Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan

The Invisible Empire

Fabio Rambelli, Fabio Rambelli

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350097117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Religions

This book draws attention to a striking aspect of contemporary Japanese culture: the prevalence of discussions and representations of "spirits" ( tama or tamashii ). Ancestor cults have played a central role in Japanese culture and religion for many centuries; in recent decades, however, other phenomena have expanded and diversified the realm of Japanese animism. For example, many manga, anime, TV shows, literature, and art works deal with spirits, ghosts, or with an invisible dimension of reality. International contributors ask to what extent these are cultural forms created by the media for consumption, rather than manifestations of "traditional" ancestral spirituality in their adaptations to contemporary society. Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan considers the modes of representations and the possible cultural meanings of spirits, as well as the metaphysical implications of contemporary Japanese ideas about spirits. The chapters offer analyses of specific cases of "animistic attitudes" in which the presence of spirits and spiritual forces is alleged, and attempt to trace cultural genealogies of those attitudes. In particular, they present various modes of representation of spirits (in contemporary art, architecture, visual culture, cinema, literature, diffuse spirituality) while at the same time addressing their underlying intellectual and religious assumptions.

1

The Dead Who Remain: Spirits and Changing Views of the Afterlife

Satō Hiroo Translated by Emily B. Simpson

Four people, two men and two women, are seated in a Japanese-style tatami room with a decorative alcove (tokonoma 床の間) in the background (Figure 1.1). The main male figure, with hair tied in a topknot, occupies the seat of honor with sake cup in hand. The young woman in the lower right corner concentrates intently on her needlework. All figures are in full formal dress and a beautiful meal is laid out on the table, as if for a special day.

Figure 1.1 Votive image (kuyōe): four family members who died at different times spend time together in the afterlife. Courtesy of Jōrakuji, Iwate Prefecture. Photograph by Satō Hiroo.

This picture, which resembles a scene taken from mundane everyday life, differs from the average family portrait in one aspect only: all the figures appearing here are dead to this world. This can be seen in the posthumous names (kaimyō 戒名)¹ written on the hanging scroll on display in the alcove (tokonoma). Here, the dead, whose outfits and hairstyles show they died in different time periods and probably in different locations, are shown together in one place, relaxed and at ease.

The Tōno region in the Iwate Prefecture, where this picture originates, has long held the custom of depicting deceased ancestors and relatives as they were in life, in the midst of a light-hearted conversation. This family portrait is one of such memorial votive pictures (kuyō egaku 供養絵額) that were offered at temples.

The practice of making pictures of the dead and offering them at temples is not limited to the Tōno region, but can be seen throughout the Tohoku area. In the Murayama region of Yamagata prefecture, the custom of offering mukasari ema ムカサリ絵馬, wooden tablets depicting men and women who died young in the wedding clothes they never got to wear in life, continues to this day. An example of this custom can be seen in Figure 1.2, which was produced in 1919 (Taishō 8) at Jakushōji Temple 若松寺 in Tendō City, Yamagata. A young bridegroom is sitting in the center right of the picture. Facing him from the left is the figure of a bride in traditional wedding garb; her facial expression is hidden by the watabōshi 綿帽子, a bride’s silk floss headdress, and cannot be seen. Seven men and women in formal dress encircle the pair, perhaps matchmakers and relatives. Within this group, the bridegroom is the one no longer alive in this world, having lost his life at a young age. The bereaved family, pitying this youth who died before participating in a wedding ceremony—an important marker of adulthood—offered an illustration of an imaginary one instead. In the roughly one hundred years since this picture was produced and offered to this deceased man, his representational figure has been immersed in the blissful time he was unable to experience in real life.

Figure 1.2 Votive image (mukasari ema): scene of a post-mortem marriage ceremony for a man who died young. Courtesy of Jakushōji, Tendō City, Yamagata Prefecture. Photograph by Satō Hiroo.

Lastly, in the Tsugaru region of Aomori Prefecture, mourners offer bride and groom dolls to comfort the souls of young people who died prematurely. In the Ningyōdō 人形堂 (Doll Hall) of Kawakura Jizōson Temple 川倉地蔵尊, a large number of these dolls are enshrined in glass cases. When the object of memorialization is a young man, the customary portrait of the deceased and a bride doll will be offered together as a set. When the person being remembered is a young woman, a groom doll is offered instead. There are also offerings of bride and groom dolls as a couple, with one of the two figures standing in for the deceased. The dolls acting as spouse of the departed are each given their own fictional names. Along with the dolls in the case are offerings such as cans of tea, sake, or beer. There is sometimes a small baby doll resting between the feet of the two dolls, presumably representing an imaginary child born to them.

