For this assignment, I decided to watch “The Weeping Demon” part of “Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams”. The theme of purity, or the pollution of it, is the biggest theme in this segment of the movie that relates to Shinto. In the story, Japan has apparently been destroyed by a nuclear holocaust, destroying almost all life and polluting what is left. Since one of the major beliefs in Shinto is that Japan and the Japanese all came from some divine origin, it makes sense that they would be considered pure, or at least more pure than the rest of the world. When they were destroyed by nukes and then infected by the fallout, the purity of the Japanese was polluted. Many of the people that are left have been turned into demons. I assume this is because they are the ones that engineered the nuclear war that destroyed everything, which would explain why the demon knows what happened and why, while the regular guy is clueless. The demons are being punished just like the kami who destroyed the sacred rice field.
Which leads me to my next point, which is that punishment is the next biggest theme of the story. In Shinto, if one commits a sin, one is punished for it, just like in many other religions. There are different specific sins for followers of Shinto, though. For example, the gravest sins are against sacred objects or places. The islands that make up Japan itself are probably considered sacred, not to mention that is where pretty much all of the shrines are. So by getting into this nuclear war and turning Japan into this toxic wasteland, the survivors are being punished. Murder is also a major sin, of course, and I’m sure they are being punished for that as well. The way the war was conducted probably doesn’t fit along with the code of Bushido, as I’m sure launching nukes from afar isn’t considered honorable.
The pollution of the purity of Japan and the punishment for it are what tie this part of “Dreams” to the Shinto religion.
