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Lafcadio Hearn - Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, 1
the land of its birth, and only seems to gain in power and dignity with time.[24] Buddhism has a
voluminous theology, a profound philosophy, a literature vast as the sea. Shinto has no philosophy, no
code of ethics, no metaphysics; and yet, by its very immateriality, it can resist the invasion of Occidental
religious thought as no other Orient faith can. Shinto extends a welcome to Western science, but remains
the irresistible opponent of Western religion; and the foreign zealots who would strive against it are
astounded to find the power that foils their uttermost efforts indefinable as magnetism and invulnerable
as air. Indeed the best of our scholars have never been able to tell us what Shinto is. To some it appears
to be merely ancestor-worship, to others ancestor-worship combined with nature-worship; to others,
again, it seems to be no religion at all; to the missionary of the more ignorant class it is the worst form of
heathenism. Doubtless the difficulty of explaining Shinto has been due simply to the fact that the
sinologists have sought for the source of it in books: in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, which are its
histories; in the Norito, which are its prayers; in the commentaries of Motowori and Hirata, who were its
greatest scholars. But the reality of Shinto lives not in books, nor in rites, nor in commandments, but in
the national heart, of which it is the highest emotional religious expression, immortal and ever young. Far
underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a
mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its impulses and powers and intuitions. He who
would know what Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the sense of beauty and the
power of art and the fire of heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith have become
inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive.
Trusting to know something of that Oriental soul in whose joyous love of nature and of life even the
unlearned may discern a strange likeness to the soul of the old Greek race, I trust also that I may presume
some day to speak of the great living power of that faith now called Shinto, but more anciently
Kami-no-michi, or 'The Way of the Gods.'
Chapter Nine In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts
1
IT is forbidden to go to Kaka if there be wind enough 'to move three hairs.'
Now an absolutely windless day is rare on this wild western coast. Over the Japanese Sea, from Korea, or
China, or boreal Siberia, some west or north-west breeze is nearly always blowing. So that I have had to
wait many long months for a good chance to visit Kaka.
Taking the shortest route, one goes first to Mitsu-ura from Matsue, either by kuruma or on foot. By
kuruma this little journey occupies nearly two hours and a half, though the distance is scarcely seven
miles, the road being one of the worst in all Izumo. You leave Matsue to enter at once into a broad plain,
level as a lake, all occupied by rice- fields and walled in by wooded hills. The path, barely wide enough
for a single vehicle, traverses this green desolation, climbs the heights beyond it, and descends again into
another and a larger level of rice- fields, surrounded also by hills. The path over the second line of hills is
much steeper; then a third rice-plain must be crossed and a third chain of green altitudes, lofty enough to
merit the name of mountains. Of course one must make the ascent on foot: it is no small labour for a
kurumaya to pull even an empty kuruma up to the top; and how he manages to do so without breaking
the little vehicle is a mystery, for the path is stony and rough as the bed of a torrent. A tiresome climb I
find it; but the landscape view from the summit is more than compensation.
Then descending, there remains a fourth and last wide level of rice-fields to traverse. The absolute
flatness of the great plains between the ranges, and the singular way in which these latter 'fence off' the
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