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.

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.