In modern Western philosophy of language, words are symbols: arbitrary sound-sequences whose connection to their meanings is purely conventional, established by social agreement. There is nothing inherently table-ish about the word "table." The connection could have been different. The word is a tool, useful, precise, but inert. It carries no power of its own.
In ancient Japanese thought, and in the tradition of Shinto theology and Kokugaku ("national learning") scholarship, this picture is alien. Words are not inert tools but living forces. The concept is kotodama (言霊), koto (word, thing) and tama/dama (soul, spirit): the soul of language, the spiritual power believed to reside in words themselves.
Kotodama is attested in Japanese texts from the earliest period of writing. The oldest Japanese poetry anthology, the Man'yōshū (c. 759 CE), famously describes Japan as kotodama no sakiwau kuni, "the land blessed by the spirit of words." The Kojiki (712 CE), Japan's oldest chronicle, refers to kotodama in the context of ritual speech and divine creation. Specific ritual speech acts, norito (liturgical prayers and sacred utterances), were believed to have the power to call forth kami (divine spirits), purify spaces, bless actions, or curse enemies, not because of what they referred to but because of the spiritual force they carried as spoken utterance.
This is not simply the claim that words have emotional or rhetorical power, everyone acknowledges that. Kotodama is the stronger claim that words have ontological efficacy: they participate in constituting reality, not merely describing it. When a kami's name is correctly spoken in the proper ritual context, the kami becomes present, not symbolically represented but actually summoned. The word is not a sign pointing toward a separate referent; the word is part of the being it names.
The SEP notes that in early Japanese thought, koto was a term for both word and thing, suggesting that words had the spiritual power (tama) "to evoke, and not simply refer to, a preexisting reality." This word-thing identity is the philosophical core of kotodama: language is not a secondary layer of representation added to a pre-linguistic world but a constitutive dimension of reality itself.
It is believed that words also have their own inherent spiritual power, known as kotodama (言霊). The spirituality within words is believed since around the seventh-century Heian period. Such spirituality embedded in words is given value through spoken words, through norito. Norito can be either yogoto (words of happiness), haraenokotoba (words for cleansing), or juso (words for cursing).
— Global Critical Philosophy of Religion, 'Shinto' (2025); SEP 'Japanese Philosophy'
The kotodama tradition has implications that extend beyond Shinto ritual. It implies a different philosophy of truth: truth is not the accurate correspondence of a proposition to an external fact but the authentic resonance of a word with the living reality it participates in. A word spoken with full spiritual attention and in proper context is truer than a technically accurate proposition produced mechanically. This connects to a broader Japanese aesthetic-philosophical tradition in which sincerity (makoto) and authentic feeling (kokoro) are epistemic virtues, not just moral ones.
Quick reflection
Kotodama holds that words carry spiritual power and participate in constituting reality. Does this feel archaic — or does it resonate with something in your experience of language? Think of a word or phrase that changed your relationship to something it named.