Word: shintoism
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...Buruma, nothing in modern Japan is completely Japanese. Even the myth of a divine Emperor, he contends, was assembled using imported parts. The old samurai who wrote Japan's first constitution in 1889 borrowed the nation-building blueprint of Europe's wiliest soldier, Otto von Bismarck, transforming Shintoism from a nature cult into a unifying national faith by grafting on German dogmas of military discipline and national essence...
...Some of the groups may be little more than bizarre clubs or innocuous doctrinal offshoots of traditional Buddhism and Shintoism, Japan's most common faiths. But religious scholars and the police are nonetheless alarmed by what they see as the proliferation of doomsday cults. Mystics consumed with signs of the apocalypse have a tendency to bring their visions horrifically to life. Japanese need no reminder of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that staged a deadly chemical gas attack on commuters in Tokyo's subway system seven years ago, allegedly masterminded by Aum's Shoko Asahara. Last week, one of Asahara...
...female royalty in England. Why can't we?" Itoh nodded. "It's not like it would be something new," he says. Indeed, there were eight Empresses before Akihito, the 125th monarch in a line that mythologically, anyway, descends from the sun goddess Amaterasu, the supreme deity of Shintoism. "It's ridiculous we outlaw them...
What we have is weather as electronic American Shintoism, a casual but almost mystic daily religion wherein nature is not inert but restless, stirring, alive with kinetic fronts and meanings and turbulent expectations (forecasts, variables, prophecies). We have installed an elaborate priesthood and technology of interpretation: acolytes and satellites preside over snow and circuses. At least major snowstorms have about them an innocence and moral neutrality that is more refreshing than the last national television spectacle, the O.J. Simpson trial...
...photo caption in last Friday's Crimson referred to two Japanese beliefs systems, Shintoism and Buddhism, as "superstition." Because the word "superstition" suggests irrationality, however, the two should have been termed "religions...