Download Ebook Shinto: A History

Download Ebook Shinto: A History

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Shinto: A History

Download Ebook Shinto: A History

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Review

"Her portrayal of the history of Shinto is based on decades of her own research, and undoubtedly this work will occupy the rank of a standard work for a long time, both for students and specialists in the field. Shinto research will benefit greatly as a whole. After the turning point marked by the revolutionary approach of Kuroda Toshio, international research on Shinto has since then led to a sometimes ideological dogmatization of what might be said and not. Helen Hardacre's book gives a fresh breath to the debate, which can only deepen our further understanding of the still-puzzling topic of Shinto." --Klaus Antoni, Journal of Religion"Hardacre's achievement in this work will be hard to supersede. This book could be used in all kind of courses, from introductory or advanced undergraduate to graduate seminars, not only on Japanese religions but Japanese culture in general and even on comparative subjects. Students will benefit from the comprehensive and in-depth narration, while the book provides ample clues and opportunities for additional research and revisions. Shinto: A History, which in its comprehensive and encyclopedia nature does not even have a counterpart in Japanese, is a scholarly milestone that will orient for years the study of Shinto and Japanese religions as a whole."--Fabio Rambelli, Journal of Religion in Japan"At nearly seven hundred pages, it is difficult to think of any adjective other than 'magisterial' to describe Hardacre's new survey on Shinto As the single most comprehensive book on Shinto, Hardacre's book is a must-read her focus on the problems of indigeneity and the public/private distinction moves the field forward considerably."--Jolyon B. Thomas, H-Net Reviews"This work has been long anticipated. The culmination of a lifetime's dedication to the study of Japanese religions by a major scholar in the field, Shinto: A History is both authoritative and comprehensive. Professor Hardacre manages to lead us carefully and judiciously on a long journey through what can often be recalcitrant, complex material. The notoriously difficult question 'What is Shinto?' has finally been answered." --Richard Bowring, Professor Emeritus, Japanese Studies, University of Cambridge "Shinto: A History is a milestone work for the study of Shinto. Hardacre provides a comprehensive vision to integrate the usually unrelated research on Shinto in the West and in Japan. Calling into question our conventional wisdom about Shinto, the author masterfully demonstrates that Shinto is a heterogeneous tradition that changed with time, and it encompasses not only shrine Shinto and state Shinto but also popular cultural practices including public festivals seemingly unconstrained by the Japanese emperor system." --Jun'ichi Isomae, Study of Religions, Research Department, International Research Center for Japanese Studies "Hardacre's study is particularly useful for understanding the religious resources that the Japanese people drew on to build and maintain their local communities. Her subject is their worship of spirits. She argues that spirit worship emerged in earliest times at the core of nativist (Shinto) beliefs. This leads her to investigate in chronological sequence Shinto debates, rituals, and the practices of its priesthood in which the emperor was the chief priest. The result is a very rich, comprehensive account." --Herbert P. Bix, Professor of History, Binghamton University "Hardacre, a professor of Japanese religions and society at Harvard, surveys the history of Shinto from ancient Japan to the present in this even-handed and detailed treatment of the topic. Few single-volume histories are this comprehensive... this will serve as a valuable primer for college classes, or for those simply interested in Shinto, and it will be sure to stand as the definitive factual treatment for years to come."--Publishers Weekly

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About the Author

Helen Hardacre is Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society at Harvard University. Concentrating on Japanese religious history of the modern period, she has done extended field study of contemporary Shinto and Buddhist religious organizations, the religious life of Japan's Korean minority, and contemporary ritualization of abortion. She has also researched State Shinto and directs a research project on constitutional revision in Japan.

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Product details

Hardcover: 720 pages

Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (December 1, 2016)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0190621710

ISBN-13: 978-0190621711

Product Dimensions:

9.3 x 1.6 x 6.4 inches

Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.4 out of 5 stars

3 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#322,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

This book is not really for the novice nor for the contemporary Shinto acolyte. Hardacre traces the development of Shinto from a more political and academic aspect than any spiritual discussion. This shouldn't be too much of a surprise considering her previous book was about State Shinto, and, in this book, she more or less pulls together the development of State Shinto from Shinto's pre-"Shinto" beginnings (This is a debatable point, which is why I said it like that). She also discusses the structure of Shinto religion and a lot of technical information on shrine building and development, but for someone like me who is more interested in the development of "Modern Shinto" from the nascent writing in the 7th-8th C, it was a great read. She does discuss other historians and their take on Shinto, and, oddly, she spends very little time on actual discussion on what nationalism is, but, again, I suspect it is because she already expects the reader to have some background in the historical and historiographical discussions about "Shinto" and its involvement with Buddhism, politics, and the shift in Japanese mindset in the mid- to late-19th C.People who dive into this without much historical background are likely to be overwhelmed by most of the rhetoric, although I have to hand it to Hardacre, her writing style is less bland than most writing in history. Her chapters around 1853 through 1952 (Black Ships through official end of US Occupation) were great from a historical point of view. Again, unsurprising considering her strengths. She writes right into the Heisei (now), but I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed at her lackluster discussion of it at the end, especially given the developments in Japan over the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and their love of State Shinto, especially since the 1980s. I would like to see more movement into Abe's administration.Again, her discussion of nationalism, bolstered by briefly mentioning scholars like Walter Skya, was rather lacking in such an ambitious book. But I give it 5 stars because, as a developing academic in Japanese/Shinto History, I loved this book.It was an in-depth read that I always wanted on the topic, warts and all.In other words, for this book, it is better to have some knowledge of other writers in this area. She does take from well-known scholars in Shinto, such as DC Holtom and John Breen, but I'm not sure I would have got as much out of this without a long bibliographical reading list to back me up. She did lead me to Japan's Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society), which is an interesting look at Japanese Nationalism. Regardless, this is for scholars more than the public. Great book!

