Kami Is a Primal Experience, Not a God in the Head

If I dare to speak of god, I would say it is "the primal experience." A god is not something to be thought of in the head. Put another way, in the state of thinking in the head there is no god, and in the state with no words that is the primal experience, gods exist, plural and countless.

Looking back, in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki of the early eighth century, which compiled old traditions, there is neither the question "what is a god?" nor a definition.

Ever since the Japanese concept of kami (神) was translated as "God" in the modern era, its essence has been obscured, opening a wide chasm in understanding.

First, it is essential to keep in mind that no Japanese concept ever holds a single, fixed meaning; Japanese concepts are always plural.

Simply put, kami were not personified deities.

Exposure to Buddhist iconography had a profound impact on Shinto: for the first time, the kami began to be personified like buddhas and to take on a fixed, substantive form.

What made Norinaga outstanding comes down to one point. He held that the gods are unknowable, beyond measure by human reason, and cannot be argued by the intellect. The sensibility that grasped the true nature of the gods as "awe-inspiring things" shows that Norinaga knew the gods not with his head but through primal experience.

The gods exist neither in scholars' heads nor in books. They exist in the daily lives of the people who live on the land.

What is a god? Last week, on a boat heading out to the sea off Sanriku, a friend and I talked about the gods again and again.

When he cuts the engine, the sound of the waves surrounds him, and the towering cliffs of the great ria coastline sit enthroned above the water. There are no other boats. Being alone on that vast expanse of sea brought back a primal memory from deep in his heart.

In that moment, he says, he felt awe. Yet it was not an unpleasant feeling.

Listening to my friend's primal experience, I went out onto the sea off Sanriku, where the gods dwell, and felt that the quiet, merciless awe once known to the seafaring peoples of old still drifts over the open water.

At what stage, then, did the question of gods arise, if we refer to Japanese history? It is impossible to pin this down exactly, but paradoxically, when the question of gods began to be noticed within each person, the gods hid their forms. That is, the moment a question toward gods sprouted in us, the gods vanished from before us. If we suppose this is the reality of the gods, then in the range we can think of, we can say that gods do not exist, or are diluted.

For the common people did not know their own faith, and did not worship gods as substances in the first place. In that state, even pressing them to believe in Buddhism, which has a strong element of idol worship, hardly moved them at the level of the common people, so the monks had to think of every means to take the people into their order. As it turned out, they opened a breakthrough by an advanced religious technique: they turned the gods of the ancient clans who appear in the centralized myth compiled in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki into objects of the common people's faith, and tied them to the buddha.

What matters is that the gods, who until then had no substance, were given substance through the buddha and gathered into a front-and-back relation in idol worship. That is, before this, gods had no substance, but the common people, seeing the cast, easy-to-grasp object of faith that is the buddha, began to lay the god over the figure of the buddha, who had substance. At that moment the god gained flesh and blood through the buddha and got a form in which it takes on people's prayers as an object of faith. This, I think, is the early movement by which faith in gods took concrete form in Japan.

Put simply, the worldview of the eight million gods holds that a mysterious spirit resides in every phenomenon of the universe, an idea that is perhaps easy for most readers to grasp. In Japan, almost everything—from rocks, waterfalls, and flowers to social organizations, growth, and even abstract events or concepts in human life—is regarded as a manifestation of the divine, evoking reverence. Historically, this has been expressed through the concept of shinrei (神霊), or divine spirit. Japan has no single, absolute creator god such as exists in global monotheisms; the foundational premise of Japanese faith is the presence of countless kami. When one visits a shrine, one encounters deities of traffic safety, academic success, or safe childbirth—unfamiliar devotions to a first-time visitor, yet all widely practiced to this day.

Buy a car, and you pray to the god of traffic safety; take an exam, and you pray for academic success; give birth, and you pray for safe delivery. In the most extreme case, Iwashimizu Hachimangu in Kyoto even holds an unusual festival honoring Thomas Edison as the "ancestral deity of electricity," drawing a steady stream of worshippers from electronics companies like Panasonic.

Yet the outsider's view that reduces Shinto to a mere form of animism has never sat comfortably with those who have actually lived alongside these gods. How, then, has this polytheistic idea of the eight million gods been understood from within the tradition? In Japanese, yaoyorozu is written as "eight million," but the characters do not denote a numerical figure. Rather, they come from an ancient idiom meaning "beyond count." In classical literature, the gods are never enumerated to an actual tally of eight million; the phrase simply preserves an ancient Japanese expression for an innumerable host.

No one knows precisely when the concept of kami arose in Japan, but the word already appears in the Kojiki (712), Japan's oldest extant chronicle. Given that the earliest inhabitants of the archipelago had no script, and in light of my own multifaceted inquiry into belief in kotodama (言霊)—the spiritual power residing in words and vocal sounds—I view the deepest stratum of Japanese culture as fundamentally a culture of sound. If we fixate solely on the Chinese character 神 that was later assigned to the word, we lose sight of the ancient reality that was originally expressed through the spoken sound kami. Historically, countless theories have been proposed as to what kami originally meant, yet none of them holds a monopoly on the truth; indeed, the very attempt to reduce it to a single meaning is futile. Therein lies the difficulty of deciphering it.

