The Essentials of Japanese Mythology

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The study of mythology and folklore is a peculiar one to the extent that we are looking into things which are generally regarded as untrue yet critically important to a culture. We are also taking on the study of the “lore of the folk,” and this faces us with the question of exactly which folk we are talking about. Japan, of course, is a single nation, but its origins are so old and often so fragmented that unified mythology and folklore can be difficult to point to. Still, in all, there are some key texts, tales, and characters we can focus on which will give us a pretty good sense of Japanese mythology.

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My country, Brazil, apparently had the largest immigration of Japanese in the world. We recently celebrated one hundred years of immigration and the influence that this culture had on us is undeniable, since we are already mixed by nature and we also have German and Italian neighborhoods, as well as a great African influence. My town has a Japanese park and several sakura trees, as well as a Japanese cultural center with a baseball team. I really love it.

rotinasemroteiro
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I have Japanese in-laws and I’ve had a number of discussions with them about religion. Most Japanese don’t believe in God or any higher power, yet they regularly engage in strict Shinto/Buddhist rituals and traditions without really understanding why they’re doing it. This is why Japan is sometimes called the most religious and least religious country in the world.

Membarock
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This video is full of mistakes in just the beginning alone.

Japan didn't adopt Western traditions after WW2, that began during the Meiji Reformation in 1868 when the emperor banned most traditional Japanese culture and forced society to adopt Western norms and practices. Even martial arts and most traditional crafts were forbidden. It's actually during and after WW2 that the Japanese revived many lost Japanese art-forms, often times in watered down forms from their original.

Japan wasn't unfamiliar to Abrahamic religions. The Portuguese began trading with Japan in 1543. Catholic Christianity was introduced to the nation then and quickly became a fast-growing religion until it was banned in 1614.

realtalk
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I can't believe you claim Japan didn't aspire to Eestern culture until after WWII. The Meiji restoration of the mid-1880s was, to a significant extent, specifically about such modernization, and it's easy to find pictures from around 1900 that show Japanese people in western garb - especially military. It was a time of transistion to be sure, but by the time WWII had started, Japan was already very westernized. Not to say it was a fait accompli - you'll find a thorough mix of old and new before WWII.

stickplayer
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No actually the westernization of Japan started long before WW2, it started during in the Meiji Restoration ( 1850 - c. 1889). Almost 100 years before the end of WW2.

BuchananBobby
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Shinto was replaced with gohanism when the 7th dragon ball was found.

Floggingday
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Japan's unique folklore is likely due to it's inhabitants' isolation after settling the archipelago, that coupled with their less serious attitude surrounding their ancient mythologies leads to the "anime-understanding" of japanese myths

shinobi-no-bueno
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The first foreign cultural interference (with the west) was the Dutch, Portuguese, and the Jesuit missionaries in the south. Japan developed a Christian minority significant enough that it was deemed dangerous by the Shogunate. The Shogunate clamped down on it to keep it from spreading beyond Kyushu.

gustavju
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Very interesting choice of words "unique" I think when comparing something to something you know makes it unique. Every mythology is unique and strange.

tkyusko
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I truly wish various aspects of Japanese culture, traditional and contemporary, were more known and popular in the west. It's so fascinating and a lot of certain aspects are exceedingly more practical and respectable than how the west thinks and behaves.

javiermontiero
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There are some errors in this video.
1 it says that after world War 2, Japan started to become westernized.
This is incorrect because their military and infrastructure started to westernized in the mid to late 1800 during the Meiji Restoration.
2. It also mentions that the US military was there briefly. They are still there

binchillin
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The video confuses different concepts. An ideology can have inside itself a philosophy but not the other way around. A religion can have (also) an inherent philosophy and even support an ideological preset, but not necessarily the other way around:


A philosophy refers to an approach of looking and analyzing life an existence (that the whole concept of existence, “what is” and “what is not” is under the concept of ontology or metaphysics). Therefore “philosophy” is not limited to those studied by academia, there are thousands of philosophies and even some aren’t consistent or share their space with other philosophies within a same culture/society.


An ideology instead looks at a social state of things and proposes a correct way to fix it: it is fixed and represents a view of things (that can be contained by a philosophy and even a religion) and doesn’t accept alternatives. An ideology could be whether secular (not necessarily paired with religious belief) OR religious therefore contain a religion. You could have MANY political parties that are under THE SAME ideological umbrella, politics being the HOW to reach such change expressed and desired by an ideology. In some authoritarian countries only ONE and just ONE ideology is permitted (like under communism) and (sometimes) only ONE form of politics that correlates to said ideology. You can ALSO have different ideologies in the same society and the struggles may be big or even huge.

Usually a constitution of a country expresses one philosophy (in the West many have an inherent Humanist philosophy) that ALLOWS for many ideologies as long as they get along with said philosophy; if not, constitutional reformation would happen. Nevertheless there are constitution that support whether one and only one ideology (example: some Communist ones) or countries that accept one and only one religion as that of a country (example: most Muslim countries).


A key component for religion is its supernatural assumption: it’s an ontology that already starts with the idea that some things go beyond the limits of natural laws or physical laws and it’s not contained by logic. From there on the variety of concepts that sustains its hierarchical structure (whether it has one God, gods, no gods, everything is God or gods, etc.) can be paired with philosophical views on reality and sometimes (as expressed above) with an ideology. Another key ingredient of religions is faith: that that needs no proof to be deeply believed. In science you may rely, at the end of a rational or empirical road, on a belief that can’t advance beyond a certain point BUT while science will always look after an explanation beyond that, religion doesn’t.


Religions that have strict codified belief that have to be adopter without differences are called dogmatic, that is, they have certain tenets that should not be touched to be considered part of said religion: non dogmatic religions can be on the other hand syncretic. They can mingle and integrate concepts from other religions, even add gods to their own, even share different mythologies and even have different stories or myth for their gods.

magnvss
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Great job digging up such wonderful art for this video.

DB-bctg
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I’ve heard that Japan has a saying, paraphrasing but everyone is born in Shinto and dies Buddhist. Basically Shinto doesn’t have much in the way of funerals from what I understand

danielderamus
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I feel like Japan is one of the few places that’s similar to India, where religion is not just about worship but more a way of living.

adr
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I'm 1 minute in and they seem to have forgotten that the meiji restoration happened.

yamitsukikarasu
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The systematic reference to Abrahamic religion is somewhat disturbing, the whole video makes it seems like a western audience has no frame of reference outside of those, when it's not really the case, at least in Europe with ancient influence and mythology being integral to a lots of countries culture.

enomiellanidrac
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i found shintoism as a child and it lead me on the most beautiful spiritual path.

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKS
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Actually I understand that approximately 1% or so of the Japanese population follows Christianity- including Roman Catholicism which has traditionally been centered in Nagasaki, even today...

davidwhitney
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You glossed over the big reason Shinto doesn't have missionaries .. because it is a religion for Japanese. They would find it odd if anyone wanted to 'convert' because outsiders have no ancestral/historical tie to Japan.

gear