Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan (review)

Anyone who sets out to study the religious and political environment of early Japan deserves respect, for the subject is fraught with difficulty at every turn. The main chronicles on which we rely (Kojiki, Nihon shoki, Sendai kuji hongi, and what remains of certain local gazeteers) were not only compiled more than two hundred years after many of the events they purport to describe but were also composed with various conflicting agendas in mind. They were at root political in intent. And this is not all. They were written, by and large, in classical Chinese and would certainly not exist had Japan not already been well settled within the orbit of Chinese culture when they were first mooted. The temptation is, however, to block out this awkward fact, to forget that they express themselves in a foreign medium, and to read them for what they can tell us about Japan prior to such influence. As a result they are like shifting sands, dangerous terrain that we must attempt to cross if we are to go anywhere at all, but that often cannot take the weight we impose upon them. Despite the difficulties they present, these sources continue to fascinate us, drawing us in to their impossible mix of fact and fiction, narrative and discourse, tempting us to tread on them as if they were solid ground.

It is through such unreliable texts that successive generations of Japanese have, for example, created the story of how Buddhism was first introduced into Japan, and it is through such texts that we also try to reconstruct what belief systems might have been there before the arrival of Buddhism. Pre-Buddhist phenomena used to be labeled Shinto, but it is now generally accepted that what is usually meant by this term emerged somewhat later as part of a process of self-definition in response to the presence and power of Buddhism rather than predating it. Without such a foil, of course, the need for self-definition is never that obvious. The term now in most common use to designate whatever might have been "non-Buddhist" at this early stage is jingi sūhai, or "worship of the gods of heaven and earth." Such a change in terminology does not in itself help define the nature of the beast, but at least it allows us to draw a distinction between this and later Shinto, and to conceptualize the situation in terms of localized, competing cults rather than a system of thought and practice able to stand comparison with Buddhism. Nevertheless, it is still hard to avoid the tacit assumption that this term, too, despite its obvious Chinese overtones, stands for what was "native" and "indigenous."

Michael Como is a man with a mission: to challenge the idea that elements of a pre-existing native Japanese religious outlook can be found within texts such as Kojiki and Nihon shoki, and to show that the phenomena under review were not in fact indigenous at all but rather the result of a prior wave, or series of waves, of influence from the continent. In other words, everything that might seem at first sight to be non-Buddhist in these texts was no less "foreign" than Buddhism itself. In a series of thematically arranged chapters Como investigates the early myths, paying most attention to the large number of immigrant lineages that achieved prominence and indeed spearheaded the sinification of Japanese culture in the sixth and seventh centuries. He starts by discussing the Hata, immigrants from Silla who were associated with both Buddhism and silk weaving but who gained real influence when the capital moved north to Heian-kyō, which they had already made their heartland; they had strong ties, for example, to the shrines at Kamo and Matsuno-o. A heavy Korean and Chinese presence without question exists in what we tend to conceptualize as traditionally Japanese. Como's argument is that despite the natural desire...