![]() Each clan was united by the shared worship of the clan kami. In the period just before writing was introduced, the people organized themselves into many extended clans ( uji). It would be a stretch to call this Shinto, however, since so little is known about the religious beliefs and practices of the time. The people practiced divination using tortoise shells and tattooed their bodies. The largest, Yamatai, was ruled by a woman who exercised shamanic powers, going into trances and communicating with the gods. Wei Chih (History of the Kingdom of Wei), for instance, speaks of the land of the Wa, an islandĬhain with many different principalities. ![]() The earliest written records that may refer to the islands today known as Japan are Chinese texts. No nation as such, no racially or ethnically distinct and unified people, and no unified religion were found in the Japanese archipelago during this time. 8000–200 b.c.e.) or even the early centuries of the Common Era. In an important sense the terms Japan, the Japanese, and Shinto are anachronisms when they are used in reference to the JMmon period (c. Yet not all natural phenomena are sacred only those that evoke a specific sort of response (for example, wonder, awe, a sense of the uncanny, or fear) in people are said to possess kami nature. This has led some scholars to suggest that Shinto is a form of animism. Islands, mountains, rocks, trees, springs, rivers, waterfalls, whirlpools, and any number of other phenomena are referred to as kami. More important, kami are not necessarily beings at all. The founders of some socalled new religions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were also considered to be living kami ( hitogami or ikigami). The emperor and empress, for example, were long held to be living kami in human form. The noun kami, which is both singular and plural in usage, is usually translated as "deities," "divinities," or "gods." In contrast to the mainstream traditions of the three Western monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), which hold that the divine and the human are categorically different forms of being, in Japan the line between the human and the divine is blurred. It tells us that defining and dating Shinto has always been a political act, one related to the rhetorical construction of a collective identity and to the goal of legitimating imperial rule. Yet, while it is impossible to accept this picture of Shinto as historically accurate, the very fact that so many Japanese scholars and Shinto apologists have proffered it is itself useful for the historian of religions. From a modern perspective, claims such as these are ideological and xenophobic in nature they are not historically grounded. They have projected the origins of Shinto back into the misty past and connected it with a divinely ordained political order. They have argued that this spirituality-styled Yamatodamashii, or "the spirit/soul of Yamato," Yamato being the name for ancient Japan-is unique to the Japanese as a people and has not changed over the centuries. For centuries nativist scholars in Japan ( kokugakusha) and apologists for the imperial family have claimed that Shinto is the expression of the natural and innate spirituality of the Japanese people. Indeed, the location of the origins of Shinto in history depends upon how the term Shinto itself is defined. It has no founder, so its beginnings cannot be connected with an individual. "Shinto" literally means "the way of the kami." It is difficult to pinpoint the historical origins of this Japanese religion. The term Shinto refers to the worship of local divinities, called kami, in the Japanese archipelago. RELIGION AS A PERCENTAGE OF WORLD POPULATION: 1.8 percent OVERVIEW
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