I was looking for a nuanced history like this--but for the non-scholar it is a bit hard going, because the history is not only so carefully documented and specific, but includes figures (priests, scholars, and gods) of medieval Buddhism. (All the Japanese terms and phrases are transliterated into romaji.) The book lays out well the scarcity of information prior to the eighth century, and then proceeds to carefully parse and integrate "shinto" aspects of belief and ritual with Japan's adoption of Buddhism and the ongoing changes of its governing structures. I haven't finished it, yet, but all along the author also traces the aspects that will be incorporated into later reinventions of what Shinto means within the culture. With an extensive bibliography of up-to-date studies in Japanese. A reliable and judicious survey.

When it comes to writing history, the use of chronology as an organizing principle may seem like an inevitable choice. An historian may have to account for something that is thousands of years old. What better place to start than at the beginning?In the case of Helen Hardacre's Shinto: A History, however, I'm not so sure. This is because what constitutes Shinto and separates it from other religions (if Shinto was a religion) was not properly formulated until after the arrival of Buddhism and Confucianism. Even then, any proper analysis was / is murky due to the syncretism of Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism throughout Japanese history.Beyond writing this review, my primary motivation in reading Hardacre's study was to understand how Shinto works. Although Hardacre did get there eventually, the largest part of Shinto: A History consists of an incredibly detailed account of the institutional / bureaucratic manifestations of Shinto from the Council of Divinities (Jingikan) in the seventh century to present day Heisei.The clearest and most complete exposition of what Shinto is and how it operates in Japanese society is to be found roughly halfway through the book in a section on Shinto theologian Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843). Atsutane built on earlier Kokugaku (National Learning) thought that posited that the Emperor was at the head of the Kami and that the Kami were subjected to him in the same way that the subjects of the realm were. Atsutane's genius was in integrating ancestor worship and the simultaneous presence of spirits in the spiritual realm and the manifest world. (339) When combined with prayers at shrines and household kamidana, "The effect is to bind the worshipper into a hierarchy of Kami stretching from the emperor and the highest Kami down to the ancestors, from the beginning of time to the present, creating an image of a single community, including the ancestral Kami, united through worship of the Kami." (342) Ancestor worship is a lineage-based system – a bloodline, if you will – with the Kami as its source. The Emperor is a living Kami and all Japanese both alive and dead are related to this main line of transmission.It is interesting to note that up until the death and resurrection of Christ, both Judaism and early Christianity were lineage based. Jesus was a direct descendent of King David. The passing of the baton to the Apostles rather than to an heir (Dan Brown notwithstanding) revolutionized the transmission system in the West. By making the Holy Spirit available to lowly fisherman, tax collectors, and Gentiles, Christ shifted the power structure from a bloodline or lineage-based system to a spirit system available to all.As Hardacre makes clear, Shinto was predominantly a closed system expressly formulated to reflect Japanese circumstances. Although various Shinto theologians did attempt to fashion Shinto into a complete world view so that it could stand up to Buddhism and Confucianism, Shinto was never meant to explain how things worked outside of Japan. To put it another way, I can be a Buddhist or Confucian in my home state of Maine. But no matter how many times I climb Mt. Katahdin or worship our governor, I cannot practice Shinto there.In the final third of Shinto: A History, Hardacre takes issue with the characterization of State Shinto as being largely responsible for the rise of Imperial Japan and its conduct during the Pacific War (1931-1945). Although a case could be made for Shinto being used to instill notions of patriotism and sacrifice among the populace, Hardacre writes that: "The Occupation view of Shinto in relation to militarism or nationalism was, however, unbalanced and distorted . . . virtually all other branches of Japanese religions up to 1945 similarly devoted themselves to prayers for military victory, exaltation of the martial spirit, and justification of Japan's supposed mission to rule all of Asia." (444)The surprising thing to me is not that Buddhism was involved in the war effort – after all the Catholic Church gave Hitler the green light – but that a military man like Douglas MacArthur and his cohorts at SCAP understood Shinto almost as well as Hirata Atsutane did.Those who see religion as a myth-based code of values subject to rational analysis fail to understand its true nature. Any religion worthy of its name is nothing more than a power structure designed to attract and deliver power to the spiritual entity that it serves. It does this by eliciting a pledge of devotion during a person’s lifetime. Once the pledge has been given, the die is cast and the soul is in thrall to whatever spiritual force it has given its allegiance to.From his time in the Philippines, MacArthur understood that a Japanese soldier in service to the Emperor could not be defeated short of annihilation because of the way Imperial Japan was configured. Each individual soldier was part of something stretching backwards and forwards in time that crossed the boundary between the living and the dead. State Shinto had tapped into the local power supply at every village shrine and hamlet and added it to the grid. The only way to ultimately defeat something like this was to dismantle it.Fortunately, what is true for Shinto's negatives (how it might be utilized for militarism) is also true for its positives (how it might be utilized for community). In a chapter called "Shrine Festivals and Their Changing Place in the Public Sphere" Hardacre shows us that Shinto festivals are very much a part of contemporary Japan. While visits to Yasukuni Shrine and the separation of church and state remain controversial, the vast majority of Shinto observances and rituals are peaceful and life affirming. State Shinto may be gone, but the Kami are very much with us.From the review published in Kyoto Journal 90.

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