Shinto: A Short History (review)

With this translation of the 1998 volume Shintō: Nihon umare no shūkyō shisutemu, Mark Teeuwen and John Breen bring us the first scholarly, English-language history of Shintō from prehistoric times to the present. While other works describe Shintō values or aesthetics, examine Shintō in a limited time frame, or collect a variety of unconnected articles, Shinto: A Short History seeks to provide a coherent narrative of the development of Shintō. Its four essays, each by a different author, provide a detailed overview of Shintō in Japanese history, bringing together the insights of recent research in the field.

The focus here—as befits a volume edited by Inoue Nobutaka, a prominent sociologist of religion—is on the history of Shintō as related to changes in social (and therefore also political) structures. Inoue sets the sociological tone for the work early in his introduction, proposing "the concept of a 'religious system' . . . as a tool to explore the historical development of religion in its intimate relation with the structural characteristics and changes of society as a whole" (p. 3). Treating Shintō as all or part of a single religious system, the authors of each section either explicitly or, more often, implicitly attempt to identify the "constituents" of such a religious system (both the people who "make" and those who "use" the religion); the "network" (of sites, buildings, hierarchies, pilgrimage routes, and the like) used by the system to survive; and the "substance" or message conveyed in the system's teachings, practices, and rituals (p. 4). This approach, Inoue explains, "allows us to treat clusters of religious groups that display typological similarities as one religious system" (p. 3).

Such a social, historical approach was still relatively new in 1998 when this work first appeared in Japan. The appearance of a general history focusing more on social changes than on doctrine was an event of signal importance in the world of Shintō studies. It is a sign of the rapid development of the field in recent years, however, that now (in 2005) this approach has become mainstream. Current scholarship relies strongly on social historical methods, as evident in the work of many scholars included in two influential, recent volumes—Shinto in History, edited by Breen and Teeuwen (Curzon Press, 2000), and Buddhas and Kami in Japan, edited by Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).

Reexamined now that the sheen of innovation has worn off, Inoue's "religious systems" approach appears beset by problems. As Inoue himself points out, Shintō—that is, the worship of kami—can, at most, only be said to constitute an independent religious system of its own at two times: during the ancient era, as the classical system associated with the ritsuryō state, and after the Meiji Restoration, as part of the modern imperial state. "The Buddhist and Confucian forms of Shinto that were prominent during the medieval and early modern periods were incomplete as a religious system," Inoue acknowledges, though "it is not impossible to regard them at least as a religious system in nascendo" (p. 6). Given this limitation, the logical solution might then be to write a history of the successive religious systems in Japanese history. But the subject of the book is Shintō, not religion. Herein lies the problem. While the concept of "religious systems" productively focuses analysis on the primacy of social and political developments, the exclusive focus on kami worship (albeit in relation to shugendō, Buddhism, and other practices) does not permit "religious systems" to provide a coherent framework for the narrative as a whole.

In his introduction, Inoue also introduces another promising framework that, like the focus on social history, has become increasingly prominent in the scholarly literature of the last few decades: an awareness of Japan as part of a broader East Asian, if not global, context. Inoue characterizes Shintō not as isolated in Japan but as part of a "Chinese religio-cultural sphere" of polytheism, animism, Mahayana...