Tama in Japanese Myth: A Hermeneutical Study of Ancient Japanese Divinity by Tomoko Iwasawa (review)

This is an idiosyncratic study of tama (variously translated as “spirit,” “soul,” Geist), which the author takes to be the central concept of ancient Japanese religion, even more important than kami (deity). Trained in the philosophy of religion at Boston University, Tomoko Iwasawa here offers her version of a phenomenological hermeneutical analysis à la Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur of selected aspects of the mytho-historical Kojiki (712 CE). This hermeneutical exercise is in the service of her goal of “remythologizing” Japanese myth and, thereby, rescuing the contemporary Japanese people from what she takes to be the deleterious effects of historicism and its demythologization of the world.

Had Iwasawa maintained a strict focus on reconstructing the religious anthropology of ancient Japan using the Kojiki—that is, the people’s understanding of human nature and divine nature and their interrelationships—this study might have made a contribution to the field. As it stands, however, Iwasawa’s interpretations are quirky, ideologically driven, and ultimately unconvincing, while her methodology is dubious at best. Let me suggest just a few of the major problems pervading this work. In her terse rehearsal of the structure and argument of her book, Iwasawa introduces the Tokugawa period kokugakusha (nativist scholars) Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) and Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) as “pioneers shedding light on the notion of tama in the Kojiki” (p. xi). According to Iwasawa, through their efforts to remythologize Japan, these scholars offered a much-needed corrective to the abstract rationalizing of Japanese Neo-Confucian scholars, which had alienated the Japanese people from their authentic past. As an executive board member of the International Shinto Foundation, Iwasawa views her own work as being in concert with the good work of these kokugakusha.

Like Motoori, Iwasawa privileges the Kojiki as a “primal text” and the repository of concrete linguistic evidence of the authentic ancient Japanese “primordial experiences” of the kami (p. 7). “Motoori,” she writes,

considered the study of the Kojiki to be the most crucial for pursuing the modes of being in ancient Japanese culture. Like Heidegger, who maintained that language is the “house of Being” and inquired into the early Greek language to pursue the actual origins of the Western thinking prior to Plato and Aristotle, Motoori engaged in uncovering the meanings of ancient words in the Kojiki to investigate the creation of Japanese thinking. Stated differently, Motoori listened to the voices of the Kojiki, and let the Kojiki speak to him by revealing moments of origination in the Japanese language and therefore in the Japanese modes of thinking. Here it is not difficult to find in Motoori the groundwork for a hermeneutic discipline close to the phenomenological hermeneutics identified with continental philosophy during the 20th century.

(p. 9)

It is typical of Iwasawa’s mode of argumentation to assert, rather than carefully demonstrate, an identity between the hermeneutics of these kokugakusha and a hodgepodge of Western scholars, including Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, and Mircea Eliade. Here she makes the facile claim that Motoori’s method and that of Heidegger and even phenomenology more generally are all of a piece. There is apparently no need to ask whether “being” in Motoori’s work means the same thing as “Being” in Heidegger, nor, if any differences should exist, to ask then what difference the difference makes.

Readers familiar with kokugaku discourse will find many of the same rhetorical moves in Iwasawa’s work. She shares Motoori’s assumption that the language of the Kojiki preserves a pure, unadulterated Japanese mode of thought and being-in-the-world. To be sure, this assumption requires one to ignore a number of stubborn and (with apologies to Al Gore) “inconvenient” historical facts, but apparently this is no problem for Iwasawa. She summarily dismisses the “alleged facts” of modern historians and anthropologists who have studied the Kojiki myths (p. 58, italics in the original...