Shinto shrines

Busy week with a faculty meeting, lunch with the Dean, and two classes--Civil Procedure and Criminal Procedure. Eighteen Japanese law students are scratching their heads over the "Exclusionary Rule"--but, then, aren't we all? I also gave the first "Legal Terms Quiz"--we acquire terms in each class and every fifth class, they get a quiz on them. I think I was as nervous as the students because I had no idea if the whole thing was beyond them or not. Turns out not. They had 25 terms to study from "federalism" to "jury nullification" and many of them did great on the quiz! I'm hoping it will build confidence with their English and their overall view of what's going on in the course.

But, this post is about Shinto shrines. Did I mention that there are 3500 sacred sites in Kyoto? Yep. And close to 1000 of them are Shinto shrines. A shrine (as opposed to a temple, which is Buddhist) is marked by a vermillion gate in shape of the Greek letter pi (called a torii). This is the gate at one of the most important shrines in Kyoto, Heian-jingu, the one with the iris gardens that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The typical gate is guarded by these creatures, one at each side of the gate, one with its mouth open, the other with its mouth closed. Inside the torii, you find a jumble of lanterns and smaller shrines, each one dedicated to a different deity or spirit (kami). There aren't exactly gods in Shinto, but everything has a sacred spirit attached to it--a tree, rocks, rivers, the sky, even a teacup. And we all have kami nature within ourselves. For example, there are some shrines dedicated to the spirit of academic success, so the hoardes of middle-schoolers on their school excursions pray at these shrines before they take their high school entrance exams. Or, if your knee aches, you might go to a specific shrine dedicated to knee aches and pray for relief.This guy on the right is one of my favorites. I don't know what he specialiazes in but he was attracting a lot of young women. But before any prayer or any approaching the spirits, you purify yourself by washing your hands and mouth, using these wooden ladles and this stone basin that are found near the entrance to every Shinto shrine. Purification rituals are central to Shinto.At many of the small shrines, you can write your petition on a piece of wood and leave it hanging; this shrine, I can only guess, is dedicated to affairs of the heart.

You can also shake a box and get an oracle on a white slip of paper. If it's a good fortune, you take it with you. If not, you tie it around a fence-like structure near the small shrine and leave it to get better. Here's a bunch of bad fortunes, hoping to improve by proximity to a spirit.

But there's more.

Some of the shrines have a bell on a long rope. You give an offering, ring the bell, and clap twice so you can be sure the spirit is listening. Then you bow twice and offer your prayer (almost always a request). Then you bow and clap again.

Yasaka-jinja, where many of these pictures were taken, is adjacent to Gion, Kyoto's "floating world" of Geiko (geisha), Maiko (Geiko in training), hostess bars, excellent restaurants and cheesy touristy ones, and all kinds of sordid stuff found in any city of the world. Yet here, too, you find small neighborhood shrines, just a single small place where people come to honor a spirit/deity. Shinto and Buddhism have no clear demarkation in Japan; many Buddhist temples include a small Shinto shrine. The Japanese, most of whom declare themselves "atheists," nonetheless will take a baby for baptism at a Shinto shrine and bury their loved ones at a Buddhist temple. The Buddhist monk (who just taught us meditation--but that's another post) said that religion in Japan is "practical religion." You do what works (or what you believe works). Shinto has no text, no god, no official code of behavior or worship. It's the ancient, indigenous religion of Japan that still exists in this high-tech world.
This is a small shrine in Gion; it's about 6 p.m. on a Friday, and people stop by for a quick word with the kami.
Bill here: the grounds of a Shinto shrine feel very sporadic; almost everywhere you turn you'll find a particular shrine, many of them quite small. The Buddhist temples seem much more organized with large buildings serving as the center of many sub-temples within the temple complex itself. I never quite know where to turn next in a Shinto shrine, but I imagine it being something like a large European cathedral with many side altars where one might pray or petition at a side altar dedicated to Mary or St. Peter.

Terry again--arguments abound as to whether Shinto is a religion or a "folk way." Yet its rituals and festivals, rooted in the cycle of life and in the numinosity inherent in all things, certainly persist in 21st Century Japan. The practice of Shinto, they say, leads us to live in harmony with dai shizen no meguri--the ceaseless cycle of Great Nature.