I’m not saying such an approach shouldn’t be used at all but I’d be careful about claiming a definite connection between Shinto and OT Judaism. It might be better to bring up the parallels and let the investigators connect the dots themselves. One other thing to bring up is the origin story of the Japanese. If I recall correctly, the story goes that they were founded by a group of people led by a man who was the son of a deity. I’ve heard that said deity was Amaterasu, the sun goddess, but there may be other versions and besides, everyone knows what a game of “Telephone” history can be.

Sister Mori’s lesson plan is also interesting as a sum-up of how far some Japanese LDS want to take the connection. I could see this sort of discussion being very effective for the Japanese, but wonder if a missionary would be able to get away with it these days, with the emphasis on more orthodox teaching methods.

Do you plan to mention the town in the northern Tohoku area that claims to have been visited by Christ?

If it is scripture and statements from the Prophet that you want, if you search hard enough and stretch your mind wide enough it is not too difficult to find. The dedication of Japan by president Grant makes references to Israel, but that is a common part of most if not all dedicatory prayers. And there are always stories floating around about some general authority who said something that acknowledges the truth of this stuff. But ultimately – and I need to make this clear in my next installment, whether the parallels are correct or not, the stories and the beliefs they support are playing a significant role in the lives of many people. That is what I want to explore – not so much whether it is true or not. I also don’t know if Mori’s lesson plan was ever really used with investigators, or if it was just passed around among missionaries.

And hang on to your sun goddess story — there is more on that to come.

I love the tori connection. This sort of “folk anthropology” is very interesting in many ways. While modern scholars may pan it, this sort of connection-making is very much in the vein of what folks like Frazer and Müller were doing in the nineteenth century. Müller’s theories are particularly relevant, because the basic premise of the Scots fellow you mention is very much a degenerationist one: you have the original Israelite culture, which is then corrupted over time; by philological (and ethnographic) comparison you can undo the “disease of language” (and culture) to arrive back at the pure state of Israelite heritage. While Müller was interested in tracing everything back to solar mythology, the methodological impulse here is the same.

There are two issues I see here as a folklorist that stand out. One is the truth value of the claim that Japanese culture/specific elements of Japanese culture can be derived from Israelite culture. Such claims are hard to evaluate because they are essentially unfalsifiable: one can’t prove that the tori isn’t really a degenerated remnant of the passover. Even if one could demonstrate that the tori was created much, much later, the believer in the correlation could always argue that the worldview that would lead the Japanese to create the tori must be of Israelite nature, even if the tori doesn’t date back that far. These claims then become matters of faith, rather than something to be factually substantiated or refuted.

The second point, and perhaps the more interesting one, is why people believe the connection and what it does for them. Whether or not the Japanese really are Israelite is rather beside the point if they believe that they are. They will then choose to emphasize apparent connections and will thus make them real in their lives. In that sense the historical nature of the claim doesn’t even matter to the people making the claim because the present nature of the claim and the use to which it is put is the real issue. I would imagine there are some Japanese for whom the Israelite connection is very important because it tells them that by converting to Christianity they aren’t really giving up their heritage, but embracing it. Thus they can justify (personally and to friends) a course of action that is frowned upon by broader society. I think this is the important issue for the people who make the claims, not whether Hosea really was the first emperor or whether samurai really is Samaria.

I would also point out that if the criteria for evaluating similarity is of the nature of having red gates and a few words that kinda, sorta sound the same and mean the same in two languages, it would be hard not to find evidence. Once one is committed to the truth of the proposition, evidence will be found.

Finally, for what it’s worth, there were those in Europe who claimed that the Ainu were one of the Ten Tribes to explain the apparent similarity between the Caucasian and Ainu phenotypes. I have no doubt that they also found some similarities that “proved” the connection. It was a little annoying for this viewpoint when scholarship started pointing to the Ainu (and perhaps the Ryukyuan Islanders) as remnants of the Jomon people who inhabited the Japanese Archipelago before the modern Japanese arrived.

Now that you mention it, and not to spoil your future installments, I do recall that the town of Herai claims something that would be antithetical to basic Christian tenets.

I am curious about another more fantastical Israel theory “evidence” (i.e. less concrete than the shinto shrine - tabernacle connections), which is the interpretation of old children’s songs and games in such a way that they have an ancient Israelite-related meaning. I have heard this especially in connection with the “Kagome kagome” song/game and the “iki wa yoi yoi” song/game.

The words to both of these songs have obscure meanings, and I have read from other folklorists that the songs have a very old origin. With regard to the kagome song, I have heard that it gives directions to where the ark of the covenant is buried within Japan. I certainly don’t believe that such is the case, but I think the reinterpretation of these songs is an interesting folkloric study in this field. (I think I once traced the “iki wa yoi yoi” song to Edo-period origins where is refers to a particular shrine, so no ancient Israelite origin there).

