Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
In Japanese mythology, the Japanese creation myth (天地開闢, Tenchikaibyaku lit. “creation of heaven and earth”?), is the story that describes the legendary birth of the celestial and earthly world, the birth of the first gods and the birth of the Japanese.
The Universe was formed by silence, darkness and a huge mass of formless matter. Particles within that huge mass started to move and collide with each other creating the first sounds ever heard. The movement of the mass gave place to clouds and the sky, where suddenly the three gods of Japanese mythology appeared. Under the sky a big sphere was formed by still chaotic particles; the gods decided to call it “Earth”. where the gods.
In the beginning, says the oldest of Japanese histories, Male and female they were born, and died. When heaven and earth began, three deities came into being, The Spirit Master of the Center of Heaven, The August Wondrously Producing Spirit, and the Divine Wondrously Producing Ancestor. These three were invisible. The earth was young then, and land floated like oil, and from it reed shoots sprouted. From these reeds came two more deities. After them, five or six pairs of deities came into being, and the last of these were Izanagi and Izanami, whose names mean “The Male Who Invites” and “The Female who invites”.
Several thousand years and several generations of gods passed until Goddess Izanami and God Izanagi were born; they were the creators of Japan. Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, were commanded by the elder deities to create Japan. The first five deities commanded Izanagi and Izanami to make and solidify the land of Japan Izanami and Izanagi received orders to put order on Earth. They accepted the responsibility and obtained a holy spear called Amenonuhoko (天沼矛, heavenly jeweled spear) that would help them with their mission So they stood on the floating bridge of heaven, thrust down into the ocean a jewelled spear, and held it aloft in the sky. The drops that fell from the spear became the Sacred Islands. By watching the tadpoles in the water the gods learned the secret of copulation; Izanagi and Izanami mated, and gave birth to the Japanese race. To finish their duties they had many children that would have to follow with the creation of Japan and would be responsible to look after it: the God of Wind, the Goddess of the Moon, the Goddess of the Sea, the God of the Forests, the God of the Mountains and Amaterasu, the Goddess of the Sun, considered the “mother” of Japan. From Izanagi’s left eye was born Amaterasu, Goddess of the Sun, and from her grandson Ninigi sprang in divine and unbroken lineage all the emperors of Dai Nippon. From that day until this there has been but one imperial dynasty in Japan. ( If this account be questioned as improbable, the objection has long since been answered by the most influential of Japanese critics, Moto-ori: “The very inconsistency is the proof of the authenticity of the record; for who would have gone out of his way to invent a story apparently so ridiculous and incredible?”)
There were 4,223 drops from the jeweled spear, for there are that number of islands in the archipelago called Japan. (The name Japan is probably a corruption of the Malay word for the islands Japang or Japun; this is a rendering of the Japanese term Nippon, which in turn is a corruption of the Chinese name for “the place the sun comes from” Jib-pen. The Japanese usually prefix to Nippon the adjective Dai, meaning “Great.”) Six hundred of them are inhabited, but only five are of any considerable size. The largest- Hondo or Honshuis 1,130 miles long, averages some 73 miles in width, and contains in its 81,000 square miles half the area of the islands. Their situation, like their recent history, resembles that of England: the surrounding seas have protected them from conquest, while their 13,000 miles of seacoast have made them a seafaring people, destined by geographical encouragement and commercial necessity to a widespread mastery of the seas. Warm winds and currents from the south mingle with the cool air of the mountain-tops to give Japan an English climate, rich in rain and cloudy days, nourishing to short but rapid-running rivers, and propitious to vegetation and scenery. Here, outside the cities and the slums, half the land is an Eden in blossom-time; and the mountains arc no tumbled heaps of rock and dirt, but artistic forms designed, like Fuji, in almost perfect lines. (Fuji-san (less classically Fuji-yama), idol of artists and priests, approximates to a gently sloping cone. Many thousands of pilgrims ascend its 12,365 feet in any year. Fuji (Ainu for “fire”) erupted last in 1707.’)
This story is described first hand at the beginning of the Kojiki, the first book written in Japan (712), and in the Nihon Shoki(720). Both form the literary basis of Japanese mythology and Shinto; however, the story differs in some aspects between these works, with the most accepted for the Japanese being the one of the Kojiki.
Doubtless these isles were born of earthquakes rather than from dripping spears. No other land except, perhaps, South America has suffered so bitterly from convulsions of the soil. In the year 599 the earth shook and swallowed villages in its laughter; meteors fell and comets flashed, and snow whitened the streets in mid-July; drought and famine followed, and millions of Japanese died. In 1703 an earthquake killed 32,000 in Tokyo alone. In 1885 the capital was wrecked again; great clefts opened in the earth, and engulfed thousands; the dead were carried away in cartloads and buried en masse. In 1923 earthquake, tidal wave and fire took 100,000 lives in Tokyo, and 37,000 in Yokahama and near- by; Kamakura, so kind to Buddha, was almost totally destroyed/ while the benign colossus of the Hindu saint survived shaken but unperturbed amid the ruins, as if to illustrate the chief lesson of history that the gods can be silent in many languages. The people were for a moment puzzled by this abundance of disaster in a land divinely created and ruled; at last they explained the agitations as due to a large subterranean fish, which wriggled when its slumber was disturbed. They do not seem to have thought of abandoning this adventurous habitat; on the day after the last great quake the school-children used bits of broken plaster for pencils, and the tiles of their shattered homes for slates. The nation bore patiently these lashings of circumstance, and emerged from repeated ruin un-discourage ably industrious, and ominously brave.
