Academic literature on the topic 'Amaterasu Ōmikami (Shinto deity)'

In order to create an orderly state, the first imperial chronicles emerged in the early 8th century in the territory of modern Japan through the integration and systematization of mythical elements that proved the legitimacy of the government and the descent of the imperial Yamato lineage from the supreme deity of the Shinto pantheon - the Great Sun Goddess Amaterasu. This mythic paradigm was created on the existing mytho-historical foundations fostered by cultural and political contacts with the Korean kingdoms and the Chinese empire. There is evidence that the cult of the solar deity, originally portrayed as a male principle, originated in a corpus outside the Yamato mythological system. And since male-female pairs of rulers were common (first it was the gods, later the ruler and the shamaness), it is possible that at some point the distinction between the sexes was blurred and then the female side prevailed. However, the female ancestral deity does not indicate a period of matriarchy. This symbolic type of goddess, who initiates a patrimonial lineage with rare female exceptions, was created by members of a privileged group of powerful men to legitimize their own power structures. Moreover, the cult of the mother goddess is not limited to the solar principle, but is associated with weaving, silk production, and agriculture. Thus, the simple assertion that the Yamato imperial lineage descended from the goddess Amaterasu raises numerous questions and doubts, which this essay attempts to answer.

This article responds to Jeffrey Perl’s argument (in “Regarding Change at Ise Jingū,” Common Knowledge, Spring 2008) that, while there is a “paradigm shift” at Ise every twenty years, when the enshrined deity Amaterasu “shifts” from the current site to an adjacent one during the rite of shikinen sengū, the Jingū paradigm itself never changes and never ages. The author confirms Perl’s conclusion by examining the politicized scholarship, written since the 1970s, maintaining that Shinto is a faux religion invented prior to World War II as a means of unifying Japan behind government policies of ultranationalism and international expansion. This article shows, instead, how emperors—who are not political but religious figures in Japan—and the Jingū priesthood have acted together over the past thirteen hundred years to sustain the imperial shrine at Ise and its ancient rites. The so-called Meiji Restoration actually continued an imperial policy of restoring and intensifying the observance of Shinto rituals that were threatened by neglect. Meiji intervened personally in 1889 to ensure the continuity of hikyoku, an unvoiced and secret serenade to Amaterasu, by extending its venue from the imperial palace shrine to performance at Jingū as well. The author’s archival and ethnographic research at Ise and the National Archives shows how the arguments that Shinto is a modern invention are punitive rather than dispassionately historical.