In general, I have heard a theory that traditional children’s songs and games remain relatively intact across generations and often have a very early origin within a given culture. Does this theory have any currency in the folklore studies world?

To your second point – the Japanese believer who claims Israelite heritage – I would add that it also doesn’t really matter what an “Israelite” really was historically. It is the way “Israelite” has been interpreted and filtered through a contemporary value-system that the Japanese believer takes upon himself/herself with the claim. Your point about embracing a lost heritage is exactly where I am going with this. And it extends beyond the Japanese Christian to the Japan Mormon as well. And for the missionaries, they are not converting anyone from their native culture – they are converting them BACK to their REAL native culture – it’s not colonialization, it is restoration.

The Ainu-Jomon connection would not be so annoying to Nolman McLeod. He would see it as evidence that the native Japanese were pushed out of Japan by the Jewish Samurai. But, seeing as how they are lighter skinned, they are probably lost Nephites (I’m only joking about that, by the way).

The Herai legend is very interesting. It won’t spoil future installments (although I thank you for your discretion). Heral is the burial place of Jesus Christ, who escaped the crucification (his brother James was crucified instead) and returned to the land of Japan, where he had spent some time learning wisdom in his youth. He married and had two daughters (look out Tom Hanks!) and died. You can visit the burial mound yuorself. When the mound was uncovered, there was a mysterious document called the Takeuchi document, that prophesied all sorts of things. It’s all part of the new-age strand of “Japan/Israel-lore” (Mormons accept that Christ made an appearnace, and thus the memory of his visit remains, but the stuff that doesn’t fit gets dismissed quite easily) I will cover Heral it in part II (and again, the mormon strands in part III), although I haven’t completely finished writing it all yet. But it will be there.

I have heard about the Japanese folk music containing survivals of Hebrew language, but it’s not an area I delved in to too deeply. It sounds like you clearly know more about it than I do.

As for the role of children’s folklore in general folklore scholarship, you are right, it is looked at as being very valuable both as a repository for tradition and also for the developmental roles it plays. I am sure there are others out there who can speak on more authority regardings children’s folklore. I was peripherally aware of the scholarship, but did not get into very much of it. Fen would probably be better equiped to answer your question.

On the other hand, I don’t know that much about Shinto shrines and how they work. I’d be interested to see a post that showed (and told) us everything Sister Mori brought up in her lesson. (As it is here, it assumes the reader knows enough about Shinto customs to make the connections between them and OT Judaism.)

I don’t know how much I can add to what Glenn has already said about survivals in children’s folklore. There is something to the idea of children’s lore retaining elements lost to adults. Think of “ring around the rosie,” a rhyme that can be traced to the time of the plague and actually references the physical symptoms of it (”ring around the rosie” apparently refers to the initial appearance of the buboes). This sort of scholarship was extremely popular about a century ago when folkloristics was really into questions of origins. It has since faded in importance, but it’s never been refuted.

The idea of survivals in children’s folklore does, however, face the same problem as any of the evidence considered here: there are no real criteria to determine the genuine survival from that which looks similar. Absent some sort of historical documentation or something very compelling in the text itself (like a specific reference to a known individual), I think that this evidence can be suggestive at best. There’s also the issue of selectional bias: if I believe that the Japanese are really Hebrew, I will find apparent survivals and ignore everything that doesn’t look like a survival as so much “noise” in the system.

One potential way around this sort of thing would be to use what’s called the Finnish method, which looks at geographical distribution of apparently cognate materials. If you could trace the same survivals throughout the entire Japanese region and come to a reconstructed Ur-form that matches the form that is needed to establish the connection, it could be suggestive. In many cases, however, if you start using the Finnish method, what you find is that you either lack evidence for the reconstruction, or you end up with a reconstruction that doesn’t look like what you expect from the present form that looks so much like what you’re looking for.

Here’s an example from historical linguistics that illustrates the sorts of problems that can arise from looking at apparent similarities.

In Germanic there is a root that shows up as have in English and haben in German. Students of Latin often see habeo ‘have’ as an obvious cognate. But when we start digging, we find that the Latin cognate is really capio ‘sieze, capture.’ It would be easy to base a conclusion on habeo/haben that would be false, even though on the surface it looks good.

I just have an armchair interest, but I think that the study of folklore isn’t concerned with the ultimate truthfulness of the folklore’s assertions so much as with the function that the folklore has within the culture. I don’t think that any serious anthropologists have found that there is a real link between Shinto customs and ancient Israel even though some people in Japan want to believe there is such a link. In some ways, its not too different from middle-aged Mormons booking group tours to Palenque and Chichen Itza and assuming they are looking at actual Nephite temples.

