Kami

He never imagined that it would be more profitable to breed them.

But the fact was presently discovered by one of his customers, a man named Kiriyama, then in the service of the Lord Aoyama Shimadzuki no Kami.

Kiriyama had bought from Chuzo several suzumushi, which were kept and fed in a jar half-filled with moist clay.

They died in the cold season, but during the following summer Kiriyama was agreeably surprised to find the jar newly populated with a number of young ones, evidently born from eggs which the first prisoners had left in the clay.

One of the guild, known as Mushi-ya Kojiro, Kojiro the Insect Merchant, who did business in Honjoku, returning to the city after a short visit to his native place in Kazusa, brought back with him a number of Kirigirisou which he sold at a good profit.

Although long famous elsewhere, these insects had never before been sold in Yedo.

When Mizu Echizen no Kami, says the chronicle, became Machi Bugyo, or Chief Magistrate, of Yedo, the law limiting the number of insect dealers to 36 was abolished.

Whether the guild was subsequently dissolved, the chronicle fails to mention.

Jinja Honcho now claims that 119 million Japanese people are official followers of Shinto, and they actually use that terminology on their website, official followers.

However, scholars of Japanese religion like John Breen and Mark Tuwin note that all the indications are that Shinto, as opposed to, say, Jinja or Kami, has no meaning at all to the vast majority of Japanese people.

So remember from previous episodes in this series that most Japanese people do not identify as Shinto even if they regularly attend Shinto shrines, and many more do not distinguish between Shinto and Buddhism.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, we can see that Jinja Honcho is making an indigenous argument.

There is some historical precedent to universalizing Shinto.

A Japanese intellectual named Ogasawara Shozo was one of the leaders of the overseas shrine projects that I mentioned earlier.

Ogasawara envisioned Kami as a universal spiritual force and Shinto as an inclusive polytheistic tradition that could incorporate not just Japanese colonies, but all nations and their native traditions into a pluralistic global Shinto society.

For example, Ogasawara was heavily invested in a debate over which Kami to enshrine in the chosen shrine in Seoul, Korea.

Some shrines were expressly anti-Buddhist and advocated for the strict separation of kami veneration and Buddhist practice.

A great example of a counter-cultural tradition is Yoshida Shinto.

As I mentioned episode one, the Yoshida were an influential family of Shinto priests who worked in the Ministry of Kami Affairs for centuries.

After the devastating Onin War in the late 15th century, the ministry was in a bad state, and Yoshida Kanetomo saw an opportunity to claim even greater power and authority for his family.

That's when he publicized his own version of Shinto, which he claimed was a secret ancient tradition given to his family by Amaterasu herself.

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as private religious organizations.

Despite this period of violence, if we fast-forward to today, Shinto and Buddhism seem to have found a new normal Shinto shrines are where you go to venerate the Kami, cleanse impurities, express gratitude, ask for blessings, and celebrate major milestones.

The term kami can also refer to impersonal divine forces.

A kami might be the spirit of a natural feature like a river or mountain, a natural force like wind, thunder, or fire.

Kami may also inhabit sacred man-made objects such as mirrors, swords, and comma-shaped jewels called magatama.

These objects also make up the three imperial regalia, sacred treasures passed down to the emperor by Amaterasu to signify his divine authority.

Even certain humans can become kami after they die, such as Tenjin, the kami of education.

It's sometimes said that there are 8 million kami, in other words, countless kami.

However, kami are very different from the concept of gods in other religions, especially in religions like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, in which God is transcendent.

Kami are down to earth.

Elevated to divine status after they died.

What's important here is that the Kami are not transcendent beings living in some separate supernatural reality from humans.

Kami are thought to live in the real world with humans, inhabiting objects, inhabiting natural phenomena like hot springs, or even natural features.

Mount Fuji, for example, the mountain itself, is considered by many Japanese to be a kami.

Okay, so if stars are kami, some sort of tangible being that share Mario's reality, then what's going on here? spirit possession.

Romans would sacrifice to the gods, giving them something valuable, so that the gods will show favor in return.

In Japanese Shinto, people petition kami at particular shrines.

If you want to do well on your next exam, petition Tenjin at his shrine, the Kami of Education and Scholarship.

The plain wood soon turns, under the action of rain and sun, to a natural gray, varying according to surface exposure from the silvery tone of birch bark to the somber gray of basalt.

So shaped and so tinted, the isolated country yashiro may seem less like a work of joinery than a feature of the scenery, a rural form related to nature as closely as rocks and trees, a something that came into existence only as a manifestation of Ohotsuchi no Kami, the earth god, the primeval divinity of the land.

Why certain architectural forms produce in the beholder a feeling of weirdness is a question about which I should like to theorize some day.

At present I shall venture only to say that Shinto shrines evoke such a feeling.

I have cut my hair for his sake, but the deeper relation between us cannot be cut in this, nor yet in another life.

Footnote.

Kami wa kitemo, nise made kaketa, fukai nishi wa kiru mono ka.

Literally, hair have cut although, two existences until, deep relation cut how can it be.

The plain wood soon turns, under the action of rain and sun, to a natural gray, varying according to surface exposure from the silvery tone of birch bark to the somber gray of basalt.

So shaped and so tinted, the isolated country yashiro may seem less like a work of joinery than a feature of the scenery, a rural form related to nature as closely as rocks and trees, a something that came into existence only as a manifestation of Ohotsuchi no Kami, the earth god, the primeval divinity of the land.

Why certain architectural forms produce in the beholder a feeling of weirdness is a question about which I should like to theorize some day.

At present I shall venture only to say that Shinto shrines evoke such a feeling.

Those Shinto terms, which we loosely render by the words temple and shrine, are really untranslatable.

I mean that the Japanese ideas attaching to them cannot be conveyed by translation.

The so-called august house of the Kami is not so much a temple in the classic meaning of the term as it is a haunted room, a spirit chamber, a ghost house, many of the lesser divinities being veritably ghosts, ghosts of great warriors and heroes and rulers and teachers who lived and loved and died hundreds or thousands of years ago.

I fancy that to the Western mind the word ghost house will convey better than such terms as shrine and temple some vague notion of the strange character of the Shinto miya or yashiro, containing in its perpetual dusk nothing more substantial than symbols or tokens, the latter probably of paper.