Routledge Handbook of Premodern Japanese History

Religion in archaic Japan

Work on Japanese archaeological sites is quite active and has resulted in a huge amount of
material data to interpret. Thus, the discussion here is necessarily selective and focuses on some
of the major issues and debates on how to discern religion from the archaeological record and
accurately interpret it.^5
The textual record, although extremely limited, also presents significant interpretive prob-
lems concerning religion in ancient Japan. To what extent are early texts reliable narratives of the
histories and periods they discuss? This is especially problematic for texts that were compiled
centuries after the events that they narrate. In the textual record, then, we are confronted with
the problem of reading the Japanese past, including Japanese religion, through ideological per-
spectives that were often concerned with the origins and uniqueness of the Japanese people and
nation. Japanese mythology clearly does this, but reading Japanese uniqueness as either derived
from the prehistoric evidence or having a lineage back to it is also a significant issue in interpret-
ing religion in ancient Japan. Reading the Japanese past through ideological perspectives occurs
both at the time of the compilation of the two earliest Japanese mytho- histories and also in
modern and contemporary interpretations of the archaeological record.

Issues of origins and religious continuity

One of the most significant interpretive debates encountered in the study of religion in archaic
Japan concerns issues of the origins of a distinctive Japanese identity and culture—including
religion—and its continuity over time. These debates involve readings of both the archaeological
and textual records. The traditional view of the continuity of Japanese religious beliefs and rituals
holds that there was a formative period of Japanese religion that established the foundation for
subsequent Japanese religious developments and the unique Japanese sensibilities that inform dif-
ferent religious expressions. This formative period is typically traced back to Yayoi and Kofun
period rituals and beliefs, and extends into the early formation of the Japanese state. Others,
however, trace a unique Japanese identity earlier in time to the Jōmon period.^6
Some scholars have focused on the notion that Shintō traditions, closely identified with the
imperial family, stretch in a continuous past to the Jōmon and Yayoi periods. Such a perspective
reads the archaeological record in terms of rituals and beliefs that significantly post- date the
objects under study. Thus, it is argued, Shintō’s origins date to at least the Yayoi period.^7 Mori
argues for the identity of Yayoi period culture and ritual with religious elements that are at least
incipiently Shintō:

the least we can say is that the excavations of ritual sites from the Yayoi period leave little

doubt that during this period, people believed in, and worshipped, spiritual powers that

controlled the weather and the crops. These sites bespeak the existence at this early date of

what we may call kami worship.^8

For Mori, though, Shintō origins may also have antecedents as far back as the Jōmon: “the
animism of the Jomon period will also have to be taken into account as a possible ancestor of
Shintō.”^9
Framing aspects of archaic Japanese material culture in terms of Shintō or a proto- Shintō
(sometimes referred to as primitive Shintō) was deeply influenced by the archaeologist Ōba Iwao
(1899–1975), a professor at Kokugakuin University, whose multi- volume Shintō kōkogaku kōza
(“Lectures on Shintō Archaeology”) played a pivotal role in promoting this view of Shintō
origins. As Mark Hudson and Simon Kaner argue, Ōba’s influential scholarship is “a good
example of how archaeology has been seen as national history in Japan.”^10 The problem with this