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Japanese mountain deities

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1997 by Fred D. Thompson

During a visit to Japan in 1969, I began to ponder the questions of civic unity and why the Japanese seemed to lack civic spaces in the form I was used to seeing in the West. Professor Itoh Teii[1] had drawn my attention to the fact that a public place in Japan is rarely conceived of as hard bordered, but rather as kaiwai, or an activity space. Professor Kojiro Yuichiro[2] further suggested a theoretical basis for a new form of research into public spaces in his study of village communities of 2000 inhabitants. He suggested that the centre of a Japanese village does not lie in a clearly bounded space, but rather in a linear time-oriented axis stretching from the mountain shrine, through the village shrine to the field shrine. Public space was, it appeared, intimately bound up with sacred festivals.

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After retiring in 1981, Professor Kojiro made it possible for me to join in the festival of Kakunodate, a planned town of about 8000 inhabitants. Up to that time, I had searched in vain for the Japanese equivalent of monumental public squares so familiar in the West. In Japan, as I was soon to discover, public spaces exist in the arrangement of the city as a whole, and enter collective memory of the citizens as a function of the festival. A case in point is the obon festival in Shiraiwa, a village not tar from Kakunodate, and an example of the type of indigenous community of 2000 inhabitants that Kojiro had studied. While the main economic axis of Shiraiwa runs north-south, another, running east-west, has been marked from the beginning of the sixteenth century by six large cedar trees. The two remaining trees act as a gate through which one passes in order to approach the mountains that are believed to be the abode of the gods, the Shinto yama-no-kami.

This axial organisation of the village with no visually apparent endpoints would appear to signify the lack of importance of spatial limits to the village. To the Japanese, however, spatial discovery is one of sequence from the part to the whole, the parts being united into a whole by the festival. The idea of sequence in a spatial context derives from the practice of purification, in which one progresses by degrees from one stage to the next. This sequence occurs in time as well as in space, from the time of everyday activities to the time of festivities, when through an act of purification, life energy is restored for the working days ahead and the space of the village is unified, so that it can again work in its individual parts.

The east-west axis in Shiraiwa is brought into high profile on the eve of the Buddhist festival of All Souls in mid-August, when a procession approaches the town from the centre of the rice fields to the west, the land of the Dead, and passes by the two remaining cedars en route to the village. As soon as the villagers hear the sound of the sasara, the bamboo rattles played by the musicians leading the procession, they light wood fires in front of their houses so that the ghosts of the ancestors can return to their former homes. The procession stops in front of Unganji, the Buddhist temple at the southern entry the town and shishi odori, or lion dances, take place over the following days. These lion dances are also held on the south side of every house where Shinto and Buddhist altars are erected so that the gods of the house can find pleasure in the dance.

The presence of both Buddhist and Shinto altars signals simultaneous embrace of both traditions. Buddhist rites span the time from 7 to 20 August, but the last performance, coming as it does at the Shinto shrine, reveals the symbiosis of the two traditions. In this way a typically Japanese expression of religious cohesion lives on.

On 8 April, a Shinto fertility festival starts from the opposite direction to the Buddhist festival of obon. It starts with kami-mukae, receiving the kami, from the mountain in the east, and ends on December 12 with kami-okuri, returning of the karat, to the mountain in the east. Again, the east-west axis predominates, but this time in reverse order to the summer festival.

In the kami-mukae, or receiving of the deities, a shaman, having purified himself for a certain period by eating only special foods, goes to the mountains to receive the kami and bring them back to the mountain shrine, after which they are transferred to a portable shrine and carried down the mountain to the village shrine to be celebrated by the villagers. The portable shrine is then carried through the village to entertain the gods, and brought to rest in the fields at the temporary, field shrine to spread the energy of the kami and encourage a bountiful harvest. After the harvest in the autumn, the gods are thanked at the festival of kami-okuri and returned to their abode in the mountains. Both Buddhist and Shinto festivals in Shiraiwa, then, enliven space by reinvesting it with sacred significance: space and time become one and the same through participation in the festival. As time is suspended, public space adopts its own form irrespective of its workaday uses.

Japanese mountain deities

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1997 by Fred D. Thompson

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