At first glance, this Tohoku regional custom seems archaic and old-fashioned. However, it is a practice almost never observed before the Edo period (1600–1868), and may in fact only date back to the Bakumatsu period (1853–1867). In other words, the custom actually began to flourish in modern times. Why would such memorial rituals reproducing the afterlife of the dead take hold in this northern region of Japan in the modern period?

The Dead Who Leave and the Dead Who Stay

Once dead, people are no longer tangibly present in this world; only a year after death, almost all physical traces of a person’s existence are gone. Regardless, the living do not forget the departed who were close to them in life. Why do we believe in the existence of souls, create images of the deceased, and constantly return to the subject of life after death?

In fact, for the people of the Japanese archipelago, the tendency to defy the natural process of forgetting by preserving memories of the dead did not originate in the distant past. Rather, it was during the transitional period between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries that ideas about the dead and the world after death underwent a great transformation. That period was a turning point between the view that the deceased did not maintain any existence in this world alongside the living and the view held nowadays, according to which the dead remain nearby for eternity and continue their interactions with the living.² The attempt to intentionally preserve memories of the deceased is a phenomenon that first emerges after this transition was complete.

In the medieval world, before this transition occurred, people had deep faith in the power of buddhas as saviors who would take them to the Pure Land (jōdo 浄土) after death. The image of an ideal world believed to physically exist in another dimension—the Pure Land—was shared throughout society and thus held a vivid sense of reality. Those who had entrusted themselves to divine saviors (buddhas and kami) were believed to fly instantly to the Pure Land at the moment of death thanks to the power of these savior figures. Once individuals entrusted themselves to the Buddha, they were promised an afterlife of religious exaltation in the Pure Land, and, consequently, there was no longer any need for anxiety about one’s fate after death.

Buddhist thinkers preached doctrines that supported this worldview of life and death, as a great number of extant texts show. Kamakura Buddhism was a typical representative of this view, particularly the realization of rebirth in the Pure Land based on recitation of the nenbutsu to the Buddha Amida, as Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212) advocated. Even Buddhist authors who held positions completely antithetical to Pure Land teachings on salvation, such as Nichiren 日蓮 (1222–1282) or the priests of Esoteric Buddhism, who instead focused on achieving Buddhahood in one’s body during the present life, shared a belief in the reality of an invisible Pure Land to which one undoubtedly went after death, as did all people living in that period.

Thus, in medieval Japan, the aim of rebirth in the Pure Land was widely embraced, and examples of those who had successfully achieved it were constantly collected and compiled in various “Stories of Rebirth in the Pure Land” (ōjōden 往生伝). There were also many depictions of the Buddha coming to this world to greet people as they departed human life (raigōzu 来迎図). This worldview was predicated on the notion that any of the dead who remain in this world have not yet attained salvation and thus lead an unhappy existence. The Gakizōshi 餓鬼草紙, a painted scroll created in the twelfth century, depicts hungry ghosts (gaki 餓鬼) prowling around gravesites and coveting the flesh of corpses. Thus, cemeteries were not abodes where the dead lived peacefully but places where those who fell into unpleasant afterlife destinations, such as these hungry ghosts, stayed on.

For this reason, there was no custom of relatives visiting a graveyard from time to time in the medieval period (ohaka-mairi 御墓参り). Going deliberately to a place where the deceased person was not present in any form was utterly useless. Even when memorial services were carried out at gravesites, they were not performed to pray for the tranquil rest of the dead buried there but in order to definitively send off the hungry ghosts that may have missed out on salvation, like those depicted in the Gakizōshi, to the other world.

By contrast, after the late medieval shift in the worldview of death and the afterlife, the deceased were no longer thought to set out for a distant other world. People living in early modern Japan did not imagine a separate other world, as the concept of an absolute being that instantly rescued human beings was no longer shared throughout society. In the medieval period, a particular “Buddha” worshiped at a temple was nothing other than the invisible true form (honji 本地) of the Buddha existing in another realm; the Buddhist statues enshrined at temples and shrines were not the actual Buddha but a mere representation. However, just like many of us living in modern times, early modern Japanese, when hearing the word “Buddha” could only bring to mind the Buddhist statues installed in various places, those they saw with their own eyes.

