ABSTRACT
Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity have been intertwined for over a century in Japan, creating a rich tapestry of spiritual and philosophical thought that has had a profound impact on the nature of preschools. 13 For a sense of how these distinct ideologies are intermingled, imagine Tokyo in 1870, the year William Elliot Griffis, fresh from the Rutgers Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, arrived by ship to effect the spiritual salvation of the Japanese people. Only two years earlier, Japan had ended 250 years of isolation and was in the throes of appreciation for the “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika) that Japanese then associated with the West. At that time, Shinto, with its focus on the multitude of divine spirits that inhabit both living and inanimate objects, had been practiced alongside Buddhism for over a thousand years.
