Sacred treasures as cultural text and “Symbol of new life”

Abstract

This research paper focuses, first, on semiotic status of the “Sacred Treasures” of Japan, i.e. “Sanshu no Jingi” (Formula Presented) hereinafter referred to as - Sanshu no Jingi), which symbolize a divine origin of imperial power, and second, how this concept has been actualized in collective memory of Japanese people in the second half of 50-s of XIX century as a symbol of “new life” or the so-called “ideals of new life” during the postwar economic restoration of Japan. The methodological basis of research is presented by one of the basic principles of semiotics, according to which the texts of culture are considered as “texts” that formed by means of signs. The identification of their meaning (semantics) makes it possible to fully understand the meaning of the text. In particular, by considering the expression “sacred treasures” as “cultural text”, we refer to such semiotic categories as “scope of sign”, “invariance of symbol” proposed by Yuriy Lothman (1992) and “denotation shift” that is illustrated in “Frege triangle” (Frege, 1892).This paper highlights that sacred symbols constitute the cultural core of any nation and the context of its application can be quite broad. Accordingly, the symbols can be actualized in the collective consciousness in various “sign situations”, for instance, in crisis, transitional periods in order to overcome or construct a certain “reality”, as in the case of postwar Japan.