As the image of buddhas with enormous salvific power and the enlightened places in which they lived lost their colorful appeal, the deceased could no longer fly off to another world. Instead of leaving for a nirvana out of reach of the living, the dead stayed where their bones and remains lay—this world—indefinitely. Early modern society, having discarded the notion of retreating with buddhas of another world into a religious salvation that transcended life and death, gave humans the leading role in caring for the dead. By means of the care given to them by relatives over a long period of time, the deceased gradually shed the vibrant desires and emotions they had experienced in life, and finally ascended to an existence that transcended human form: they became “ancestors.”

It is in early modern Japan that the concept of ancestors who protect their descendants came to fruition. At the same time, the understanding of what kind of existence one should attain after death changed from achieving enlightenment in an unknown, far-off location to remaining in this world and continuing to interact with one’s descendants, just as one did in life.³

The Family Registers of the Dead

In early modern times, one’s well-being after death depended on whether or not family members could continuously care for the deceased.⁴ During the process of transformation from dead relative to ancestor, the living could not afford any lapse in memory regarding the dead and thus interrupt the course of their memorialization.⁵ The importance of continuing to remember the dead first took hold in society at large in the Japanese archipelago in the early Edo period. The time of remembering a specific deceased person, and maintaining the indivisible relationship with that person even after death, had arrived (Satō 2015a).

As I already mentioned, there was no custom of visiting graves during the medieval period in Japan; the dead carried to cemeteries were abandoned and were not visited again. The names of those entombed in such graves did not remain, and the deceased quickly reached a state of anonymity.

In contrast, from the sixteenth century on, five-element funerary pagodas (gorintō 五輪塔, gravestones consisting of five stones layered on top of one another in a pagoda-like shape) began to appear, first in the Kinai area around Kyoto and Osaka and later in other parts of Japan as well (Yoshii 1993). At the same time, people also began to make square pillars featuring the names of the deceased. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a vast number of new Buddhist temples were built with adjacent gravesites (Tamamuro 1977); in the ancient and medieval periods, temples did not have graveyards within their precincts. The majority of the temples we now view as standard, with temple and cemetery as a natural pairing, were originally constructed during these two centuries. Behind this massive increase in temple building were two key trends: the spread of temples into areas inhabited by the common people and the Edo period system of parishes (danka seido 檀家制度).⁶ Beyond and above these trends, however, was the concept that the dead did not leave for another world but stayed forever in this one.

For the deceased remaining in this world to be successfully elevated to the status of ancestor, a long period of assiduous care and attention was required. In order to achieve this, a place where the living could be assured of meeting their dead relatives whenever they went there—a fixed spot for communication—was indispensable. Therefore, in the early modern period, the dead, just like the living, came to have a fixed domicile. The graveyard that held their remains was the natural choice for a residence for the dead. And just as the living have name plates on their residences, the dead also required similar markers on their graves as landmarks for those who wanted to meet with them. The tombstones at the gravesites and the posthumous names (hōmyō 法名) carved into them served that function.⁷

On fixed occasions, such as the anniversary of the person’s death, the summer Obon Festival お盆, and the week of the equinox (when Buddhist services are held), relatives would visit the grave carrying flowers, incense, and the dead person’s favorite food and drinks, and speak with the dead in the exact same way they would with living human beings. For the Obon Festival, each family would create a Buddhist altar for the spirit of the deceased (shōryōdana 精霊棚) and light the welcoming fire (mukaebi 迎え火) on the first night of Obon to greet their ancestors. Such etiquette regarding the interactions between the living and dead is normally carried out in Japan even today.

At the beginning of the Edo period, the use of tombstones engraved with the posthumous name of the dead first emerged among the warrior class. The construction of such gravestones gradually spread throughout society, and by the latter half of the Edo period, there is evidence that even commoners had stone grave markers. The trend toward remembering the dead as an individual with a particular name spread rapidly through all regions of the archipelago (Satō 2015b).

Alongside the establishment of gravestones, memorial rites for the deceased became formalized and increasingly complex. As Buddhist services for the dead were mandated from the seventh day to the thirty-third year after death, they came to regulate the lives of the living (Tamamuro 1979). The detailed customs of these funeral services, still widely practiced today, came to be inherited ...