Sunshine Through The Rain/Shinto

In the Sunshine Through the Rain section of Kurosawa's brilliant film, two things stood out to me in relation to the Shinto lecture. The first thing that I related back to Shinto was the idea of Kojiki, which the lecture defines as "collection of mythological stories that tell the history of Japan and its people." The connection I made between the concept of Kojiki and the film was told in the first part of Sunshine Through the Rain. In the first part, the little boy goes outside, only to be chased by a woman, who I assume is his mother and told not to go out in weather like this. The sun was shining and it was raining, the mother told him that during "sunny rains" things that he wasn't meant to see took place, such as fox weddings. The boy didn't listen and went out anyway, and he came across a fox wedding, just as his mother predicted. The mother would not let him back in because he had seen this and told him he had to go apologize, and that the foxes could be found under the rainbow. This to me is a pretty direct connection between "Dreams" and the idea of Kojiki presented in Shinto. I completely interpret the mother's tale of fox weddings, etc as a myth that tells the story of Japan's people. Secondly, I found some correlation between the film and the Shinto ethic that states: "Natural hazards (ex. thunder, creeping insects) could also create sin (impurity) & thus needed to be cleansed by religious rites." The mother being so worried about her son going out in the sunny rain to me represents her being worried about him going out in a natural hazard (the rain) and becoming sinful or impure. And her sending him to ask for forgiveness can easily be taken as cleansing religious rite. I feel that there were many connections between Shinto beliefs and practices and Kurosawa's film, and these were the two that stood out most clearly to me.