@article{oai:nichibun.repo.nii.ac.jp:00000232,
 author = {BAKSHEEV, Evgeny S.},
 journal = {Nichibunken Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies},
 month = {Jan},
 note = {Controversy over the origin of Japanese kami—whether they began as nature deities or as ancestors—has continued in religious and cultural studies both in Japan and in the West for over a hundred years. Here I contend that research data on the death rites, ancestor worship, and concept of deities found in the Ryukyus should be given more consideration in the debate. This essay deals with the recent (mainly twentieth-century) discourse on postmortem ritual deification in the Ryukyus, where the newly dead are elevated to the status of ancestors and deities. It also reexamines investigations into the nature of these ancestral deities. After reviewing different views expressed in this discourse, I conclude that the standard theory about deification of the dead in the Ryukyus is invalid. That theory proposes that the ancestral spirits who have passed through the final thirty-third-year memorial ceremony lose their personalities and become deified, and eventually they come to be worshiped at the utaki-type shrines in the communal agrarian rituals for the whole village or island. I argue that the ancestors deified at the last memorial service within the household ancestor worship paradigm and the deities of the village shrine worship (deities who are often called “ancestor deities”) represent two different concepts. An old form of the Ryukyuan ancestor cult is more likely to be represented by such festivals as shinugu, unjami/ungami, arasachi, shibasashi, dunga, tuurumi, hamaori, umiri, and uyaan/uyagan or by other traditional rites that reveal the indigenous ritual elevation of the dead spirit to the status of ancestral deity.},
 pages = {275--339},
 title = {<RESEARCH NOTE>Becoming Kami? Discourse on Postmortem Ritual Deification in the Ryukyus},
 volume = {20},
 year = {2008}
}