Shinto From the Field

It was right around 2020, just as the pandemic began, that I started surveying regions across Japan in earnest, and as I visited one place after another at the time, there was one thought on my mind: ten years from now, it will probably be impossible to make this same kind of research journey.

Even in places like northern Tohoku, which I have already visited many times, when I returned last year I came upon mountain shrines I had been able to enter without difficulty in 2020 where depopulation and aging had left no one to tend them; the approach paths were so overgrown with weeds that they had vanished, and I could not even step inside.

Turning all these complex factors over together in my mind, I have concluded that the next three years will be the final window in which nationwide fieldwork can be carried out, and having now completed years of preparation, I have resolved to move into action all at once.

Since the summer of 2019 I have been studying Japan's ancient history, mythology, folklore and archaeology as a single whole.

In this series, though, I will write down various insights for understanding Shinto deeply.

Reflecting on this, I have come to think that virtually every theory of Shinto has been looking in the wrong direction. Discourse on Shinto gravitates almost instinctively toward its prehistoric, primal origins. Yet even to fathom something like the faith in the eight million gods, a rigorous understanding of a specific historical period is essential. Without that foundation, any attempt to work backward into the primordial form of Shinto is doomed to fail.

By ignoring this foundation, commentators rush back to antiquity, only to have their inquiries swallowed up by their own ideologies. This tendency has been especially pronounced from the modern era onward. Rather than confronting themselves first, thinkers project the ideological currents of their own age onto Shinto. Whether their conclusions are right or wrong is another matter, and it holds little interest for me. Seen from the nature of Shinto itself, every theory carries some fragment of truth. But truth is an elusive thing—never fixed, constantly shifting, impossible to pin down. In the end, every account seems to brush against the truth while missing it altogether. This is one reason why Shinto remains so difficult to comprehend.

Change the vantage point, however, and a solid foundation emerges. It begins in the late Edo period, runs through the modernizing crucible of the Meiji era, extends through Taisho and early Showa, and ends in the ruins of the Second World War. Throughout this arc, Shinto manifested in kaleidoscopic mutations. While impossible to capture in a simple formula, these shifts reflect the essential nature of Shinto with extraordinary clarity. By grasping the whole of this modern epoch first, we can steadily work our way back toward what preceded it. Theories of Shinto that lack this sense of direction are unreliable precisely because they stand on false ground.

Historically speaking, Shinto was never a religion in the modern sense. Shrines and the priests who served the kami have certainly existed since antiquity, but organized religious bodies bearing doctrinal frameworks first arrived in Japan with Buddhism around the sixth century. Introduced from the continent with a sophisticated apparatus of scriptures, statues, and monastic orders, Buddhism constituted Japan’s first systematic religious movement. In response to this organized, doctrinal power, older native sensibilities were gradually spurred to systematize into what we now recognize as Shinto.

Yet throughout Japanese history, there was almost no period when Shinto acquired an autonomous religious identity of its own. For centuries, its religious systematization occurred almost entirely within the doctrinal architecture of Buddhism. Shinto, in itself, had not attained the status of an independent religion. While resistance against Buddhist dominance flared from the Heian period onward, the greatest pushback arrived with the rise of kokugaku (国学) in the Edo period. Yet even kokugaku did not turn Shinto into an organized religion. In my view, it was only in the Meiji era and after that Shinto first clearly assumed that character.

Only by seeing through this elusive history can we begin to discern what lay beyond it. The intertwined currents of spirituality and religiosity that dominate any discussion of Shinto today were forged and synthesized in the modern era. The history of Shinto as a religion is not ancient. I wrote this draft out of the conviction that a thorough examination of this modern crucible is the indispensable first step for anyone seeking to understand Shinto.

