand the passion for cleanliness which characterizes

the Japanese must look for its source in their ancient religion. The

root idea of the word _tsumi_, which Mr. Satow translated as "offence,"

is that of pollution. On this basis, of things pure and things defiling,

the ancient teachers of Shintō made their classification of what was

good and what was bad. From the impression of what was repulsive arose

the idea of guilt.

In rituals translated by Mr. Satow, the list of offences is given and

the defilements are to be removed to the nether world, or, in common

fact, the polluted objects and the expiatory sacrifices are to be thrown

into the rivers and thence carried to the sea, where they fall to the

bottom of the earth. The following norito clearly shows this.

Furthermore, as Mr. Satow, the translator, points out, this ritual

contains the germ of criminal law, a whole code of which might have been

evolved and formulated under Shintō, had not Buddhism arrested its

growth.