Book description
This accessible guide to the development of Japan's indigenous religion
from ancient times to the present day offers an illuminating
introduction to the myths, sites and rituals of kami worship, and their
role in Shinto's enduring religious identity.
- Offers a unique new approach to Shinto history that combines
critical analysis with original research
- Examines key evolutionary moments in the long history of Shinto,
including the Meiji Revolution of 1868, and provides the first
critical history in English or Japanese of the Hie shrine, one of
the most important in all Japan
- Traces the development of various shrines, myths, and rituals
through history as uniquely diverse phenomena, exploring how and
when they merged into the modern notion of Shinto that exists in
Japan today
- Challenges the historic stereotype of Shinto as the unchanging,
all-defining core of Japanese culture
John Breen is Reader in Japanese at SOAS
(University of London) and Associate Professor at the International
Research Centre for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, where he edits the
journal
Japan Review. His publications include
Yasukuni, the
War Dead and the Struggle for Japan's Past (edited, 2008), Inoue
Nobutaka,
Shint : A Short History (translated and adapted with
Mark Teeuwen, 2002),
Shint in History: Ways of the Kami
(edited with Mark Teeuwen, 2000), and
Japan and Christianity:
Impacts and Responses, (edited with Mark Williams, 1996).
Mark Teeuwen is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University
of Oslo. As well as the books authored and edited with John Breen, he
is co-editor of Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a
Combinatory Paradigm (with Fabio Rambelli, 2003) and The
Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion (with Bernhard Scheid,
2006).
