The high-priest of the Great Shrine of Idzumo is called an iki-gami, or living deity. Not only good but bad men might be deified or canonized, as in the case of the arch-rebel Masakado, the robber Kumasaka Chohan, and in our own day, Nishitaro Buntarō, the murderer of Mori, the Minister for Education.
Lafcadio Hearn, in his 'Gleanings in Buddha Fields,' tells a typical story of the deification of a living man. A certain Hamaguchi Gohei, head man of his village, saved the lives of his fellow villagers from destruction by a tidal wave, at the sacrifice of his crop of rice, which he set fire to in order to attract them away from the sea-shore to the higher ground. "So they declared him a God, and thereafter called him Hamaguchi Daimyōjin, and when they rebuilt their village, they built a temple to the spirit of him, and fixed above the front of it a tablet bearing his name in Chinese text of gold; and they worshipped him there, with prayer and with offerings...... He continued to live in his old thatched home upon the hill, while his soul was being worshipped in the shrine below. A hundred years and more he has been dead; but his temple, they tell me, still stands, and the people still pray to the ghost of the good old farmer to help them in time of fear or trouble."
Ancestor-Worship.—If we restrict this term to the religious cult of one's own ancestors, as in China, this form of religion has hardly any place in Shinto. The only case of it, except in modern times and under foreign influences, is that of the Mikados, and even then there is no evidence of its existence before the sixth century. The term ancestor-worship is often used more generally of the worship of dead men of former generations. There is no good reason, however, for distinguishing between the cult of dead and that of living men. If the former is the more common, it is because absence and lapse of time are usually necessary to allow their obviously human character to be
