Author: John D. (Page 163 of 202)

Aomori delights

September 14, 2012 / John D. / 0 Comments

Nioga Falls near Hirosaki

Nioga Falls
Chance discoveries are always the most exciting for being unexpected. One such find on my exploration of the Shirakawa Sanchi World Heritage Site was the Nioga Falls. it lies on the way from Hirosaki City to the mountainous beech woods around Anmon Falls.

There was nothing remarkable about the simple red torii by the side of the roadway, so when I walked inside I expected to find a humdrum little wooden shrine. Imagine my surprise on finding a magnificent waterfall! And my surprise was deepened even more by the peculiar atmosphere of the place, with conspicuous Japanese flags and without the usual Shinto features.

Kukai, aka Kobo Daishi, guardian "deity" of the waterfall

As I walked around, I realised it must be a shugendo base of some kind. The waterfall was clearly set up for misogi, and the only shrine was to Kobo Daishi aka Kukai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism.

But what was with all the flags? Though I tried to find out more at the Shirakami Visitors Center situated not far away, they were only able to tell me about a festival held there in winter when the waterfall serves as a traditional means of fortune-telling. According to the local lore, when the waterfall freezes over the thickness of the ice signifies whether the coming year will produce a good harvest or not.

Bear territory
Another shrine to catch my attention was one called Kumano Jinja. Aomori is an area rich in folklore and belief, with a shrine round every corner. But as with nearly all the shrines I visited, there was no office open and sign of a priest (or anyone else for that matter). Presumably like other rural areas, the local shrines are suffering the consequences of depopulation, meaning that a single priest has to take care of some forty shrines or so.

Bear at Kumano Jinja

The name of the Kumano Shrine was written in the same way as those in the Kii Peninsula so I presumed it was a branch shrine. But there was one striking oddity. As well as the usual komainu guardians, the main building was guarded by two little black bears. It was a reminder, if one needed reminding, that this was bear territory. The strength and savagery of the animal was here harnessed in defense of the kami.

Personally I’d rather have a bear as an ally than a foe. The day before I’d come across a real black bear at Black Bear Waterfall, and my natural reaction was to panic, turn and run away…. just what you’re not supposed to do. Fortunately for me, however, the bear panicked, turned and ran away before I did, so I very happily paid my money at Kumano Shrine and gave thanks for whatever divine providence guides such things.

Horse business

A wayside shrine - but to which kami?

One of the wayside shrines I passed had a strong horse flavour about it, and I later noticed another with a similar horse statue. Someone had been very dutiful in placing a carrot in front of every single stone monument, yet it was unclear from the inscriptions what was special about the horse. Nor was there any indication of what kind of kami it might be serving. Indeed, there was not even a hokora (small shrine) for a kami. It was all very puzzling.

Unfortunately I wasn’t in the area long enough to follow up on the mystery, so it will have to wait for my next visit to this delightful part of the world. Perhaps it has something to do with Oshirasama, mentioned here, for a horse plays a prominent role in the legends about him.

Horses in general were very much associated with this part of the world, and viewed as valuable creatures to be presented to the high and mighty. Perhaps they were seen as not only fit to serve the kami as their bearers, but having some divine status in themselves… but here I have to say, my thoughts are galloping away with themselves….

Shinto tree ritual

September 13, 2012 / John D. / 1 Comment

Japan Today reports an unusual ritual carried out on a lone survivor of last year’s Tohoku tsunami. It must surely be a first: hard to imagine there’s any precedent!

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Tsunami ‘miracle pine’ cut down as part of project to preserve it
SEP. 13, 2012

A lone pine tree that stood as a symbol of hope in Japan, after surviving the huge tsunami that swept away a forest of 70,000, is being cut down in a bid to preserve it.

The tree, which came to be known as the “miracle pine”, will be sliced into pieces and treated before being put back together, in a process expected to cost about 150 million yen.

(photo by AFP)

A Shinto ritual was carried out on the pine before the delicate process began Wednesday on the shore at Rikuzentakata, a city badly hit by the March 2011 disaster.

“The process of cutting down could take two days or more, as we need to start cutting branches that can eventually be put back on the trunk,” city official Shinya Kitajima told AFP on Wednesday.

He said the trunk of the 27-meter tree will be divided into nine sections, which will be hollowed out and given anti-decay treatment before being reassembled using a carbon spine.

The whole preservation process will finish in February, the official said, and the tree will be put back where it was, on a spot that was previously a thick shoreline forest.

A Facebook page launched earlier this year soliciting donations towards the cost of preserving the pine had raised nearly 27 million yen by Monday, a city official said.

