ABSTRACT
Nowadays the distinctions between the kami categories of ujigami, chinjugami and ubusunagami are much less than clear. Ujigami was a designation in the ancient period for the ancestral deities of the family, but in the tumult of the medieval period the homogeneity of many of these familial groups was undermined, and the original meaning of rites before the ujigami was in a state of flux. Contemporaneously, another development of consequence was taking place. With the flourishing in the early medieval period of private estates (sho¯en), estate owners began to set up shrines to kami whom they would venerate not as ancestral deities but as guardian deities (chinjugami) of those estates. In this they were inspired by the long-established examples of deities who guarded temples and castles. When the estate system declined later in the medieval period, the same term for protector guardian deity, namely chinju, was transferred to all manner of deities long venerated in the provinces. As the autonomous village began to emerge first in the Home Provinces, these guardian deities of private estates were co-opted, as it were, as guardians of these new villages. Again, as villages merged to create the larger district (go¯) units, so were the estate kami adopted as their protector deities, too.