Primitive Japan
Japanese origins, like all others, are lost in the cosmic nebula of theory. Three elements appear to be mingled in the race: a primitive white strain through the “Ainus” who seem to have entered Japan from the region of the Amur River in Neolithic times; a yellow, Mongol strain coming from or through Korea about the seventh century before Christ; and a brown- black, Malay and Indonesian strain filtering in from the islands of the south. Here, as elsewhere, a mingling of diverse stocks preceded by many hundreds of years the establishment of a new racial type speaking with a new voice and creating a new civilization. That the mixture is not yet complete may be seen in the contrast between the tall, slim, long-headed aristocrat and the short, stout, broad-headed common man.
Chinese annals of the fourth century describe the Japanese as “dwarfs,” and add that “they have neither oxen nor wild beasts; they tattoo their faces in patterns varying with their rank; they wear garments woven in one piece; they have spears, bows and arrows tipped with stone or iron.
They wear no shoes, are law-abiding and polygamous, addicted to strong drink and long-lived. . . . The women smear their bodies with pink and scarlet” paint. ”There is no theft,” these records state, “and litigation is infrequent”;” civilization had hardly begun. Lafcadio Heara, with uxorious clairvoyance, painted this early age as an Eden unsullied with exploitation or poverty; and Fenollosa pictured the peasantry as composed of independent soldier-gentlemen.” Handicrafts came over from Korea in the third century A.D., and were soon organized into guilds. Beneath these free artisans was a considerable slave class, recruited from prisons and battlefields.” Social organization was partly feudal, partly tribal; some peasants tilled the soil as vassals of landed barons, and each clan had its well-nigh sovereign head. Government was primitively loose and weak.
Animism and totemism, ancestor worship and sex worship’ satisfied the religious needs of the early Japanese. Spirits were everywhere in the planets and stars of the sky, in the plants and insects of the field, in trees and beasts and men. Deities innumerable hovered over the home and its inmates, and danced in the flame and glow of the lamp. Divination was practised by burning the bones of a deer or the shell of a tortoise, and studying with expert aid the marks and lines produced by the fire; by this means, say the ancient Chinese chronicles, “they ascertain good and bad luck, and whether or not to undertake journeys and voyages.” The dead were feared and worshiped, for their ill will might generate much mischief in the world; to placate them precious objects were placed in their graves for ex- ample, a sword in the case of a man, a mirror in the case of a woman; and prayers and delicacies were offered before their ancestral tablets every day. Human sacrifices were resorted to now and then to stop excessive rain or to ensure the stability of a building or a wall; and the retainers of a dead lord were occasionally buried with him to defend him in his epilogue.
Out of ancestor worship came the oldest living religion of Japan. Shinto, the Way of the Gods, took three forms: the domestic cult of family ancestors, the communal cult of clan ancestors, and the state cult of the imperial ancestors and the founding gods. The divine progenitor of the imperial line was addressed with humble petitions, seven times a year, by the emperor or his representatives; and special prayers were offered up to him when the nation was embarking upon some particularly holy cause, like the taking of Shantung (1914). Shinto required no creed, no elaborate ritual, no moral code; it had no special priesthood, and no consoling doctrine of immortality and heaven; all that it asked of its devotees was an occasional pilgrimage, and pious reverence for one’s ancestors, the emperor, and the past. It was for a time superseded because it was too modest in its rewards and its demands.
In 522 Buddhism, which had entered China five hundred years before, passed over from the continent, and began a rapid conquest of Japan. Two Clements met to give it victory: the religious needs of the people, and the political needs of the state. For it was not Buddha’s Buddhism that came, agnostic, pessimistic and puritan, dreaming of blissful extinction; it was the Mahay ana Buddhism of gentle gods like Amida and Kwannon, of cheerful ceremonial, saving Bodhisattwas, and personal immortality. Better still, it inculcated, with irresistible grace, all those virtues of piety, peacefulness and obedience which make a people amenable to government; it gave to the oppressed such hopes and consolations as might reconcile them to content with their simple lot; it redeemed the prose and routine of a laborious life with the poetry of myth and prayer and the drama of colourful festival; and it offered to the people that unity of feeling and belief which statesmen have always welcomed as a source of social order and a pillar of national strength.
We do not know whether it was statesmanship or piety that brought victory to Buddhism in Japan. When, in 586 A.D., the Emperor Yomei died, the succession was contested in arms by two rival families, both of them politically devoted to the new creed. Prince Shotoku Taishi, who had been born, we are told, with a holy relic clasped in his infant hand, led the Buddhist faction to victory, established the Empress Suiko on the throne, and for twenty-nine years (592-621) ruled the Sacred Islands as Prince Imperial and Regent. He lavished funds upon Buddhist temples, encouraged and supported the Buddhist clergy, promulgated the Buddhist ethic in national decrees, and became in general the Ashoka of Japanese Buddhism. He patronized the arts and sciences, imported artists and artisans from Korea and China, wrote history, painted pictures, and supervised the building of the Horiuji Temple, the oldest extant masterpiece in the art history of Japan.
Despite the work of this versatile civilizer, and all the virtues inculcated or preached by Buddhism, another violent crisis came to Japan within a generation after Shotoku’s death. An ambitious aristocrat, Kamatari, arranged with Prince Naka a palace revolution that marked so definite a change in the political history of Nippon that native historians refer to it enthusiastically as the “Great Reform” (645). The heir-apparent was assassinated, a senile puppet was placed upon the throne, and Kamatari as chief minister, through Prince Naka as heir-apparent and then as Emperor Tenchi, reconstructed the Japanese government into an autocratic imperial power. The sovereign was elevated from the leadership of the principal clan to paramount authority over every official in Japan; all governors were to be appointed by him, all taxes paid directly to him, all the land of the realm was declared his. Japan graduated rapidly from a loose association of clans and semi-feudal chieftains into a closely-knit monarchical state.
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