Ise Shrine and a Modernist construction of Japanese tradition

Today the Shinto shrines at Ise embody some of the most treasured aesthetic values associated with Japan (Fig. 1). (1) The image of stout columns of unfinished cypress, standing in a court of white pebbles and sheltered by a dense cryptomeria forest, resonates with cherished assumptions about Japanese culture. Ise has come to serve as an exemplar of architecture devoid of unnecessary ornament; an architecture that reflects extraordinary sensitivity to building materials; an architecture that is integral with nature rather than being imposed on it.

The shrines' public status has not always been benign. In the years leading up to World War II, Ise became inextricably bound with nationalism and imperialistic conquest. Yet after the war modernists and their allies seized on this symbol of the antiquity of Japanese culture as a touchstone for their own designs. Within a generation they were able to neutralize wartime political associations by establishing a new vision of Ise that was compatible with the rhetoric of democracy that dominated postwar Japanese political discourse and was consonant with modernist aesthetic values.

This essay examines the rich history of representation of the shrines in text and image, with an emphasis on the remarkable transformation of the cultural status of the shrines after World War II. The publication Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture played a pivotal role in the formation of the discourse on Japanese architecture in the postwar period. (2) This book supported the claim made by Japanese modernists that they were the legitimate heirs to Japan's long cultural legacy, and, at the same time, it enhanced the appeal of Japanese modernism for a growing audience overseas. Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture contributed significantly to the process through which the meaning of the Shinto shrines at Ise was transformed during the postwar period. Ise's status as a site for religious practice and as a symbol of the imperial institution was subordinated to its new status as an object of aesthetic contemplation.

Photography was an essential catalyst in this transformation. Watanabe Yoshio's unprecedented photographs provided intimate visual access to the inner reaches of the shrine complex, thereby tearing down the spatial and visual barriers that had once protected the shrines' religiopolitical aura. This exposure neutralized the shrill nationalistic rhetoric that had enveloped Ise during World War II and facilitated the rehabilitation of the shrines into public institutions better suited to the newly emerging postwar order. The photographs reconstituted Ise within a rigorously modernist aesthetic, rendering the shrines' architecture intelligible in a way that the hazy, poetic representations from the past could not.

Modernist architects and critics embraced this new reading. Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture and other self-conscious efforts to construct a "Japanese tradition" sympathetic to modernism strengthened artists' and architects' claim to a distinct Japanese cultural identity in the wake of a devastating war and foreign occupation. This discourse successfully shaped a consensus that modern architectural practice in Japan was inexorably bound up with and could not be understood outside of the context of premodern architecture, a position that is still pervasive in the literature on Japanese architecture to the present day.

Ise and the Imperial Family

The shrines at Ise emerged from World War II bearing a complex historical legacy. For many this was a terrible burden, but some recognized valuable opportunities, seeing aspects of the shrines' history that could be utilized to promote new cultural practices, even while keeping others at a distance and quietly erasing still others. In order to understand this process, it might be helpful to examine briefly the history of the shrine and ways in which it has been represented.

In the fifth and sixth centuries C.E., an elite based in the Yamato region (primarily modern Nara Prefecture, near present-day Osaka and Kyoto) established a military and political hegemony that came to dominate the Japanese main islands. The ruling family at the Yamato court (now referred to as the imperial family) claimed direct descent from the sun goddess, Amaterasu1 Omikami, and the significance of that claim grew along with the family's political stature. Little is known about the earliest history of the shrines at Ise, but by the end of the sixth century the Yamato court had established links with Ise as a site for the worship of its divine ancestor.

Ise Shrine became a crucial structural member in the ideological framework that bolstered the legitimacy of the emperor. According to the Nikon shoki (or Nihongi), a chronicle of the history of Japan compiled for the court in 720 C.E., the emperor Sujin (traditional reign dates of 97 B.C.E. to 30 B.C.E.) determined that the sun goddess was too powerful to be worshiped within the palace grounds and ordered that the shrine to the sun goddess be moved from the palace to Kasanui in Yamato. (3) During the reign of the succeeding emperor, Suinin (traditional reign dates of 29 B.C.E. to 70 C.E.), an imperial princess set out to find a new shrine site for Amaterasu. When the princess arrived in Ise the sun goddess herself declared, "It is a secluded and pleasant land. In this land I wish to dwell." (4) A shrine was therefore erected at Ise in her honor. The Nihon shoki provides revealing insight into the concerns of the court in the eighth century, when the imperial family was consolidating its power after decades of turbulent political strife and governmental reform. Ise had a central role in that project.