tory, and have no temples erected to their memory and no service
prescribed or maintained in their honor. The most important deity in the
Pantheon of the Japanese was Amaterasu-o-mi-kami, who is also called in
Chinese characters Tensho Daijin or the Sun Goddess. She appears not only
in the myths concerning the origin of the Japanese race, but as the
grandmother of the divine prince Hiko-ho-no-ni-nigi, who first came down
to rule the Japanese empire. In the Shinto temples at Ise the principal
deity worshipped at Geku is Uke-moche-no-Kami, and the secondary deities
Ninigi-no-Mikoto, who came down to found the Japanese empire and was the
grandmother of the Emperor Jimmu, and two others. At the Naiku the
principal deity is Amaterasu-o-mi-kami (from heaven shining great deity),
also called the Sun Goddess, and two secondary deities. The temples at
Ise, especially those that are dedicated to the Sun Goddess, are the most
highly regarded of any in Japan. Other temples of considerable popularity
are situated in other parts of the empire. Thus there are Shinto temples
in Kyushu and in Izumo, which are old parts of Japan settled long before
Buddhism was introduced.

The Shinto religion must be regarded as the primitive religion of the
Japanese people. It prevailed among them long before Buddhism was
propagated by priests from Korea. It differs from all known systems of
religion, in having no body of dogma by which its adherents are held
together. The greatest advocate of Shintoism, Moto-ori, a writer of the
18th century, admits that it has no moral code. He asserts that
"morals(69) were invented by the Chinese because they were an immoral
people, but in Japan there was no necessity for any system of morals, as
every Japanese acted rightly if he only consulted his own heart."

Reference is frequently made in the early stories to divination, or the
process of obtaining the will of the gods by indirection. The oldest
method of divination was by using the shoulder-blade of a deer. It was
scraped entirely free from flesh, and then placed over a fire made from
cherry wood. The divine will was determined by the cracks caused by the
fire in the bone. A later method of divination was by using the shell of a
tortoise in the same way as the shoulder-blade of the deer was used. They
had superstitions about fighting with the back to the sun; about using
only one light in the house at once; about breaking off the teeth of a
comb in the night-t