304 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
have had its own territory. As clans acquired territory, the kami residing there
and associated with the region came to be honored as the tutelary deities of the
uji and were sometimes even claimed as ancestors. Thus primitive Shinto
expanded and was incorporated into the growing hierarchy of the Yamato state.
Men of the elite uji were granted honors according to a system of titles, the
highest being “great omi.” These titled families all had kinship ties to the Yamato
king; families who gave daughters in marriage to the king would be grandfathers
and cousins of the next king, their powers magnified. Beneath the elite uji, and
supporting them, were occupational specialist groups, or guilds, who monopo-
lized skills like ironworking, horse training, and weapons manufacturing.Shinto, Folk and Imperial
The woods, streams, mountains, and coasts of Japan are not only lovely
but sacred, according to the most ancient spiritual ideas of Japanese tradition.
In natural spaces beyond the household and village there are powers and spir-
its, life-giving but also dangerous, which live alongside and overlap the lives of
humans. This is the realm of the kami:
This other world is variously placed—across the sea, in the woods or hills
or mountains—but in any case beyond the normal purview of civilized
humanity. It is from the other world that fertility is introduced in the spring,
and it is against the chaotic forces of this other world that various seasonal
rites are invoked. It is, then, the prototypical locus of unrefined power
according to the horizontal worldview of traditional Japan. The other
world that I am referring to is the locus and source of extraordinary, unpre-
dictable power, both constructive and destructive, and it is the regulation of
intercourse with this other world that lies at the heart of all popular festi-
vals. (Gilday 1993:276)
Archaeology attests to continuity with historic Shinto assumptions. Sacred
sites are marked in the archaeological record by caches of bronze bells, which
were ceremonial instruments in the Nara Basin in Yayoi and Kofun times.
They are invariably found on hilltops overlooking plains and fertile agricultural
land. The bells were ornamented with signs of prosperity: storehouses, grain
pounding, and the hunting of boar and deer (Barnes 1988:176). The distribu-
tion of the bells suggests they were the focus of community ritual activities,
even as Shinto shrines today are centers of communal festivals, matsuri. But
why are they located so far from human communities? What is their relation to
human communities? The Chinese character for the word “shrine” (mori)
includes the character for “woods” or “forest.” Often there is no structure at
all, for it is the space itself that is the kami. But there will invariably be the ubiq-
uitous marker of a sacred space, a simple gate, the famous shape of the torii that
has come to symbolize Japan itself in some ways.
An eighth-century provincial gazetteer, the Hitachi Fudoki, is among the
oldest documentary sources on folk Shinto in early Japan. It tells a legend asso-
ciated with the first encroachment of human farmers into the wild lands of the