「七つまでは神のうち」って本当？#202

Children and the Gods — Evidence from Folklore

Summer fiction is full of a familiar motif: a mysterious child in a straw hat who turns out to be either a ghost or an avatar of the gods. Why would a god choose to appear as a child? Folklore studies offer a clear answer.

In religious ceremonies, children were treated as *chigo* (稚児) — *yorimashi*, vessels through which a god descends into the human world. At festivals and sacred rites a chigo's feet were never permitted to touch the ground; adults carried them on their shoulders for exactly this reason. (A previous episode's entry on "piggyback riding" pointed to this same original meaning.) Tales preserved across Japan describe children playing in a shrine precinct, only for the group to number one more than it should — and when they disperse, one child is missing, with muddy footprints leading straight to a stone Jizo statue whose feet are caked with dirt. The god had taken a child's form and joined the play.

These cases, together with customs such as Shichi-Go-San and the naming ceremony held seven days after birth (*shichiyō-mae*), show that the number seven has long been bound up with infancy. They also establish that children genuinely occupied a boundary position between the world of gods and the world of adults.

The Surprising Findings of the Research

The episode centres on Shibata Jun's book *Nihon Yoji-shi: Kodomo e no Manazashi*. It is a critical study of the phrase "Nanatsu made wa kami no uchi," which folklorists, cultural figures, and novelists had been repeating uncritically as "a word passed down from ancient times." The book stands in a line of scholarly scepticism that began to surface among folklorists in the 1980s and 90s.

When Shibata collected "I've heard the saying 'Nanatsu made wa kami no uchi'" reports from across the country, the total number of cases fit on the fingers of one hand: just 4–5. It is a result that cannot by any stretch be called a nationally widespread tradition.

From Antiquity to Early Modern Japan — the Historical Origins of the Phrase

Where, then, does the phrase actually come from? Shibata locates its starting point in the ancient and medieval *fukki-rei* — a set of official statutes governing how people avoided *kegare* (ritual impurity arising from death, blood, filth, and other invisible spiritual contaminations). Fear of kegare was especially intense during the Heian and Muromachi periods; the emergence of death-impurity in the capital could prompt a decision to relocate the entire court. People practised *mono-imi*, a form of self-imposed seclusion, to prevent the spread of contamination.

Children posed a problem. Infants died without warning — something resembling what we now call sudden infant death syndrome — and even during mono-imi they could not be made to comply with the restrictions. Leaving uncontrollable small children subject to the fukki-rei made it impossible for adults to conduct religious ceremonies smoothly. After deliberation, the court and aristocracy decided to **exempt children aged seven and under from the fukki-rei entirely**. If a parent died, the child need not observe mourning; if a child died, the parent need not observe mourning either. Crucially, this was primarily a rule for the aristocratic class.

In the early modern period, the growth of print culture and the boom in shrine and temple pilgrimages carried knowledge of the fukki-rei to commoners. The reason behind the exemption, however, did not travel with it — only the impression that children under seven were somehow special. Meanwhile, the stability and settled life of the Edo period gave rise to a strong sense of "the household," recasting children as precious heirs. The saying "kodomo dakara" (because they are children) emerged in this era. The two attitudes — children as holders of a fukki-rei-derived privilege, and children as cherished family treasure — began to fuse.

When the Meiji government elevated Shinto to a state religion, knowledge of the fukki-rei spread further, and the notion that children under seven could get away with irreverence before shrines grew stronger. Records even describe children urinating in front of small shrines and Jizo statues without censure. Shibata emphasises, however, that this was not because children were sacred and therefore forgiven, but because they lacked moral agency and therefore scolding them was pointless.

Yanagita Kunio's "Misreading" and the Spread of the Phrase

Yanagita Kunio (柳田国男), the towering figure of Japanese folkloristics, was known for gathering vast quantities of cases from across the country and weaving them into coherent arguments. When the following all landed in his hands — gods appearing in children's forms, chigo serving as yorimashi, and the special treatment of children under seven under the fukki-rei — he read them together as meaning "children up to age seven belong on the side of the gods." The result was that a saying originally meaning "it's pointless to be angry with a child under seven" was recast as "Nanatsu made wa kami no uchi" and began to circulate.

The phrase is easy to say and has a pleasing rhythm. It settled in as a stock expression whenever people discussed the relationship between children and the divine, and folklorists, cultural figures, and novelists all reached for it as "a word from ancient times." Shibata criticises this sharply and states flatly that "this concept did not exist in the pre-modern Japanese archipelago." The phrase only genuinely spread from the late 1930s (Showa 10s) onward.

Two Facts That Must Be Distinguished

Shibata's research demands one essential distinction. **That seven-year-old children are liminal beings is a fact** — the link between the number seven and infancy in Shichi-Go-San and the seven-day naming ceremony is real. But **the idea that the phrase "Nanatsu made wa kami no uchi" has existed since ancient times is a fiction** — it is a modern-era misunderstanding.

Why seven specifically became the threshold is not fully explained even in Shibata's book. An awkward inconsistency remains: the *kubunden* (land allotment) system applied to those aged six and older, out of step with the seven-year boundary. The episode closes by noting that the question of "why seven?" still leaves room for further research.