"Shinto And The Life Of A Dog Man"

From the Washington Post:

Each spring in the snow country of Japan there’s an ancient custom of hiking to the top of a mountain as soon as the trails are passable. It’s called O-Yama-biraki or Open Mountain Day. What began as a ritual of the pre-Buddhist days of Japan, when the animistic folk religion of Shinto was practiced, endures. You hike to the summit to greet the spirit of the mountain as it wakes from the long winter. From the Shinto perspective, the natural world is sacred. Mountains are sacred. Trees are sacred. Kami or nature spirits dwell there.
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For sixty years, since Morie [Sawataishi] rescued the Akita breed from extinction during World War II – when they were being eaten, and their luxurious pelts used by the Japanese military to line winter coats -- his dogs have led him into the wild. Together, they have traveled to a deeper place, a world of instinct and survival. They have encountered growling beasts and dead carcasses, poisonous mushrooms, flying pheasants and lost hikers.
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Like most Japanese, Morie finds it hard to say exactly what is Shinto, what is Japanese, and what is simply “life.” The belief system is so old, and its basic values and patterns of behavior so ingrained in Japanese culture, Shinto doesn’t often appear to be a formalized set of beliefs as much as a way of living, a way of seeing, a way of thinking about the world and nature and our place in it.

Simplicity and restraint are Shinto. Natural beauty is Shinto – and the reverence not just for nature, but for things kept natural. Unpainted and unvarnished wood is Shinto. The passing of the seasons, the melting snow on the ground, the whisper of the wind in the trees. A dignified old tree can be declared a kami, or natural spirit, and blessed by a priest and then festooned, and protected, by an elegant twisted rice straw rope. A wild forest is Shinto. And the path of a dog, too.

In her new book, "Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain", Martha Sherrill tells the story of Morie Sawataishi, a 92 year old Shinto, and his Akitas.

Photo from the Midwest Akita Rescue Society.