Kami

“ As to what regards religion, Japan is the realm of the Kami, that is, of Shin, the beginning of all things; and the good order of the government depends upon the exact observance of the ancient laws of which the Kami are the authors. They cannot be departed from without overturning the subordination which ought to exist, of subjects to their sovereign, wives to their husbands, children to their parents, vassals to their lords, and servants to their masters. ”

“ For the purpose of this little essay, it will be sufficient to consider the Kami as the spirits of the dead,—without making any attempt to distinguish such Kami from those primal deities believed to have created the land. With this general interpretation of the term Kami, we return, then, to the great Shinto idea that all the dead still dwell in the world and rule it; influencing not only the thoughts and the acts of men, but the conditions of nature. ”

“ Just as the emperor is kami, and provincial officers of rank, so also mountains, rivers, the sea, thunder, winds, and even animals like the tiger, wolf or fox, are all kami. [12] The spirits of the dead also become kami, of varying character and position; some reside in the temples built in their honour ”

“ In truth, the intermediate step between the Maori practice and that of the old Israelites is furnished by the Kami temples in Japan. These are provided with bells which the worshippers who present themselves ring, in order to call the attention of the ancestor-god to their presence. Grant the fundamental assumption of the essentially human character of the spirit, whether Atua, Kami, or Elohim, and all these practices are equally rational. ”

“ These three objects thenceforth became the three sacred things of Japan. Strict injunction was given that the mirror was to be regarded and reverenced exactly as though it was the spirit of the Sun goddess, and it was ordered that the Kami of "thought combination" should administer the affairs of the new kingdom. The fact is also to be noted that among the Kami attached to Hikoho no Ninigi's person, five—three male and two female—are designated by the Records as ancestors and ancestresses of as many hereditary corporations, a distinctive feature of the early Japan's polity. ”

“ They have a head, or general, of their order, residing at Miyako, to whom they are obliged to bring a certain sum of money every year, and [Pg 25] who has the distribution of dignities and of titles, whereby they are known among themselves. They commonly live in the neighborhood of some famous Kami temple, and accost travellers in the name of that Kami which is worshipped there, making a short discourse of his holiness and miracles, with a loud, coarse voice. ”

“ The dead are the "powers above," the "upper ones,"—the Kami. We have here a conception resembling very strongly the modern Spiritualistic notion of ghosts, only that the Shinto idea is in no true sense democratic. The Kami are ghosts of greatly varying dignity and power,—belonging to spiritual hierarchies like the hierarchies of ancient Japanese society. Although essentially superior to the living in certain respects, the living are, nevertheless, able to give them pleasure or displeasure, to gratify or to offend them,—even sometimes to ameliorate their spiritual condition. ”

“ Whether Kami is used of Gods or men, it is in both cases a secondary application of the general meaning "upper." The Gods are Kami because they reside in Heaven (superi, caelicoli, Ὁνρανίωνες, Most High, Father in Heaven) ; men are Kami on account of their higher rank. No doubt both gain prestige by their association under the same title--the Gods by a reflection from the pomp and ceremony which attend on mortal Kami; and men by assimilation with the transcendent power and glory of the great nature-deities. [Pg 8]
Why should height come to be everywhere associated with excellence and rank? ”

“ Indeed, this domestication of deity, this taming of once wild trances, is not the least peculiar attribute of the far-eastern branch of the subject. Among every people divine trances have taken place, but to make of the accidental and fortuitous the certain and the regular, to develop the casual communion into a systematic cult, shows a degree of familiarity with the subject peculiarly Japanese.
The word kami, which appears both in the ancient and modern expressions, is highly suggestive. For kami refers exclusively to Shintō gods; Buddhist gods being always known as hotoke. ”

“ It is more than probable that the Japanese term kami is the same as the Aino word kamui, and that the despised and conquered aboriginal savage has furnished the mould of the ordinary Japanese idea of god—which even to-day with them means anything wonderful or extraordinary.22 From the days before history the people have worshipped trees, and do so yet, considering them as the abodes of and as means of communication with supernatural powers. ”

“ Classes of Kami.—Although the Kami are deficient in several of the attributes of the Christian God, they possess two essential qualities without which it would be impossible to recognise them as deities at all, viz., sentiency and superhuman power. The union of these ideas may be accomplished in two ways, first by attributing sense and will to the great elemental objects and phenomena, and secondly by applying to human and other living beings ideas of transcendent power derived from the contemplation of the mighty forces on whose operation we are daily and hourly dependent for our existence. ”

“ The city of Theni is the capital of Kami. The western and southern coast of Kami and the interior country to the central range is a pleasant land, where palm trees of many kinds grow and there is much tropical verdure because on these coasts there is a constant current of warm water, which comes through an untraveled sea lying west and south of us, and in which float endless paths of sargassum.
To the north and east beyond the central range, as also the land northeast of us across the sea, are barren wastes of ice and snow. ”

“ On the other hand, the religion of the Kami, by its doctrine of the apotheosis of all great saints and great heroes, gave, like the old pagan religions, a hospitable reception to all new gods, so that even the rival demigod, Buddha, came to be regarded by many as identical with Tenshō-daijin,—a circumstance which will serve to explain the great intermixture of religious ideas found in Japan, and the alleged fact, very remarkable, if true, that, till after the arrival of the Portuguese missionaries, religious persecution had never been known there. ”

“ In Japan, to solve the problem of reconciliation between the ancient traditions of the divine ancestors and the dogmas of the Indian cult, it was necessary that some master spirit, profoundly learned in the two Ways, of the Kami and of the Buddhas, should be bold, and also as it seems, crafty and unscrupulous. ”

