Chapter 8 Japan 305kami. A cultivator named Matachi went to work clearing new land for rice
fields. But this land was the home of terrible horned serpents, the Yato no kami,
who attempted to halt this expansion of the human domain. So Matachi put on
his armor and went to battle against them, driving them back to the surround-
ing hills. Then he dug a ditch at the foot of the hills and placed boundary stakes
to mark the division, saying: “Above this line shall be the land of the kami;
below it shall be the rice-fields of humans.” But he built them a shrine and
promised to serve them forever to prevent their curses, which, according to the
Hitachi Fudoki, his descendants faithfully did (Gilday 1993).
Antipestilence festivals are found as early as the Nara period, when people
suffered from a variety of troubles that have always plagued people: pests that
ruin the crops, epidemics that bring disease and death, warfare and violence
that cause untimely death. These various calamities were somehow equated in
the popular mind, so that swarming insects and malevolent spirits bitter about
their unexpected deaths all needed to be controlled by community ritual action
enlisting the powers of the kami. (See box 8.2 on the next page for description
of a contemporary folk Shinto festival.)
In the Nara (710–794) and Heian (794–1185) periods, Shinto began to do
another kind of work for the body politic. A variant form of Shinto was created
by the Yamato court to provide a cosmological underpinning for the imperial
line’s authority to rule. In one of the great accomplishments in the history of the
premodern state, myth, legend, and political ambition were pulled together into a
single text, which for 1,500 years was accepted as political doctrine and cosmo-
logical truth and played a significant role in the astonishing continuity of the
imperial family down to Emperor Akihito, the present 125th emperor of Japan
(who plans to abdicate in 2019, to be succeeded by Crown Prince Naruhito).
This text was the Nihon Shoki (“Chronicles of Japan”). A Korean scholar named
Wani had arrived from Paekche early in the fifth century bringing 11 volumes of
Chinese books, including the Analects of Confucius and the Thousand-Character
Classic, that is, Confucian and Buddhist texts. Another of the books he brought
may have been the Shiji of Sima Qian. Then or later, the Shiji gave the Japanese
court the idea of a dynastic history that tells the story of the past—as they wanted
it told. They must have recognized the tremendous power that lies in recording
the past and the prestige that histories can give to kings, living and dead. But, if
scholarly independence of mind is evident in Sima Qian’s history, where some
rulers were praised, others vilified, and all by a mere scholar who watched from
the sidelines, inserting his own personality into the text, these flaws were not
allowed to mar the Nihon Shoki. It reveals nothing of its authors’ personalities but
is an official version of the past written by several imperial princes and a staff of
10, completed and presented to Empress Gensho in 720 C.E.
The following summarizes the basic mythology for an Imperial Shinto:
In the beginning the world was in a state of chaos, but gradually the light par-
ticles of matter rose to form heaven and the heavy particles settled to become
the earth. Kami materialized and, after the passage of seven generations, the