My dear readers... Please bare with me with this historical part... without knowing the origin of the Japanese animism, it would only be a "flum flam" that you can find in any "new age" gooks that are published in the Western authors who know nothing about Japanese language or history... But the historical introduction would be finished in this chapter 3: the impact of Buddhism's arrival next time!!!
In our stone age, we already mass produced terra-cotta dolls called "Doguu". As Hanshu chronicle described how Japanese men looked at around 100s and 200s, these terra-cotta dolls are decorated with the trait of tatoo all over the body, which is already not a custom in a center area of Japan i.e. Osaka-Nara in 5th and 6th centuries. The interesting fact is that these terra-cotta dolls are made in order to be destroyed! Their neck part is very fragile and one excavation proved that they found over 1000 dolls but very few of them intact. Another curious fact is that, the female figure of terra-cottta dolls have very exaggerated body parts, such as breats and hips... I found this curious, since it is something common with the White Goddess of Nothern England, which prospered, before the Keltics immigration wave reached there. My conclusion here is that the Japanese people have a strong bonding to animism, finding spirits behind any small river or mountain, which is also quite common in oceanic area, and then these spirits developed into deities in Japanese myth. The basic of Japanese myth is in one phrase: one's ancestory is a god figure or a descendant of this figure. It is not that people believed that they are partially god. It is more important that the animism is so deeply into the people's mind and thus the dawn of the Japanese religion... until the deep impact of Buddhism which already florished for over 1000 years (it's origin is said to be B.C. 500s and it reached Japan in the middle of 500s A.D.).
About the influence of Buddhism over the indigenous animism will be explained in next chapter: The witchcraft from the Far East: Introduction 3!!!
Mon Feb 26, 2007 5:36 am