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Updated: June 1, 2025
Filial piety still remains the supreme virtue among civilized peoples possessing an ancestor-cult.... By filial piety must not be understood, however, what is commonly signified by the English term, the devotion of children to parents. We must understand the word "piety" rather in its classic meaning, as the pietas of the early Romans, that is to say, as the religious sense of household duty.
Also there are gods, beyond counting, supposed to preside over all things good or evil in human life, birth and marriage and death, riches and poverty, strength and disease .... It can scarcely be supposed that all this mythology was developed out of the old ancestor-cult in Japan itself: more probably its evolution began on the Asiatic continent.
It were a grave mistake to suppose that the ancestor-cult has yet been appreciably affected by exterior influences of any kind, or to imagine that it continues to exist merely by force of hallowed custom, and not because the majority still believe. No religion and least of all the religion of the dead could thus suddenly lose its hold upon the affections of the race that evolved it.
How far the ancestor-cult was tolerated by the Portuguese missionaries in Japan is a matter of much sociological interest for investigation. The supreme cult was, of course, left alone, for obvious reasons.
Later on we shall find that not only government, but almost everything in Japanese society, derives directly or indirectly from this ancestor-cult; and that in all matters the dead, rather than the living, have been the rulers of the nation and the shapers of its destinies.
One must carefully read the entire Legacy in order to understand Iyeyasu's real position, which was simply this: that any man was free to adopt any religion tolerated by the State, in addition to his ancestor-cult. Iyeyasu was himself a member of the Jodo sect of Buddhism, and a friend of Buddhism in general.
But what especially helped the new ancestor-cult to popular favour, was the fact that it included many beautiful and touching customs not known to the old. Then too were instituted the Bon-odori, or Dances of the Festival of the Dead, and the custom of suspending white lanterns at graves, and coloured lanterns at house-gates, to light the coining and the going of the visiting dead.
In Formosa, for example, though the domestic ancestor-cult is maintained in the homes of the Japanese settlers, Ujigami have not yet been established. As for the tribal or clan law, it survives to the degree of remaining almost omnipotent in administrative circles, and in all politics.
The East has been tolerant of all creeds which do not assault the foundations of its societies; and if Western missions had been wise enough to leave those foundations alone, to deal with the ancestor-cult as Buddhism did, and to show the same spirit of tolerance in other directions, the introduction of Christianity upon a very extensive scale should have proved a matter of no difficulty.
The question of all questions that I should like to see answered, by Japanese evidence, is this: To what extent did the missionaries interfere with the ancestor-cult? It is an important question.
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