The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of MéijiGriffis, William Elliot
Religion
The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji
Griffis, William Elliot
Japan -- Religion
[Footnote 17: The proprietor of a paper-mill in Massachusetts, who had
bought a cargo of rags, consisting mostly of farmers' cast off clothes,
brought to the author a bundle of scraps of paper which he had found in
this cheap blue-dyed cotton wearing apparel. Besides money accounts and
personal matters, there were numerous temple amulets and priests'
certificates. See also B.H. Chamberlain's Notes on Some Minor Japanese
Religious Practices, _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, May,
1893.]
[Footnote 18: M.E., p. 440.]
[Footnote 19: See the Lecture on Buddhism in its Doctrinal
Development.--The Nichiren Sect.]
[Footnote 20: The phallus was formerly a common emblem in all parts of
Japan, Hondo, Kiushiu, Shikoku, and the other islands. Bayard Taylor
noticed it in the Riu Kiu (Loo Choo) Islands; Perry's Expedition to
Japan, p. 196; Bayard Taylor's Expedition in Lew Chew; M.E., p. 33,
note; Rein's Japan, p. 432; Diary of Richard Cocks, Vol. I., p. 283. The
native guide-books and gazetteers do not allude to the subject.
Although the author of this volume has collected considerable data from
personal observations and the testimony of personal friends concerning
the vanishing nature-worship of the Japanese, he has, in the text,
scarcely more than glanced at the subject. In a work of this sort,
intended both for the general reader as well as for the scientific
student of religion, it has been thought best to be content with a few
simple references to what was once widely prevalent in the Japanese
archipelago.
Probably the most thorough study of Japanese phallicism yet made by any
foreign scholar is that of Edmund Buckley, A.M., Ph.D., of the Chicago
University, Lecturer on Shintō, the Ethnic Faith of Japan, and on the
Science of Religion. Dr. Buckley spent six years in central and
southwestern Japan, most of the time as instructor in the Doshisha
University, Kiōto. He will publish the results of his personal
observations and studios in a monograph on phallicism, which will be on
sale at Chicago University, in which the Buckley collection illustrating
Shintō-worship has been deposited.]
[Footnote 21: Mr. Takahashi Gorō, in his Shintō Shin-ron, or New
Discussion of Shintō, accepts the derivation of the word _kami_ from
_kabé_, mould, mildew, which, on its appearance, excites wonder. For
Hirata's discussion, see T.A.S.J., Vol. III., Appendix, p. 48. In a
striking paper on the Early Gods of Japan, in a recent number of the
Philosophical Magazine, published in Tōkiō, a Japanese writer, Mr.
Kenjirō Hiradé, states also that the term kami does not necessarily
denote a spiritual being, but is only a relative term meaning above or
high, but this respect toward something high or above has created many
imaginary deities as well as those having a human history. See also
T.A.S.J., Vol. XXII., Part I., p. 55, note.]
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