Norito

Rating:
Summary: a wonderful journey to another time and place
Review: Few books can match Donald Philippi's "Norito" in its ability to transport us back to the very earliest days of Japanese history and thinking. This slender volume provides as fine an understanding as it is possible to obtain of Japan's original conceptions of religion. In the centuries that would follow the era that these "songs" represent, Japan would be transformed by the Buddhism introduced from China. By this process of cultural sharing, a native religion (Shinto) that had existed without written texts or formal doctrine, without much real estate or a church hierarchy, would be changed forever, losing its essential innocence and intimate relationship to nature.

Philippi's "Norito" would be especially well teamed with a reading of Michiko Aoki's translation of the "Fudoki" ("Records of Wind and Earth"). This eighth-century gazeteer of regional information provides, far more than the contemporaneous and now better known "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" histories, a view of early Japanese life still relatively untouched by outside influences.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting look into ancient Japanese religeon
Review: The heart of this short volume is of course the ancient ritual prayers used in Japan in ancient times, more specifically translations of them. This in itself is a rare feature and should get the attention it deserves as we tend to overlook such core features especially when dealing with Easter (non-Western) rituals.

Another valuable part of this book is the preface, which itself is reason enough to buy the book. It is a clear attack on an all too overlooked problem: that Western scholarship and its methods, despite its own hubris, lacks in the capabilities it needs to have in order to deal with non-Western subject matter: from Euro-centracism to Chirstian enspired thought of the place of man and God in the universe and their roles therein. This should serve as a good wake-up call to many in the scholarly community.