As used m Japan the word "senzo" (ancestor) has some peculiar implication about it. This is the central theme of this resume. The idea of the "ancestor" in Japan, which naturally bears an impress of the social conditions of the country, does not mean "one from whom an individual person is descended by blood relationship," but "the founder of the ie (family) to which an individual pertson belongs." There are two ways in which the "ancestor of ie" is understood. In the one way it is taken to be the "first couple who founded and headed a particular family together with all the succeeding couples who became family heads generation after generation." These ancestors were supposed to protect the particular family. In the other way it means "presumed ancestors who had lived in the still more ancient past preceeding the founding couple of a particular family." This happened this way: when a particular family became politically and socially influential, it was customary for distinguished persons belonging to such another family as had been well known and powerful in a very distant past to be taken for the ancestors of the family in question and worshipped as such, the intended purpose being to further enhance the family's social standing as well as securely maintain its influences. Ancestors in this latter sense are known as "shutsuji ancestors" (pseudo-pedigree ancestors). In the ancient ages the pseudo-pedigree ancestors of a family were worshipped in a shrine, while its real ancestors were worshipped at a family grave. For instance, the Imperial Family, after successfully establishing a unified State consequent upon its conquest of the heads of the families (uji-no-kami), enshrined in the 8th century "Amaterasu-Oogami" (the Sun Goddess; literally, 'Great God Shining in the Sky') , whom the Family took for its pseudo-pedigree ancestor, in the Ise Shrine (Ise being a provincial town about in the middle of Japan) while they worshipped their real successive ancestors, beginning with Emperor Jimmu, the founder of the Family, at their respective mausoleums. This Imperial tradition was followed by the heads of a considerable number of families dominant in the 6th and 7th centuries, who without exception took those gods who had been celebrated in the primeval ages for their pseudo-pedigree ancestors and enshrined them as their guardian gods. With a firmer establishment in the 8th century of the political system of the unified State with the Imperial Family as its center, these guardian gods were taken into and were given their respective statuses in a sort of hierarchical structure of 'guardian god worship', the top of which was constituted by the Ise Shrine where the guardian god of the Imperial Family had been enshrined.
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