Religion (宗教/shuukyou)

Before I came to Japan, I got to know Y in Italy, where we lived in the same city, Turin, for a year. One evening we were waiting with some friends in a small mountain railway station, after a day of skiing in Limone, up near the Alpine border with France. We had more than an hour to wait for a train, and made the waiting room into an impromptu ristorante with cheese, olives, bread and wine. We had the place to ourselves, and the talk turned to our childhoods and our religious education. Michael (Anglican), Chiara (Sicilian Catholic) and I (NZ/Irish Catholic) recited the Ten Commandments, the Apostle’s Creed and the Seven Deadly Sins with gusto, and pleasure at how much we could recall after decades of neglect. Y, when it came to her turn, recited the one and only Buddhist prayer she could remember from her lifetime of observance: “南無阿弥陀仏…Namu Amida Butsu ” Yuko said that “Amida Butsu” refers to Buddha but she had no idea what namu means. “I’ve never wondered about that” she said.
“That’s it? That’s all you have to learn?” “Yes,” she assured me. I was already an admirer of Japanese culture, after seeing most of Ozu Yasujiro’s films and devouring hundreds of pre-digested Zen parables; it now seemed even more attractive.If you look at the statistics for religious affiliation, you will see that 90% of Japanese people are Buddhists and that 90% are Shintoists. One can see American trade representatives narrowing their eyes at this statistic. Of course, it is the same people who are both Shinto and Buddhist. Rather than fight over the religious affiliation pie, the two major religious traditions in Japan have, over the centuries, arrived at a kind of mutually profitable entente whereby the milestones of life are divided between them: The Shinto temples get weddings and new babies, while the Buddhists get the funerals. There is a bit of cross-over. Buddhist priests will probably get married in a Buddhist temples and I have heard of Shinto funerals.
“Belief” is the word which springs to mind when talking about Westerners and their religions. The “Credo” is the defining prayer which Catholic children have had to struggle to learn by heart for centuries.

For Japanese people, “practice” seems to be the defining concept. I’ve never heard of a Japanese person say, “I don’t go to the temple (the normal translation for the Buddhist お寺-otera) because I don’t believe in it.” The same goes for the shrine. More than belief, religion in Japan is a matter of doing the socially appropriate thing on a given occasion.

Buddhist services remind me of the Latin mass of the 1950s.The funeral service is pretty much an unintelligible, meaningless drone to the average Japanese person. The priests chant the sutras from concertina-shaped folders at a rhythmic pace which is somewhere between the way priests used to race through a weekday mass and Winston McCarthy giving the commentary on a Springbok test. In fact the language, a solid mass of Chinese characters, is at least as far from modern Japanese as Latin is from English. No translation, no commentary, no exegesis is provided. In fact I have seen one priest achieves a bathetic climax, after a resonant performance of one of the great sutra, by immediately loudly asking for his fee. (Payment to the monk is usually per visit and they receive about 5000 yen ($70 NZ Dec. 2003) for a half hour call. )

I have never heard a Japanese person lament or even mention the fact that they could understand nothing of the ceremony. Most seem to accept that the service is a chance to slip off into a reverie, only broken by the need to move their legs to keep the blood circulating as they sit on their heels on the tatami floor.

Buddhist practice is pretty much a takeaway business. Nothing of importance happens inside a temple. For city funerals, the priests go to the big funeral emporiums and, in the country, to the family house.

Almost as important as the funeral is the elaborate sequence of commemorative days that follow the demise of a family member. Since Y’s mother and four of her brothers had already died before I arrived in Japan, there were plenty of opportunities to admire the thoroughness of this observance, so minimally connected to what westerners would call belief. On the 13th of every month, the family monk would arrive on his scooter and chant prayers for a half an hour or so in front of the Buttsudan (family altar) in Y’s father’s room. In the shrine, there was a picture of her mother, a couple of candles, and a plate of delicacies, perhaps mochi, (rice-paste balls) and fruit. The priest usually came in the morning and anyone who was home would attend. Y would try and say a prayer on that day every month, even if she missed the priest’s visit.

The seventh and the forty-ninth days after the death are important. The first Buddhist All Souls Day (August 13-15) after the death is also a must. The first and third anniversaries are also marked by family gatherings and a prayer session. There is another gathering at the seventeenth anniversary, and then a big gap until the fiftieth anniversary. I was there for the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Y’s oldest brother, and of her father’s mother.


The funeral itself is a grander affair, and the status of the family is measured by the number of priests. The passing of a country doctor like Mr. W, the father of a our sister-in-law, called for a three priest ceremony, and Y father, as a retired headmaster, could hardly have had less than two.

If Buddhist beliefs are vague and cursory for most Japanese people, those relating to Shinto are elusive to the point of invisibility. The wedding ceremony is certainly pleasant and may actually take place inside a shrine. The consumption of saki is an integral and repeated part of the ceremony, and certainly reduces anxiety.

Apart from weddings though, Shinto is a pretty much do-it-yourself affair. You take the baby to the shrine soon after birth, and again on the special feast day called　七五三 Shichi-go-san (Seven-five-three), early in November, when the child is in her third, fifth and seventh year. There may be a priest who can bless the visitants with a wave of paper wand but if not, it is sufficient to stand outside the shrine and make a short prayer to feel that one has satisfied the requirements of a successful visit. In less than five minutes one has completed the necessary ceremonies which would be pretty much as follows: pouring water over one’s hands inside the entrance to the shrine to cleanse oneself; standing in front of the shrine; throwing a coin or, rarely, a 1000 yen note into the collection box; ringing the bell (to awaken the gods), clapping once (to make sure they are awake), bowing and praying silently, for perhaps fifteen seconds; clapping again and leaving. (If it is New Year, people usually also spend fifty yen on a fortune-telling slip -- or two, if the first one offers a less than optimistic prognosis for the coming year.

There is no equivalent to Sunday school for Japanese children, and I have never met any Japanese person except my shakuhachi teacher and monk friend,S, who showed the slightest interest in discussing religious belief.