are male or female. This weakness of the personifying power is profoundly characteristic of the Japanese race. It is shown in their unimaginative literature, their language, which has no grammatical gender and makes the most sparing use of personal pronouns, the feeble character-drawing of their fiction, and their equally feeble attempts at monumental sculpture and portrait-painting. It does not follow that the ancient Japanese were backward in their general intellectual development. Their aesthetic sensibilities were by no means uncultivated, and in the faculty of minute and accurate observation and description, they cannot be pronounced inferior to their European contemporaries.
The nomenclature of Shinto is wholly anthropomorphic. Its perspicuous character enables us to discern traces of the various phases in which the gods are considered alternately as fathers, chiefs and sovereigns. A good number have the root of the word chi-chi, father, incorporated into their names,[1] where it assumed the various forms of chi, ji, or oftener tsuchi or tsutsu.
The "chieftain" idea of divinity is represented by the use of the word wo, male, i.e. virile or valiant one, in many of the names of deities, and by the ascription to some of warlike qualities. There is nothing to show that these are deified chieftains. On the contrary, the term wo is applied, like tsuchi, father, to what are unmistakably nature deities, such as the sea-gods Soko-tsutsu-wo (bottom-father-male), Naka-tsutsu-wo (middle-father-male), and Uwa-tsutsu-wo (upper-father-male), produced by the lustrations of Izanagi in the sea after his return from Yomi.
Kami, the most common and comprehensive word for deity in the Japanese language, belongs to the tribal and national stages of social development. Its original meaning is "above," "superior." Just as our word "lord" embraces
- ↑ As in the case of our own minor deities, Father Christmas and Father Thames.
