Paper short abstract:

Gift giving practices in Japan have long and tortuous histories. Some history and folklore literature trace their development back to moments when people practiced offerings to religious deities. This paper examines the genesis of bribing from religious offering in Japan from anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Gift giving practices have long and tortuous histories. Some history and folklore literature trace their development back to early moments in which people discovered the practice of offering best parts of their game to supernatural beings or deities. In Japan, one of the most quoted example of society in which gift practices follow extremely complex etiquettes of exchange, wrapping, as well as of opening the objects donated, humanities literature pictures back the origin of these societal practices in the canonization of the Shinto religion. The human, who encountered the kami (the deity in Japanese Shintoism) discovered that by donating he could hope to influence the course of reality.

This is the same principle through which the complex hagiography of Mediterranean European cultures developed a favouritistic structure of gift exchange practices, in which the saints became patrons-like interlocutors, who could reciprocate or not ex-voto and other gifts that their devotes offered them. From this mechanism to bribing, the step is not long. This paper takes a historical-anthropological perspective to analyze the genesis of gift-giving practices in the Japanese political realm.