Shinto: A History by Helen Hardacre, and: A Social History of the Ise Shrines: Divine Capital by Mark Teeuwen and John Breen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shinto: A History by Helen Hardacre, and: A Social History of the Ise Shrines: Divine Capital by Mark Teeuwen and John Breen Yijiang Zhong Shinto: A History. By Helen Hardacre. Oxford University Press, 2017. 720 pages. Hardcover, £29.99/$39.95. A Social History of the Ise Shrines: Divine Capital. By Mark Teeuwen and John Breen. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 320 pages. Hardcover, £85.00/$114.00; softcover, £28.99/$39.95. The past decade or so has seen steady growth in the number of works on Shinto, in particular those dealing with its history. This trend continues the agenda of earlier scholarship in challenging the conventional notions of Shinto as the ethnic or national religion of Japan and as the ideological apparatus of the modern (pre-1945) Japanese state. Asking what Shinto was and is, then, has become the starting point for research and writing on this subject. Furthermore, inspired by recent Western-language critical scholarship that has called into question the very idea of religion, it has become necessary for authors to engage the methodological issues concerning how to reconceive Shinto in relation to religion and how to devise narratives to recapture the histories of that which can be identified as Shinto. The expanding literature has diversified and enriched the field of Shinto studies and contributed new perspectives for understanding more broadly the history and society of Japan. The two books under review, both by established scholars, are the most recent contributions to this maturing field. They represent the latest attempts to “find” Shinto, to recover its past, and to think about how such inquiries are best conducted. Helen Hardacre’s Shinto: A History, comprising sixteen main chapters, is magisterial in its narrative scale. Covering Shinto from the Yayoi period (400 BCE–300 CE) to the present, it is the first comprehensive history of the subject in English. Scholars have generally sought to avoid essentializing Shinto and have thus been wary of representing it as a transhistorical entity; they have also decried application of the term “Shinto” in reference to the period before that term came into use. Nevertheless, the author justifies her narrative of long-term continuity by posing an “ideal of Shinto” that consists of the following elements: “concepts of imperial rule associating it with ritual, a government unit devoted to coordinating ritual throughout the nation’s shrines, a code of law mandating an annual calendar of kami ritual, the claim that rituals for the kami are public in character, and the assertion that this complex of [End Page 245] ideas and institutions devoted to the kami embodies Japan’s ‘indigenous’ tradition.” The book recounts the “emergence and development of these elements and debate concerning them” (p. 2) in Japanese history, using specifically the key terms “public” in contrast to “private” and “indigenous” in contrast to “foreign” to identify historical continuity. It is quite clear that the ideal, so identified, assumes a transhistorical coherence and is centered on the state. Despite the book’s impressively long time span and encyclopedic content, this state-centered approach means that certain pasts, such as those of local shrines, and certain perspectives, such as that of economic history, are deemphasized if not excluded. The first four chapters of the book take up Shinto in ancient Japan. Chapter 1 traces the flow of knowledge, including Buddhist teachings, from the Asian continent and its influence on ancient kami worship and political rulership. The arrival of Buddhism gave rise to the notions of foreignness and indigeneity, with the latter symbolized by local deities—the kami. The author further identifies Shinto’s institutional origin in the Jingikan (Ministry of Divinities), the governmental body created sometime in the late seventh or early eighth century to oversee kami-related affairs at court and at provincial shrines. In fact, the author understands the Jingikan as providing institutional and ritual continuity for the history of Shinto. Chapter 2 examines two eighth-century mytho-historic texts, Kojiki and Nihon shoki, compiled respectively in 712 and 720, and argues convincingly that whereas Nihon shoki was meant to impress continental rulers with Yamato mastery of Chinese statecraft, Kojiki served to underscore the sovereign’s support for “indigenous” kami worship...