Japanese Religion And Nature
Japanese attitudes toward nature and the environment have deep roots in the religious traditions that have shaped the country's cultural ethos. Japan's indigenous religion, Shinto, is a form of animistic nature worship, in which the divine ''kami'' (deities, spirits, or gods) are believed to reside in animals, trees, rice fields, and certain human beings. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, Shinto might be called an ecoholistic religion because not only sentient beings but also whole mountains and the land itself are the objects of worship. Every village once had its own Shinto shrines, many of which still exist today. Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism found their way into this religious context but were transformed and melded into native Japanese traditions.
Buddhism thrived in the Nara and Heian era (7101180). The Buddhist monks Kukai (774-835) and Sai-cho (767-822) propounded the belief that ''mountain, river, grass, and trees have attained Buddhahood.'' This thesis is different from the sentient/nonsentient dualism of original Buddhism and expresses the ecological continuity of beings. In the Kamakura era, Zen Buddhism thrived, represented by Dogen Zenji (1200-1253) (Cal-licott 1994).
After a period of civil war, Japan was united. Thus began the Edo Era (1603-1867). Edo (today's Tokyo) was densely populated (roughly 1 million people resided there in the seventeenth century) and because the ruling class itself was not wealthy, the difference between rich and poor was small. Meat eating and land development were illegal. Edo society retained and even enriched the natural environment by its symbiotic human/nature interactions.
When Jesuit missionaries visited Japan, some major local rulers accepted Christianity, but later the missionaries were exiled, and Japan became a closed country with the exception of the admission of occasional foreign traders. The principal ideological opponent of Christianity was Hukan Fabian (1565-1621), the author of Refuting Deus. By then Buddhism had become the national religion; every family had both Shinto and Buddhist altars in its house. Further, Confucianism was adopted as a governmental ideology, and its implicitly ecological world view thus complemented the combined Buddhism and Shinto traditions of Japan.
Japanese Confucianism was founded by Kaibara Ekken and developed and practiced by Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) and Ninomiya Sontoku. For Japanese Confucians, "heaven" ("heaven-earth-nature" or ten-chi-sizen) was a symbol of the natural environment. Although the social ethics of these thinkers was similar to today's European and North American utilitarianism, their environmental views were ecoholistic, giving serious consideration to nature's welfare or well-being. Sorai's ethicopolitical outlook respected heaven and the happiness of people; hence human happiness was embedded in an ecological worldview. Sorai's motto was "happiness of people and world peace.''
When Japan was forced to open it economy and culture to Europe and North America in the 1850s, the goal of "rich country, strong army,'' based on European Enlightenment ideals, became the guiding spirit of the age. Japan's national independence became an overriding concern of public policy. Yet the leading philosophers such as Nakamura Keiu were originally Confucians. Keiu combined his own belief in a Confucian heaven with a Christian God. Uchimura Kanzo (1861-1930), a leading Christian thinker, argued for an agriculture-based (instead of industry-based) state, "small-countryism" and "non-warism," positions that ran against the tide of industrialization and imperialism. Contrary to other Enlightenment thinkers, they accepted utilitarianism in the social and ethical spheres while retaining a traditional Confucian view of nature.
Although Japan began to evolve into a capitalist-industrial society under the influence and pressure of the United States and European powers, the culture remained steeped in traditional Shinto, Confucian, and
Buddhist thinking while critically evaluating and absorbing European ideas. Out of this confluence original Japanese philosophies have emerged. The so-called Kyoto School, led by Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), created a nondualistic philosophy based on Zen Buddhism. Some of the members of this school argued against European and North American modernism. Their philosophies were mainly concerned with religion, aesthetics, and culture. Today the Kyoto School is reviving, but it has not yet given much attention to the global ecological crisis, despite the influence on global environmentalist thought by Nishida's friend Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966).
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