As far as Shinto shrines go, here is a brief description:

-The structure of a shrines includes an inner sanctum, in which is a simple table with the image or representation of the enshrined deity. The head priest enters this room only one or twice per year for certain rituals (and New Years Day usually is not one of them).

-There is an outer antechamber, or worship hall, usually but not always attached or connected to the inner sanctum in the same manner as the Israelite temple/taberncale, where most of the more common rituals are performed. This room contains a long table where various offering are placed. The offerings usually consist of candles (but never incense), cloth, paper torn in a certain fashion, and food such as rice and rice cakes, and salt. The rice cakes are often stacked in such a manner that might suggest a stack of shewbread. There is often a cloth hanging or curtain separating the outer worship hall from the inner sanctum.

-A worshipper approaches the shrine through an outer torii gate before coming to a small washbasin with running water and a lavel. The worhsipper performs simple ablutions of the hands and mouth beofre approaching the outside of the worship hall, where a couple of claps and a short prayer are offered. Sometimes a coin is tossed into an offeratory box. If a worshipper pays for a more advanced ritual, they may enter the worship hall and be treated to a ritual conducted by the priest.

-In addition to this lay worship, the shrine priest will conduct certain annual rituals, which usually have a related festival for the community. While they vary from shrine to shrine, there is usually a purification ritual in the spring and a main celebration of the deity in the fall. During the fall celebration, the image of the deity is taken out of the inner sanctum, placed in the portable mikoshi, and paraded around the neighborhood. During this process, usually only the head priest sees and handles the image of the deity.

-At larger and older shrines, there is a larger variety of rituals. The incantations chanted during these rituals are often in an extremely obscure form of Japanese, which doesn’t seem to correlate to normal Old Japanese - leaving the door open for people to find correlations with ancient Hebrew.

-Some people think that the hats and robes Shinto priests wear correspond to Israelite temple garments. There is a picture in Glenn’s video.

Sorry this was so long!

Fen, I can’t believe you played the Ur- card. When I taught F101 classes, I actually tried a couple of times to get my students to do a quick and dirty historic-geographic reconstruction project. It was an utter and complete failure every time. The only thing they learned was that the Finnish method sucks.

The only thing they learned was that the Finnish method sucks.

Sheeeesh! Kids these days. When pappy was a folklorist, he walked sixty miles uphill in a blizzard with a was cylinder phonograph to get that one additional variant that proved that “The Booger on the Nightstand” was really a corrupted version of “The Bottle on the Nightstand” and not the other way around…

You’re right though: the Finnish method is hard. I think it takes a certain masochistic personality to do it, especially since the early practitioners wrote everything on index cards and manually sorted them rather than having a computer to sort through the materials. Of course, what their failure demonstrates is that the methodological rigor needed to know whether you are looking at real correlates or apparent correlates is hard. Most arm-chair folklorists therefore dispense with the real work and just go off apparent correlations, especially since what they are trying to prove is usually grounded in a present concern, not a real concern for history.

I see this all the time with Hungarian scholars who feel that the Finno-Ugric hypothesis of linguistic and cultural evolution (it asserts kinship between Hungarians, Finns, Estonians, Lapps, and a bunch of small groups in Siberia) is “racist” (because the Soviets used it as a way to demonstrate that the Hungarians were “primitive”). This hypothesis, however, is about as well demonstrated as any in linguistics (using methods connected to the Finnish method), even if it has some real limitations. The response of these Hungarian scholars is to assert connection between the Hungarians and a grab bag of historically important peoples (although not the Ten Tribes, as far as I know) including the Huns, the Scythians, and especially the Sumerians. They focus on spurious similarities (like the Sumerian deity name Ishtar and Hungarian Isten ‘God, deity’) and one fellow has even claimed that if you (just ignore everything scholars have done in deciphering Sumerian and) read it using his guidelines, it’s really Hungarian.

This move by Hungarians is really parallel to the whole Ten Tribes thing in many ways. It is used by Hungarians to explain their position as non-European invaders who ended up in the middle of Europe and allows them to affirm a current (conservative, nationalist) political identity based on their glorious heritage that is actually superior to that of other Europeans. In this context the connection to the Lapps and various “primitive” peoples is seen as embarrassing because it doesn’t support the idea of glorious heritage and present superiority: sort of like how you don’t want cousin Ray Bob Tom and his wife Billy-Joe to show up at a swank shindig you’re throwing for some rich colleagues to reveal you really came from the wrong side of the tracks…

As a result these scholars ignore the best evidence of what actually was in favor of an argument that serves present goals.

On another not, the tribe of Ephraim is called to restore lost truths, eh? No wonder I’m so wrapped around the axle about Truth.