Hello, and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 541, The Way of the Gods.

Before we get into it today, a bit of prefacing, we've spent the past 40 episodes on a revised introduction to Japanese history,

my attempt to provide a brief introductory overview to Japan's history,

an update and expansion to the miniseries this podcast started with well over a decade ago.

But you'll be shocked to hear, along the way, even with 40 episodes, a lot ended up on the

cutting room floor. And so I started to put together

ideas for a series of footnote episodes, expanding on ideas and questions from the main

series that are interesting, but not directly relevant to the narrative, so to speak.

And so with the help of my beloved patrons who voted on topics they wanted to see,

I am now able to present to you the revised introduction to Japanese history footnotes.

The goal here is to take on some topics that came up,

but which I didn't have room to fully elaborate on in the original episode.

In the first of these, a top choice all around relates to one of the more intriguing questions

of early Japanese history, what we know about the early religious practices that we now, somewhat

anachronistically, call Shinto.

To spotlight this, since I'm going to try and do it for all these episodes going forward,

this is a subject that relates directly to material from episodes 502 and 503, which deal with

the formation of the Amato Kingdom and its mytho histories.

Also, a disclaimer, I believe I am legally required to give every time I do an episode that touches on this at all,

Shinto itself is, as I've said, an anachronistic term.

That specific word, which literally translates as the way of the gods, would not have been in use until the 19th century, really during the Meiji era, when Japan's traditional religion was given

a name to distinguish it as a specifically Japanese belief system. That attempt to mark Shinto

...