Yoshida Shinto

Issue 282 of the Journal of Shinto Studies (神道宗教) contained two articles about Yoshida Shinto: “The Early Modern Reception of the Yoshida Family’s Medieval Research on Shrines”, by Arai Daisuke, and “A Study of the Formation Process of Kiyohara Senken’s Gyōjihi”, by Nitta Keizō. I am not going to get into the details, because both papers are careful philological studies looking at the sources used in creating historical works, but I think it would be useful to say something about Yoshida Shinto.

Yoshida Shinto was created by Yoshida Kanetomo (1435–1511), the hereditary priest of Yoshida Jinja in Kyoto. His family was one branch of the Urabë, who had been important in central Shinto practice since the first records. After much of Kyoto, including many jinja and the Shinto complex in the Imperial palace, had been destroyed in the Ōnin War, Kanetomo decided to revitalise Shinto practice. He did this by, essentially, appointing himself the head of Shinto, saying that all the kami were enshrined in his jinja, and writing new rituals that he said were part of a tradition passed down from the kami exclusively within his family.

He managed to convince a lot of people to take him seriously.

However, succession in the family did not go smoothly. Kanetomo’s eldest son, the intended heir, predeceased him, and instead Kanetomo was succeeded by that son’s son. However, the grandson was in conflict with his uncle (Kanetomo’s second son), which led to the grandson burning his house down and running away in 1524. Kanetomo’s third son had been adopted into the Kiyohara family, and was the Kiyohara Senken named in Nitta’s paper. Senken decided that his own third son would become the next head of the Yoshida family, as Yoshida Kanemigi.

However, Kanemigi had not been initiated into all the secret rites of Yoshida Shinto. Senken had to get him initiated via someone who had been initiated by Kanetomo, and there seems to have been only one possibility — a priest at Keta Jinja in what is now Ishikawa Prefecture. Nitta’s article is concerned with some of the evidence for how that happened, in particular a text describing how a particular secret ritual should be performed. One aspect of the article that I found interesting was that Senken was comparing sources and trying to reconcile them when initiating a secret religious ritual. He was certainly not simply taking the word of the initiator at face value — the final version has a couple of notes that say, in effect, “the teacher says [something], but that can’t be right”.

In any case, Kanemigi was initiated, and if I am remembering correctly he managed to convince the Tennō to back Yoshida Shinto. The tradition continued to grow in influence through the sixteenth century, and in the early seventeenth century the Tokugawa Shogunate granted it authority over most jinja and priests in Japan, a position that it maintained until the Meiji Revolution in 1868.

However, as early as the seventeenth century people starting raising questions about the authenticity of Yoshida Shinto. They argued that it was clearly based on esoteric Buddhism, and Onmyōdō, and was not any sort of ancient Shinto tradition. This is obviously true. Even Senken, in notes that were not for publication, refers to esoteric Buddhist texts when trying to clarify what the central rites of Yoshida Shinto should be. I am aware of no-one today who disputes the claim that Kanetomo made it all up.

Nevertheless, as Arai shows in the other article, Shinto researchers in the Tokugawa period, even those who were otherwise critical of Yoshida Shinto, often relied on documents compiled by the Yoshida family when writing their own histories of jinja.

This may be part of the reason why Kanetomo’s creation was so widely accepted. He was not just making up random stuff. He was drawing on deep knowledge of several traditions that were very important in Japan at that time. Yoshida Shinto, therefore, made sense to the people around him, and continued to make sense to a lot of Shinto priests for over three centuries. Indeed, I believe that what is now called “Ko-Shinto” (meaning “Old Shinto”) shows a lot of influence from Yoshida Shinto, meaning that it still makes sense to some people now.

The influence of Yoshida Shinto on contemporary mainstream Shinto is very limited. The Meiji government was extremely effective in stamping it out. However, it is a very important part of Shinto history, a part that gets less attention than I think it deserves.