The Shinto Cult (Paperback)

In taking up the study of a religion which has never extended beyond the limits of an easily defined territory, we may appropriately first of all take a hasty glance at the geographical outlines of the system we call Shinto, the primitive faith of the people of Japan. To appreciate the geographical position of Japan, one needs to have before him a map of the world. He may then see at a glance how remarkably the three thousand islands of that Empire stretch for some twenty-five hundred miles along the coast of Asia, from Kamchatka on the north to the island of Formosa on the south, which island is crossed by the tropic of Cancer. It may be called the longest and the narrowest country in the world. It looks like an immense sea-serpent, with its northern tail twisting toward the Aleutian Islands, which our Government acquired from Russia in 1867, and its southern head pointing toward the Philippine Islands, which we acquired from Spain in recent years. It seems to guard the whole eastern coast of Asia, and along with China, on the mainland, is suspected and feared by some European diplomats as embodying some sort of a Yellow Peril. It may be that its noteworthy contiguity to our Alaskan possessions at one extremity and our Philippine wards at the other bodes some sort of peril to any Western nation that may hereafter presume to enlarge its dominions in the Orient by force of arms.