Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
When attempting to compare the nations of England and Japan it is easy to make surface-level equations. Both are archipelagos situated at the two furthest reaches of Eurasia dominated geographically by one major island surrounded by smaller outlying ones. Both in turn also consist of a few smaller ethnic groups dominated by one major group which migrated there around two millennia ago. Both have languages, customs and histories highly distinct from the continent, avoiding that continuum blend which occurs when nations directly abut one another. Both are hegemonic within their locality (both even having accidentally split their smaller neighbour in half in the middle of the last century), both are religiously disentangled from any other country. Both have one central economic nexus (London/Tokyo) that make up the major part of their productivity and wealth. Both are thalassocratic naval powers. Both are economically faultering ex-Empires with highly educated workforces and low birthrates. Both are liberal(ish), athiest-leaning(ish) and very polite(ish). The list could easily go on but safe to say that "the Land of the Rising Sun" and "the Empire on which the Sun never sets" have a lot of the same foundational building blocks which may result in a similar nation a-la "geographic determinism".
Shinto is by no means a similar religion to Anglicanism, as discussed last week, but both have been moulded by the indigenous efforts of their countrymen, and ultimately shaped by such underlying properties of their position in the world. The CofE, despite its definitive origin in 1534, had been divergent from continental religion for many centuries before that, particularly in its position within society. There is of course the ancient influence of Celtic Christianity and its particular focus on monastic isolation. Scottish saints such as St Ninian or St Columba retreated from society to distant islands (Whithorn and Iona respectively) to practice a naturalistic form of early Christianity separate from the synods and councils of the Mediterrain, meanwhile the hagiographies of the lives of the more politically active saints such as St Patrick or St David are often steeped in magic and mythology so much as to make them equally figures of myth and history. The English were pagan upon their arrival to Britain, and these pagans spread out quickly across what is today England, displacing the Celts and Christianity to the fringe. They established the seven English Kingdoms of the Heptarchy, which each would be converted one-by-one. First were the kingdoms of Kent in the South and Northumbria in the North. St Augustine of Canterbury was sent by the Pope in Rome to baptise Kent for the Roman Rite, meanwhile Northumbria was Christianised when King Oswald returned from his exile on Iona, thus firmly placing the North of England into the Celto-Christian world. These two Kingdoms and their respective capitals of Canterbury and York remain today the two archdiocese of England. Northumbrian Christianity flourished and followed on the Celtic tradition of island monasteries (Lindisfarne) and mythologically-charged saints (St Cuthbert). Canterbury in turn took on a more Roman approach, importing bishops and scholars from Rome to found new cathedrals and to spread the gospel into the surrounding kingdoms of Wessex, Sussex, Essex and East Anglia. The final kingdom, Mercia, remained staunchly heathen until the defeat of King Penda (the last pagan King in Britain) by the Northumbrians. Mercia (which consists broadly of today's Midlands) was both a battleground and merging place for the two sects of English Christianity under the following Northumbrian and West-Saxon supremacies, with the church at Canterbury eventually gaining dominance over the whole country under King Alfred the Great due to the collapse of the Northern Kingdoms from to pagan Viking raids. This mix of Celtic and Roman rites gave England a unique form of religion. One that valued both the legalistic theology of Rome and the Catholic scholars, as well as a huge reverence of "people and place" in the lonely holy sites of the old indigenous saints.
The origins of Shinto are far more hazy, being entirely indigenous to Japan (probably) and holding a mythological history stretching back to the birth of the universe. In this way it is far more in line with the three pre-Christian belief-systems of Britain (Celtic, Graecoroman, and Norse). However, if we take China as the parallel to Rome, it is fair to make some comparisons with the conflict and dialectic between Shinto and Buddhism as that between Celtic and Roman Christianity. Long before the so-called "Japanese Reformation" and the codification of Zen I talked about last week, the two religions lived side by side in a syncretic fashion. Buddhism provided a legalist and theological system through which philosophers and kings could reason and rule, particularly since it was filtered through the highly structured system of the Chinese Imperial Court. Buddhist-leaning Emperors (read pro-Chinese) would bring over scholars and priests to found new temples and proselytise to the masses, while Shinto-leaning Emperors (read anti-Chinese) would divert funds from the temples into new grand shrines and hold extravagant festivals and commemorations of kami and mytho-historical events. Over time these two different paths created a synthesis under which they could both function, with the "high-church" Buddhism and the "low-church" Shinto, perhaps analogous to the Catholic-to-Protestant spectrum seen in Church of England. Both religious systems were changed and moulded as required to fit the country they found themselves in. Heated until they were pliable enough to both bring to bear both the inherent strength of an organised religion, while retaining the ancient rights of the populace to the veneration of mythology. This is unlike the way say Islam was adopted by the Turks, or how Communism was adopted by the Chinese. In those systems while the belief system was indeed moulded by the adopters into something distinct, they came about as revolutions that purposefully set out to destroy the old ways, rather than find a way to preserve them.
And so we have two religious systems that set out to venerate the old. Old churches, old monasteries, old castles, old temples, old shrines. Old saints, old kami, old tales, old myths. In Britain when someone claims to be "Anglican", there is almost no theological or moral standpoint they could take that would surprise me, it is a religion meant to encompass every view held within the English populace. There are as many Conservative Anglicans as there are Liberal Anglicans, unlike in the US or Germany, religion here should be as apolitical as the King, the BBC, or the NHS. In Japan mainstream religion seems very much the same. Politicians of every stripe will make shrine visits or espouse sutra out of a sense of duty, and the religious institutions are unbiased by nature. For the great majority of the population religion is indeed not something they really thing about at all. They will perform acts of religion like holidays or visiting places of worship, but this is more from a position of respect and tradition than any religious fervour. Almost all of us in Britain performed in a Nativity play when we young for example, but such plays are never evangelising in any respect: I doubt it even passes most parents' minds that it is a form of religious ritual. In Japan its common to see your average mother or salaryman pass through a shrine and make a prayer just because they happen to be nearby, and the ubiquitous New Year's shrine visit is an annual pilgrimage for almost everyone in the country.
While I think the quote I left off last week with is somewhat disingenuous (it disregards the very real spiritual sincerity of many), it is true that most of the everyday acts of religion in this country can barely be called as such. We visit cathedrals not to experience the divine, but to experience our history. We sing carols not to remember Christ's birth in solemnity, but to enjoy a collective Yuletime spirit. We close our shops on Sundays not to abide by the holy word, but just because that's what we do. But in complying with these traditions, we are in fact living a Christian life whether we intended to or not. The middle-aged housewife who finds joy in her family being all together again on Christmas Day is as much a Christian as the bishop who has spent twenty years studying scripture. We've created a church within which we can truly "live", rather than just consider. And while I am of course not Japanese I have visited (and lived vicariously through their stories), and it seems they too live within Shinto. They visit shrines with their friends because they're beautiful and they want to take photos. They hike around Kyoto on a whistlestop pilgrimage just because that's what you do. They sit under the cherry-blossoms to drink sake because its fun. Both religions seem bewilderingly relaxed to outside zealots, but they fail to understand that their basis is not one of tight theological reasoning, but one of love of people and place.