Across the vast body of scholarship on the subject, kami is presented as a richly polysemous concept encompassing natural phenomena, elemental spirits, ancestral spirits, the souls of human beings, and even transcendent principles. The sun, the moon, thunder, and wind; the spirits of historical figures and ancestors; the spirits dwelling in animals and plants; unseen forces that bring fortune or calamity; and the primordial principles at the root of the world—whatever inspired awe, reverence, or dread was called kami. Surveying all of this in the Edo period, Norinaga Motoori, the scholar of kokugaku (国学) who first established a rigorous method for reading the Kojiki, wrote: "Whatever it may be that possesses extraordinary excellence—or strangeness—and inspires awe is called kami." In other words, he showed that the range of the concept is not merely vast, but boundless.

When we step back behind the written characters and listen to the ancient sounds, however, a wholly different reality comes into view. By the early eighth century, when the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki were compiled, the character 天 (heaven) was already being read with the native sounds ama or ame. Yet the ancient inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago originally had no concept of a celestial realm high in the sky. To my mind, the notion of a heavenly realm bears the unmistakable stamp of ancient Chinese cosmology, brought over by migrant groups from the continent. If we look calmly at the realities of ancient history, any people traveling from the Asian continent or the Korean peninsula to the Japanese archipelago had to cross the open sea. In the eighth-century chronicles, the arrival of the gods is already told as amakudari (天降り)—a "descent from heaven" straight down onto the islands—but that, too, was a later conceptual overlay. For in its oldest stratum, the Japanese sound ama meant the sea (海).

Even today, along coastlines throughout Japan, people who make their living diving and fishing in the sea are still called ama (海人・海女). In the southern islands off Kyushu, the name Amami (奄美大島, Amami Oshima) preserves the same maritime root. Moreover, the powerful ancient seafaring clan that plied the waters around the archipelago was known as the Amabe (海部氏, read ama), holding sway along coastal regions across Japan. To this day, the chief priest of Kono Shrine on the coast of Tango in Kyoto Prefecture is a direct descendant of the Amabe family, whose detailed genealogy is preserved as a National Treasure.

Put simply, Amaterasu was neither a goddess of the high heavens nor an indigenous deity native to the Japanese islands. She was the tutelary deity of migrant groups who came from across the sea—from the direction of the Chinese continent—and at the root of her worship lay a guiding presence prayed to for safe passage across uncharted waters. That was the true origin of Amaterasu. Later, once the age of maritime crossings gave way to settlement and assimilation across the archipelago, fierce struggles broke out among rival groups over ancestral legitimacy. Through repeated cycles of fracture and alliance, these migrant coalitions grew in scale until they pushed into the fertile southern Yamato basin—present-day southern Nara Prefecture, a landscape ideally suited to wet-rice cultivation—and established a unified polity. That was the beginning of state formation in Japan.

The Kokugaku scholar Motoori argued that a god is not limited to the gods of heaven and earth and the spirits of shrines but refers to everything that has uncommonly excellent virtue and is to be feared, from human beings, birds, beasts, trees, and grasses to mountains and seas. This context is hard to grasp, but Motoori's excellence comes down to the point that he set god as the unknowable, which cannot be measured by human "reason," and thought it cannot be discussed with the brain. Historically, this is a reaction against the tendency in which gods came to be understood through Buddhist doctrine, statues, and theorized religious faith, and then began to be interpreted by Confucianism. That is, Motoori declared to the intellectuals that monks, Confucians, and Shinto people were not conveying gods but only warping gods by their respective ideologies, and that the very act of discussing gods is the problem.

Then what is a god that cannot be discussed with the brain? If I translate his words in my own way, I think Motoori had a sensibility that took the true nature of the god as "awe." That is, it shows that Motoori knew gods not in the head but in the primal experience. On the other hand, then and long before, many of the intellectuals and religious people who discussed gods had no primal experience, did not put a primal experience into words as Motoori did, and could not avoid discussing from the influence of the character of the age in which they lived.

What I came to understand by accumulating that experience is that awe is contact with a god, and a dialogue. So the sway of trees, the blowing sea wind, the sound of rough waves, the state of the light are all translated as the words of a god. Through those words we face the god, talk, and offer prayer. I strongly feel, from my friend's tale and my own experience, that this was the true form of the god, at the source of the eight million gods, tied to humankind's ancient memory.

However many myths and old traditions I read, I do not feel a god. But when I put myself alone in an early-morning forest, on a shore wrapped in dusk, on a great sea in the dark before dawn, a human being feels an awe that cannot be put into words. To work at myth and history with that primal experience. Because only at that moment the wind that has not changed since ancient times blows, and the god dwells there.