Puns (しゃれ/share), Religion and Superstition

While a lot of Catholic practices seem superstitious to Protestants, Catholics were taught to make a very clear distinction between religious practice and mere superstition. Anything which involved the intervention of God, or the intercession with God of the Virgin Mary, or of any of the saints, was not superstition. Any belief in the autonomous power of other supernatural agents was regarded as superstition.

In a culture, like the Japanese, where practice is only tangentially linked to belief, such distinctions are seldom discussed. There is little concern as to whether a lucky or unlucky practice is linked to a “true” religious belief. There tends to be simply a pragmatic acceptance that some practices may ward off misfortune and, as long as they are not too onerous, should be followed, “just in case”.

The most socially pervasive superstitious (is there a less derogatory word?) practice in Japan is the organization of activities according to the list of unlucky and lucky days. Most Japanese diaries, or agenda, classify every day of the year on a scale which indicates whether it is appropriate for certain activities, especially important events like marriages or funerals. For instance, some days are called “tomo-biki” or “friend-pulling”.

Funerals should never be held on such days as this would invite the death of other people, who would be “pulled” into the other world to accompany the departed one.

The fact that these classifications are printed in most “normal” diaries is an indication of how pervasive the judgement of lucky and unlucky days is in daily life in Japan.

Individual belief seems irrelevant. Even if one family which was organising a wedding might feel strongly against such prescriptions--I have never heard of one--the fact that most guests would be upset if the wedding was on a inauspicious day would ensure the family would go along with normal practice.

I have never heard Japanese people say, “Don’t be superstitious!” when someone gives them advice about lucky or unlucky behaviour. Although there are obvious economic consequences to the existence of a number of taboo days on the calendar, with weddings being crammed into the luckiest days, and the wedding “palaces” being deserted on the bad days, I have never heard any suggestion that the lucky calendar be abandoned.

Many of the common practices seem to derive, not from any specific religious traditions, but from a feeling for the magic power of words. For example, the Chinese-based word for “four”, 四-“shi” sounds identical in Japanese to the Chinese-derived word for death, 死-“shi”.

Wherever possible, the number four is avoided in social interactions. While money is a common present when one is attending wedding, one has often to think carefully whether one should be stuffing thirty or fifty thousand yen into an envelope, as forty would be out of the question. For funerals in Kumamoto, the choice would be between three and five thousand yen ($50-$70, 2002).

On the positive side, eight is generally thought to be lucky, since the Chinese character for eight, 八, spreads wide from a peak (“sue hirogari”—lit. “the ends spread out”) and this is considered fortunate. I can see a link between that shape and the　 spreading gables of a wealthy house, It also looks like part of the Chinese character for rice 米, an important measure of wealth in Japan, at least until the Meiji period.

The list of do’s and don’ts is never complete, and even adult Japanese can be caught out doing something that might offend someone. Y once made the mistake of taking a pot plant as a present for her sister-in-law’s father, who was in hospital with pneumonia. Her elder brother intercepted it in the corridor of the hospital, narrowly averting embarrassment. Pot plants have roots, suggesting permanence, which in turn implies that the patient may have more than a temporary stay in hospital.

One tradition that is universally known is the belief that one should eat 鰻,unagi [eel], on one of the hottest days of the year. The reasoning is: the day is called “ushi no hi”; the word “unagi” contains the same sound “u”; hence, one should eat “unagi” on that day.

The use of paper in Shinto rites may be based on a similar pun: the Japanese words for paper, 紙, and for god, 神, are pronounced in the same way,　“kami”.

These traditions seem, like so many aspects of Japanese culture, to be coolly, rather than passionately observed. I have never heard of Japanese people dying or becoming sick because of dread at the breach of one of these traditions. On the other hand, the use of Shinto priests for something akin to exorcism is not uncommon. Two friends lost one of their twin boys at birth. The surviving twin had severe and chronic health problems which lasted for several years. A friend of the family suggested calling a Shinto priest. The priest came, and did a series of incantations to pacify the spirit of the dead twin, who, the priest explained, felt sad and lonely, and was trying to take his brother with him. After the priest’s visit, the boy’s health improved.

Although we have not had any similar reason to call in a priest, I would not protest if Y wanted to do so. I have bowed my head many times to receive a blessing from a Shinto priest, who waves strands of folded paper, hanging from a kind of wand over the heads of the people standing before him. No priest has ever wanted to know whether I believed or not, nor wondered if I was “Shinto”. Only once, when I went with the Noh actors for a blessing before the Takigi (torchlight) Noh, did I ever have the feeling that a Shinto priest was uncomfortable at my presence. I may have imagined it. Shinto is a cool religion in a way that my brand of Irish Catholicism certainly was not.

Japanese people who practice Shinto and Buddhism seem unconcerned about whether they are better than other religions, and never seem remotely interested in “converting” people. The persecution of Christianity during the Edo period seems to have been political rather than religious in motivation, inspired mainly by the fear of the ruling elite that the new beliefs would destabilize the established order.

However, there have on occasion been outbreaks of the kind of religious strife that is all too familiar to Europeans to those living in the Middle East. I have seen evidence of the attacks on Buddhism during the early Meiji period. In our explorations of the countryside around Kumamoto, I had often encountered Buddhist statues whose calm demeanour was somewhat compromised by their lack of a head. There is one famous collection of five hundred Buddha, one fifth of whom are headless. There is a notice saying that many lost their heads during a severe earthquake in the early nineteenth century.

I accepted the explanation without question until, years later, I came across another series of headless Buddhas on another mountain side. This time though, there was a different explanation. A large noticeboard explained that the statues had been mutilated during the nineteenth century by gangs of ultra-nationalists, who considered Buddhism un-Japanese and who were trying to promote the ancestral folk religion, Shinto, as the official religion of the renascent Japanese state.

The priest who had written this belonged to the minority Shingon sect of Buddhism, and was obviously an exception to the cultural norm of reticent forbearance in the face of ill-treatment. (Part of his noticeboard was taken up with a long account of the refusal of the authorities to take any action regarding the rape of one his family members.)

At some point after that brief Meiji-period outburst of anti-Buddhist passion, the state must have decided to accept that Buddhism could be accepted as Japanese, just like that other foreign import which has come to be seen as a defining aspect of the Japanese national identity, the Chinese writing system.

The great popularizer of Japanese religion and thought, Shiba Ryoutarou, has done much to demythologize the ancient character of contemporary Shinto. State Shinto was manufactured by the Meiji regime out of the decentralized folk religion and was used to support Japanese imperialism and militarism.

Pre-Meiji Shinto survives, however. Walking through the forest on the slopes of Mt. Aso one winter’s day, Y and I came across a tiny Shinto stone shrine, almost invisible among some bushes, with the carving of a snake on the one side. In front of the stone, someone had left an egg as an offering to this deity of rural fertility.

On the hill behind Kumamoto University, there is what Y and I have always called the “brain shrine”, a triad of enormous boulders with a crude little concrete “shrine” and collection box in front of it. There is a pile of pebbles in front of it, each with a student’s prayer written on it: “語学しますように. 神様助けてください/

Gogaku shimasu you ni. Kamisama,tasuketekudasai. /

[“May I pass [my entrance exams]. Help me, God!”

“Let me be accepted for medical school!”]

It is in these mountain shrines, rather than in the bombastic bellicosity of militaristic “state-Shinto” shrines like Yasukuni Jinja in Tokyo, that the ancestral spirit of Japan can be sensed.

State Shinto has more to do with Europe than Japan, as the young Meiji leaders felt they had to create a European-style state if they were not to be dominated, like China. by the European cabals.