The territorial archetype: shime

The earliest Shinto sanctuaries combine different facets of ancient Japanese civilization, such as respect for territorial rights, the worship of nature, the sense of purity and the cultivation of rice.

The art of knotting and binding was probably one of the first manual skills mastered by the early inhabitants of East Asia. The binding of grasses, bushes and trees was used to signal a personal claim to land or other property. It set a shime, a mark of occupation or possession and hence of power. I have already set out, in a number of publications, the complex set of deductions which have led me to conclude that from the archaic Japanese shime is derived the Japanese word shima, "garden". Shime literally means a "bound artefact", which in turn signifies "occupation" (the verb shimeru possesses all three meanings). The word shima, derived from shime, means "land" or, more specifically, "land which has been taken possession of". It later acquired the meaning of "garden", or rather "a section of nature fenced off from the wilderness". It finally came to mean "island", a "piece of land floating in the untamed ocean". In the noun shime-nawa, (literally "rope of occupation"), used to describe the ropes delimiting a sacred area or sanctifying a holy object within a Shinto shrine, we find a use of the word shime which goes beyond the politico-economic sense of possession as expressed by binding to assume a religio-magical significance.