Yijiang Zhong. The Origin of Modern Shinto in Japan: The Vanquished Gods of Izumo.

Abstract

The newly established Bloomsbury Shinto Studies book series continues to yield interesting research cases. Until recently in the Western imagination, Shinto was perceived as a millennium-old unbroken tradition of worshipping kami (local deities)—a religious monolith, mysterious, unique, and belonging solely to Japan. However, the arrival of academic studies investigating different aspects of kami worship is steadily chipping away at the older narratives, revealing instead the previously unknown depths of this research field, which is still relatively new to Western historians. These fresh studies of Shinto’s past and present, for several of which the Bloomsbury series appears to be a newly founded platform, finally explain how and why Japan was able to develop a variety of local manifestations of Shinto, to what extent the kami were used and reinterpreted by Buddhist practitioners, Neo-Confucian scholars, and Western-educated intellectuals, and how Shinto institutions responded to the political and existential challenges presented by the emerging modernity. To this extent, historians would agree that the more we know about the factual and institutional formulations of Japan’s many kinds of religiosity, including Shinto, the better we will fare in our understanding of the increasingly interconnected local and global histories.