Hello Everyone and Welcome back to Myths Matter with James port now
This week we're gonna be talking about Japanese mythology, which is fascinating because in Japanese mythology
Something almost unique in the world happens. Japan is so interesting to me because
it's one of the very few cases where a external religion who came to the country in this case Buddhism and
didn't totally replace or destroy the
traditional religion, Shinto, right
And so you have these two mythological structures: the Buddha structure and the Shinto structure, sort of existing side-by-side
So now you've got two mythologies
But more than that
Because especially of the way that Shinto works
You have a lot people who
were able to believe both in Buddhism and Shinto
to get a lot of these
Attempts to sort of reconcile the two to bring the two together and so not only do you have to separate myth structures
But you also got this very interesting intersection of the two myth structures, which is different than you see almost anywhere else
For example; take Beowulf, right?
Beowulf is a story as we have received it today. That is the
Attempt at Christianizing a previous story. It was monks taking an existing story and trying to
Make it more Christian to make it fit their
now dominant belief structure
Which is different than what we see in Japan where there's a really an attempt to
reconcile these two sort of disparate belief structures not to a
Race or overlap one, but instead to make them harmonious, which is really interesting to me
but beyond that I'll confess I
really love Japanese horror and all the creepy stories and
bizarre and interesting monsters that come out of
What I thought was Japanese mythology, but it's my own lack of knowledge
I didn't realize that that's maybe not actually Japanese mythology
so when I started researching this
I was planning to tell some creepy stories, and I didn't because as I researched them almost all of these
things we think of today as
Japanese horror and the basis of Japanese horror comes out of 15, 16, 17 century
No dramas, and so they're written specifically to be performed on the stage
We know who created these things, no pun intended, again
so anyway
This brought up to me this question
Okay, if we- if we understand who created them if we know that a human being invented a myth whole-hog
Is it no longer a myth, right?
because does it no longer to carry that weight of being something fundamental and maybe even something spiritual that has an origin that's
beyond just the creation of a single person and
The more I wrestled with this, the more I couldn't decide because at first I was like, okay, so take Homer right? Well
We don't really know who Homer is and it probably wasn't even just one person
and the stories that we have from Homer are actually probably much later compilations of
A series of stories attributed to Homer, so sure those kind of myths
but then he started talking about Virgil and the Aeneid, right
The Aeneid is usually taken as part of Roman myths structure
But we know who Virgil was we absolutely know who this guy was. We know that it was a single individual
We know that he was inventing this sort of
Himself, and we know who he was writing it for and why he was writing these things
so
At what point do we consider something a myth and not in that?
myth versus folklore sense that we've already talked about when we're talking about myth as
Sort of having to do with the history of the gods and folklore being, well, everything else. This is more
Fundamental at what point does a myth become a myth in our culture?
if
200 years from now, people are
retelling the Tokyo stories
Retelling Lord of the Rings and are using it as analogies and metaphors and ways to teach moral lessons
Does that become?
Part of our mythology, right, if it becomes fundamental to our culture
does that now become a myth?
That's something that I don't really have a good answer to. I don't know yet
I have to think about it more and so at some point in the future. I may play around with telling some of the
Later, Japanese ghost stories and horror stories just so we can talk about this subject more because I need to think about it
And I would love to hear from all of you
if any of you have thoughts on
At what point something becomes a myth? Feel free to tell me, let me know in the comments because
I'm still trying to process. I don't know what the cutoff line is for putting a myth on this series
So, you know, we're building it as we go
But I think that's about it for me. Join me next time for
Aboriginal, Australian Aboriginal mythology
Which is really interesting because it's sort of the one of the oldest myth cycles we have
It's the oldest continuing religion that exists anywhere in the world
and
So yeah come with me next time into the dream time and I will see you all there. Take care everybody