ABSTRACT
The last thirty years, in some branches of Japanese studies, may simply have enabled us to know rather more than we did before. The change is more one of quantity than of quality or viewpoint. In the study of Japanese religion it seems that we have truly rethought the subject: we see it with different eyes, and have opened up whole areas for legitimate study which before were not considered worthy of serious attention. But the entire area in which Buddhism and Shinto were blended together, and which formed the natural religion of the large majority of the Japanese people before the Meiji period, was almost completely neglected. The importance of the folk layer of Shinto, recognized by Yanagita Kunio as early as 1910, figures increasingly prominently in our rethinking of Japanese religion. Yanagita believed Shinto to be a many-layered phenomenon, in which one layer of belief and practice was superimposed on another in the manner of geological strata.
