ABSTRACT
In the private or family life of the individual, just as in the corporate life of the community, one of the most powerful springs of action is the urge to ritual purity; consequently, there are many prohibitions and taboos laid on pollution. The highlights of the community's ritual year are, by and large, the critical seasonal junctures when the spirits are present, either voluntarily or through the invocation of those who serve them. On both counts, the simple fact of the crisis, and the propinquity of the kami, it is imperative to purge all aspects of pollution by a series of preparatory rituals of fasting, self-denial, and positive purification. The same is the case with the life cycle of the individual or the household, for the cycle is marked by a series of crisis points —the onset of menstruation, marriage, childbirth and death; careful purificatory preparation must be made to meet these critical moments and the various pollutions and taboos which they entail are to be treated with the utmost circumspection. But the taboos and the rituals concerning the defilements created by the crises in the individual life cycle have, if anything, suffered more than those of the community. The remote seaside village or the mountain hamlet are, naturally, more likely to preserve the longer and the more faithfully both aspects, the community and the household, of the purificatory ceremonial at the time of crisis. Yet, even so, there are many instances where the influence of the stress and bustle of modern urban life has spread beyond the city limits and has crowded out, more particularly, the observance of the private or the household ceremonies. And as for the city, although some of the community rituals are maintained—though often in drastically modified form— urban conditions and environment hardly make for the easy observance of the household ones: the girls' high school system, with its regular and testing examinations, leaves little scope for strict attention to the elaborate traditional ceremonies and restrictive taboos at the time of the onset of the girl's first menstrual period; the maternity home, the growing practice of the wife's home sewing or rudimentary secretarial job, and apartment living, with families of six or seven to a room and a toilet for every twenty rooms the norm rather than the exception, all make a nonsense of the old rules of a ritual pollution lasting thirty days or more, and a seventy or seventy-five day secular taboo on the mother after her delivery.
