Mitama

The Japanese word mitama (御魂・御霊・神霊, 'honorable spirit') refers to the spirit of a kami or the soul of a dead person. It is composed of two characters, the first of which, mi (御, honorable), is simply an honorific. The second, tama (魂・霊) means "spirit". The character pair 神霊, also read mitama, is used exclusively to refer to a kami's spirit. Significantly, the term mitamashiro (御魂代, 'mitama representative') is a synonym of shintai, the object which in a Shinto shrine houses the enshrined kami.

Early Japanese definitions of the mitama, developed later by many thinkers like Motoori Norinaga, maintain it consists of several "spirits", relatively independent one from the other. The most developed is the ichirei shikon (一霊四魂), a Shinto theory according to which the spirit (霊魂, reikon) of both kami and human beings consists of one whole spirit and four sub spirits. The four sub-spirits are the ara-mitama (荒御霊・荒御魂, Wild Spirit), the nigi-mitama (和御霊・和御魂, Gentle Spirit), the saki-mitama (幸御魂, Happy Spirit) and the kushi-mitama (奇御霊・奇御魂, Wondrous Spirit).

According to the theory, each of the sub-spirits making up the spirit has a character and a function of its own; they all exist at the same time, complementing each other. In the Nihon Shoki, the deity Ōnamuchi (Ōkuninushi) actually meets his kushi-mitama and saki-mitama in the form of Ōmononushi, but does not even recognize them. The four seem moreover to have a different importance, and different thinkers have described their interaction differently.