Shinto

Like other mafias and mobs around the world, they possess an organizational culture founded on the basis of this perceived ideology of machismo, manliness, and rough ruggedness.

But unlike other mafias and mobs, we will see that they also play a very public role in their communities, often walking at parades, giving exhibitions at festivals, and even performing community service tasks such as donating money or labor to Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines and other volunteer work.

The Yakuza are very fascinating, especially in this day and age, because there are actually not that many of them left.

So much of their most visible and impactful history is behind them.

He'll pass them directly on to his successor by word of mouth, and brushes the bear with a branch from a fir tree or a leafy stalk of bamboo.

The brushing is intended to mimic purification done by a haregushi, the purifying wands used by Shinto priests.

The shikari will then ritually skin the bear, starting with a lengthwise cut down the centerline of its body.

Once the skinning is complete, then follows a more elaborate ritual I will turn to Scott Schnell to explain.

One.

Of whatever dimension, the temples or shrines of poor Shinto are all built in the same archaic style.

The typical shrine is a windowless oblong building of unpainted timber with a very steep overhanging roof.

The front is the gable end, and the upper part of the perpetually closed doors is wooden lattice work, usually a grating of bars closely set and crossing each other at right angles.

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.

It grows with familiarity instead of weakening, and a knowledge of popular beliefs is apt to intensify it.

And, uh, like, if you're making a high-budget animated version of Sekiro, why would you do that? What do...

What was, what would be the point of demystifying the only cool... like, one of the coolest aspects, not the only cool, but for me definitely the coolest aspect of, like, the Sekiro setting was, like, the Japanese Shinto mysticism stuff.

I love that shit.

You like the Japanese stuff, the weeb stuff.

But those aren't even the most widely practiced religions.

Like, there are more followers of Sikhism worldwide than there are followers of Judaism, and Shinto is practiced by millions of people and yet zero representation on the Coexist bumper sticker.

So what's the point of having a category like the Big Five, and why do we hear about only a few religions while ignoring tons of others? Well, let's go back in time to figure that out.

As we saw in episode one, what counts as a religion is actually quite complicated.

Which raises an important question.

Why would an emperor need a sorcerer? The Way of Yin and Yang, a fusion of Chinese cosmology, Buddhism, and native Shinto belief, made Japan's official science in the year 675.

But when plagues and vengeful spirits haunted Heian-era Kyoto, science alone couldn't save them.

Mysticism became the only cure.

Ainu religion is based on an animistic system where every living and non-living thing on Earth holds a god inside of it called a Kamyu.

Fun side note, many anthropologists believe this to be the origins of the multiple gods of Shintoism, But that is an episode for another day.

It's just a fun little side fact.

So the Kamyu provide the foundation of the Ainu religion, and the central deity is the goddess of the hearth, Pchi Kamyu.

What Rikyu demanded was not cleanliness alone, but the most beautiful and the natural also.

the name a boat of fancy implies a structure created to meet some individual artistic requirement the tea room is made for the tea master not the tea master for the tea room it is not intended for posterity and is therefore ephemeral The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant.

Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice.

Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married.

Stone huts.

Shinto shrine with torii.

Icy well called the Spring of Gold.

Stone tablet bearing a Chinese poem in the design of a tiger.