The reason is that most of the provinces are in steep decline, facing an unrelenting outflow of people and a super-aged society, while the nationwide infrastructure built during the era of high economic growth from the 1970s onward is about to reach the end of its lifespan all at once. Even recently, roads have caved in in Saitama and Tokyo; if urban infrastructure is already in this state, it goes without saying that the provinces will be far worse off. What is more, the countless local governments that are already technically bankrupt have no budget to maintain or repair this infrastructure. Having seen and heard these realities firsthand, I concluded that by around 2030 we would enter an age when the kind of research journeys I am making now cannot be done at all. Determined to use my own feet to visit as many places as possible before then and listen to the people who live on the land, I have kept traveling as much as I could—yet even this has begun to feel too slow.

And the greatest problem of all is a massive earthquake, which could strike at any moment. Just as recent earthquakes in the Tokara Islands and near Japan in Kamchatka had a noticeable effect on Japan as well, an earthquake and tsunami that could come at any time carry the potential to sweep away historical traces in the lands I plan to survey, above all along the coast, so I must do what can be done before they strike. As a realistic risk in particular, if an earthquake directly beneath the Tokyo metropolitan area or a Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake occurs, the Tokaido belt along the Pacific coast that supports Japan's economy could be paralyzed as a whole, with much of it wiped out. Because natural disasters also act as a force driving large-scale human migration, for someone like me who seeks to investigate cultures rooted in fudo (風土)—the living fabric of wind and land—I feel more strongly each year the need to bring this work to completion as soon as possible.

Extreme impoverishment in Japan is also worsening, and when we look at the accelerating decline in births, there is no possibility that things will take a turn for the better over the next twenty or thirty years; it can be said that this place has entered its final time limit. That is why, as my personal mission and the mission of a generation born in Japan, I have let go from the outset of thinking about the future of this place at the level of the state or society, and feel keenly that we have entered a grave era in which each individual must think and act in earnest looking hundreds or thousands of years ahead. Even looking at the recent issue of the US-Japan tariff agreement, there is no future left at the level of state or society.

Taking this idiom literally, I drink and compare the spring waters of the regions I visit. If a water feels right to my senses, I judge that I am compatible with the land; if it does not, I judge that I am not. Even among springs, water quality differs greatly with environmental conditions, and I attach great weight to its mineral content and to whether it is a water my own gut flora favor. I believe these conditions are directly tied to spirituality, and I have kept up my research on them.

When I go to worship at a shrine in my own genealogy of the gods, I find, strangely, that I meet people of the land. And since the land's spiritual power and the signals of my own spiritual power match, they seem to sense something and teach me all sorts of things. This becomes the key that opens the next destination. It feels like playing an imaginary role-playing game, in the real world, about the genealogy of the gods: clear each task properly and you move on to the next stage. Year by year, in this way, I have reached not only the roots of my ancestors but also the roots of my genealogy of the gods.

On that basis of lived experience and bodily sense, I analyze the roots of my ancestors and the roots of my genealogy of the gods by combining many viewpoints: ancient Japanese history, Shinto history, archaeology, folklore and custom, and springs. Lately I am closing in on the core, little by little.

I myself love to stand in the forest of Shirakami-Sanchi in the early morning, or to let the sea wind blow over me on the Tottori Sand Dunes as dusk closes in, because in those moments I feel a pleasant awe that cannot be put into words. That awe is contact with the gods, and the swaying of the trees, the sea wind blowing through, and the sound of rough waves are all translated into the words of the gods.

Since the modern age began, the gods have lost the prayers once offered to them as objects of faith and have become things to be analyzed and argued over. Something was surely lost in us at that moment, but now as in the past, the gods truly exist, in plural forms, in the primal experience of awe.

No amount of reading myths and ancient traditions will let you feel the gods. But when you place yourself alone in a forest at dawn, on a shore wrapped in dusk, or on the great sea in the darkness before daybreak, you feel an awe that cannot be put into words. Take that primal experience with you when you turn to myth and history, because in that moment alone the same wind blows as in the remotest past, and that is where the gods dwell.