“ The reason is that we make loving-kindness our shintai.
Hear all men! If you desire to obtain help from the Gods, put away pride. Even a hair of pride shuts you off from the Gods as it were by a great cloud.
Hear all men! The good Kami find their strength and their support in piety. Therefore they love not the offerings of those who practise tedious ceremonies. ”

“ When Chinese literature was imported into Japan, the people adopted many Chinese ideas, laws, customs, and practices, which they so mixed up with their own that it became necessary to adopt a special name for the ancient native customs, which were in consequence called Kami no michi or Shinto, the word 'michi' being applied in the same sense as the Chinese Tao, and Kami because of their divine origin. These native customs survived only in ceremonies with which the native gods are worshipped. Every event in the universe is the act of the gods. ”

“ These are rude tribes who, so far as we know, have never been other than rude tribes. The Japanese are a comparatively civilized nation, one of those so instructive to the student of culture from the stubborn conservatism with which they have consecrated by traditional reverence, and kept up by state authority, the religion of their former barbarism. This is the Kami-religion, Spirit-religion, the ancient but mixed faith of divine spirits of ancestors, nature-spirits, and polytheistic gods, which still holds official place by the side of the imported Buddhism and Confucianism. ”

“ These, once the old kami of the primitive Japanese, or kamui of the aboriginal Aino, show the mental soil and climate16 which were to condition the growth of the seed imported from other lands, whether of Buddhism or Christianity. It is very hard to kill a god while the old mind that grew and nourished him still remains the same. ”

“ A like apotheosis was also extended to all who had seemed to deserve it by their sanctity, their miracles, or their great benefactions.
The Kami of the first dynasty, the seven superior gods, being regarded as too elevated above the earth to concern themselves in what is passing on it, the chief object of the worship of the adherents of this ancient system was the goddess Tenshō-daijin, [32] already mentioned as the first of the demigods, and the supposed progenitor of the Dairi, and of the whole order of the Kuge. ”

“ GENERAL CHARACTER OF SHINTO
Kami is the ordinary Japanese word for God. It means primarily above, superior, and is applied to many other things besides deities, such as nobles, the authorities, the ‘missus,’ the hair of the head, the upper waters of a river, the part of Japan near Kiōto, etc. Height is in every country associated with excellence and divinity, no doubt because the first deities were the Sun and other Heavenly objects. We ourselves speak of the ‘Most High’ and use phrases like ‘Good Heavens’ which testify to a personification of the sky by our forefathers. ”

“ For, as on the death of Panku, the giant toiler of Chinese myth on whom devolved the task of chiselling out the universe, his left eye was transmitted into the orb of day and his right into the moon, so when the Japanese Kami returned from his visit to the underworld, the sun emerged from the washing of his left eye and the moon from the washing of his right. Japanese writers have sought to differentiate the two myths by pointing out that the sun is masculine in China and feminine in Japan, but such an objection is inadequate to impair the close resemblance. ”

“ THE CASTLE OF THE OCEAN KAMI With regard to the legend of the ocean Kami, the rationalists conceive that the tribe inhabiting Tsukushi at the time of Ninigi's arrival there had originally immigrated from the south and had gradually spread inland. Those inhabiting the littoral districts were ultimately placed by Ninigi under the rule of Prince Hohodemi, and those inhabiting the mountain regions under the sway of Prince Hosuseri. ”

“ The Hotoke, or Buddhas, and the beneficent Kami are not the only divinities worshipped by the Japanese of the poorer classes. The deities of evil, or at least some of them, are duly propitiated upon certain occasions, and requited by offerings whenever they graciously vouchsafe to inflict a temporary ill instead of an irremediable misfortune. ”

“ Those who attend the service of the Kami temples, though not collected into monasteries, like the Buddhist clergy, but secular and married persons, yet assume to themselves a far higher degree of holiness and respect than they think the common bulk of secular persons deserve. They live with their families in houses built for them in the descent of the mountains. Their way of life, as well as their common dress at home and abroad, is no ways different from that of the other inhabitants, except that they do not shave their heads, but let their hair grow, and tie it together behind. ”

“ Taiyal, Saisett, Bunun, Tsuou, Tsarisen, Paiwan, Piyuma, Ami, and Yami. This is as nearly as the Japanese—or, for that matter the English—can imitate the pronunciation of the respective names by which these tribes-people call themselves. Each name seems merely to mean “Man” in the dialect of the tribe using it, except Ami (sometimes pronounced by themselves “Kami”) , which means “Men of the North.” ”

“ The prosperity of thy dynasty shall be coeval with heaven and earth.” Thus they call their country the land of kami (ancient gods of tradition) . With this spirit, in the old days when China held the hegemony of the East, and all neighbouring peoples were regarded as its tributaries, Japan alone, largely no doubt on account of its insular position, held itself quite aloof; it set at defiance the power of Kublai and routed utterly the combined Chinese and Korean fleets with vast forces sent by him to conquer Japan, this being the only occasion that Japan was threatened with a foreign invasion. ”

“ Meanwhile the Emperor Komei, at Kioto, was being urged by the feudal lords of Tosa, Hizen, Sendai, Uwajima, and other provinces to abrogate the treaties which the Regent had made, to close the ports, and expel all strangers from the land, but Ii Kamon no kami was too strong for them to succeed in overthrowing him, and it will be understood that the representations of the Ministers of foreign powers already accredited to Japan in virtue of the treaties must all have tended to confirm the Regent in his resolution to abide by the terms of the compacts which he had entered into. ”

“ Even a living man can be regarded as a kami, in cases of some very unusual service rendered to the public welfare. Professor Imai recently—at Karuizawa—called attention to the fact that originally kami was written 上, i.e. ”