Joshua Frydman - The Japanese Myths: A Guide to Gods, Heroes and Spirits

A one-eyed oni haunts the wild forests of premodern Japan.

What Are the Japanese Myths?

The Age of the Gods

The Imperial Mythos

Living Kami and Divine Humans

Canon Foreigners: The Japanese Buddhist Pantheon

A World Flush with Spirits

The New Mythologies of Modern Japan

Joshua Frydman is Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. An expert on ancient Japan, his academic interests include the development of writing systems (in East Asia and worldwide), and the role of transregional and global cultural interactions in the development of premodern societies as viewed through literature and art. He is also the author of Inscribed Objects and the Development of Literature in Early Japan.

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Japan has a long association with myth. One of the earliest English speakers to naturalize as a Japanese citizen, Lafcadio Hearn (18501904), made it his lifes goal to learn the surviving folktales of rural Japan and transmit them to foreign audiences. His short-story collection Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904) became famous in the West, its tales of snow women and ogres in the hills adding to the exoticism of the Japanese woodblock prints and clothing that had recently become fashionable in western Europe and North America. Hearns work began more than 150 years of Western obsession with Japanese myths. How many modern fans of Japanese cinema, anime, manga, literature or popular music thrill to the images of gods and monsters in the shrouded valleys and craggy peaks of the islands? Yet for all its modern appeal, Japanese mythology has a much longer history.

Japan today is a society navigating a complex historical situation. One of the most economically powerful and technologically advanced nations in the 21st century, Japan is firmly a part of the modern, global West. Yet it is also very much not a part of the West. The deep connections that now exist between Japan and the United States and Western Europe are only slightly older than Hearn himself, but the myths, folktales and stories that Hearn recorded go back much further. In addition, these stories are intertwined with Japanese religions such as Buddhism and Shinto, which are not well understood by many people in Europe or the Americas.

Mythology is never static, but it can often appear so in hindsight. Most of the famous mythologies of the world such as Egyptian, Greco-Roman or Norse belong to societies that either no longer exist or no longer practise the religions that were associated with those mythologies. We see these older mythologies as if they were frozen in time, when in reality they are sets of stories that may have been told at wildly different times with varying images of the same gods and heroes. In the case of Japan, however, the religions associated with the myths are still practised; their gods are still worshipped and their heroes are still relevant. Although the ways in which the modern Japanese understand their myths are very different today than they were even a century ago, let alone more than a millennium, the mythology itself is still very much a living force in Japanese society. In order to understand Japanese mythology, then, we have to understand the context of those myths: where they originated, why they were used in the past, and how they are still used today.

Japan today is neither politically nor culturally the same as it was 200, 500 or 1,000 years ago. At the same time, however, there is strong continuity: many contemporary Japanese are descendants of the Japanese people of 1,000 years ago; they live in (some of) the same areas and worship many of the same gods. In order to define what makes their beliefs Japanese, we have to then understand different ways to think of Japan.

The country we know today as Japan is comprised of four main islands: from north to south, Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. Honshu, which means mainland, is by far the largest, followed by Hokkaido and Kyushu, with Shikoku the smallest of the main islands. The Japanese archipelago also includes almost 7,000 smaller islands.

The archipelago lies to the east of the Asian continent and its name in Japanese, Nihon or Nippon , meaning Origin of the Sun, reflects this geographical location. The English name Japan is a 17th-century corruption of the Chinese pronunciation of those same characters; in modern Mandarin, riben, but probably something closer to jeh-pen in the Early Mandarin of the 1600s. Nihon is a royal name, fit for a royal kingdom. The name supposedly dates to the reign of Empress Regnant Suiko (r. 593628), the thirtieth monarch in the traditional order of succession. Suiko is said to have written a letter to Emperor Yang (r. 569618) of the Sui Dynasty in China, proclaiming From the Son of Heaven in the Land Where the Sun Rises (Nihon) to the Son of Heaven in the Land Where the Sun Sets. This letter in its entirety appears in the Sui shu (Book of the Sui; 636), along with the aforementioned anecdote. Once Emperor Yang heard the introduction, he was very upset that the ruler of a barbarian kingdom (and a woman no less!) claimed a title equal to the Emperor of China. He was so incensed, according to the Sui shu, that he ordered the letter burned, and sent no reply.

Regardless of whether the account in the Sui shu is true or not, the name Nihon was used both inside and outside Japan by at least the 8th century. It was the official name taken by the imperial court, and this is in part why it remains the name of the country today. Yet neither the name Nihon nor the lands claimed to be associated with it had a stable definition until about 200 years ago. Take Hokkaido, for example, the northernmost of the main islands, famous today for its lavender fields, skiing and Sapporo beer. This island was not a part of Japan until the late 1700s; prior to that it was a mysterious barbarian region known by several different names. The indigenous people of Hokkaido, the Ainu, were seen as strange bear-worshipping savages for most of Japanese history unfortunately until well after their island was taken and colonized.