(photo by Asia One, Singapore)

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For a related story on the tree’s likely demise through sea water, see here.

Shirakami Sanchi (Aomori)

September 13, 2012 / John D. / 1 Comment

A distinctive style of shimenawa rope decorates this torii with what looks like a picture of a White Kami (Shirakami)

Virgin beech
For the past few days I’ve been touring Shirakawa Sanchi, a wonderful World Heritage Site featuring virgin beech forests covering a mountainous range in northern Tohoku. It’s given me a taste of life on the wild side. A night stranded in a broken-down car; a thunderstorm in the woods; and a close encounter with a black bear at Black Bear Waterfall (Kurokuma no Taki).

I’m writing this blog entry aboard the Resort Shirakami, a spacious tourist train that runs between Akita and Aomori along the western and northern sides of the National Park. The extra large windows afford views of the mountains to one side, and of the attractive rocky coast on the other. The sunset views are not to be missed.

Part of the coastline as seen from the train

In terms of Shinto, the area is as rich in folklore and wayside shrines as it is in apple trees and fresh-flowing streams. Two things stand out. One is that appreciation for the gifts of nature is particularly strong because of the clearly evident cycle of life.

The warm Tsushima Stream collides here with the cold of Siberia, resulting in a moist atmosphere that pours down buckets of rain on the mountains. (In winter the region has one of the world’s highest densities of snow,) The resulting rivers nourish an abundant wildlife before flowing back into the sea, while the ancient beech woods are home to a remarkable diversity of insect and plant life.

Another characteristic I’ve noticed is the oddity of some of the shrines. There are strange features, which reference obscure legends about which even the locals seem unclear. Some have flower and candle decoration – whether this has been adopted from Christianity or is a local characteristic, I’m not sure.

Tohoku was for long an isolated backwater and developed distinctive traditions of its own. It was even too remote for Basho, who travelled to the exotic ‘Deep North’ but never got anywhere near this far.

The White Kami
One of the puzzles I set out to solve was why the area is named Shirakami (White Kami). I thought perhaps it was something to do with snow, but had difficulty in tracking down information about it. Even the Visitors Centers were uncertain. It turns out the name is a recent invention, dating from when the area was put forward as a World Heritage candidate.

The new name resulted from opposition to the building of a major road, which would have cut through the virgin woods. Since the road bore the old name for the area, it was thought a new name would signify a fresh start to conserving the natural resource, befitting designation as a World Heritage Site. Shirakami was chosen in reference to an old kami of the region, Oshirasama.

The cult of Oshirasama was once strong in northern Tohoku, and from what I could gather legends about him centre around an unfortunate love affair involving a princess and a horse. It may have derived originally from worship of Hakusan (White Mountain) in Ishikawa, one of the country’s three sacred mountains along with Mt Fuji and Tateyama. According to the Kokugakuin encyclopedia…

Although Oshirasama is commonly viewed as a tutelary of agriculture and silkworm production, little agreement has been reached regarding the etymology of the name Oshira and the kami’s specific characteristics. The object of Oshirasama worship generally consists of a pair of sticks of mulberry (occasionally bamboo) about 30 cm long, with male and female faces (or a horse’s head) carved or painted in ink on one end. The images are clothed in layers of cloth called osendaku which are added to each year. Many old families enshrine Oshirasama on a kamidana or in the alcove of a main room, and they are also used as ritual implements by religious practitioners such as itako [mediums].

So there we have it… Shirakami Sanchi not only takes you into a world of outstanding natural beauty and wildlife diversity, but it plunges you into a remarkable world of ancient myth and custom, involving the shamanistic roots of ancient Shinto.

It’s well worth a visit!

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For pictures of Oshirasama dolls, see this page.

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A walk in the beech woods at Juniko, just outside the World Heritage core area

Village festival

September 9, 2012 / John D. / 0 Comments

Horse dancing in full style

I’m touring the delightful World Heritage Site of Shirakami Sanchi at the moment, noted for its mountainous virgin beech forests, in the northern part of Tohoku. On the way I happened to come across a festival near the World Heritage Center at Fujisato. The community likes to think of itself as a town, but it’s really a few villages cobbled together for administrative expediency. The festival is put on by the Asama Shrine and is known as Koma odori matsuri (Horse dance festival).

It started about 400 years ago when a Lord Satake was exiled by the Mito clan to this area (now the northern part of Akita prefecture). The lord was disgruntled at being sent away to such an isolated and uncivilised part of the world, so as consolation and to cheer him up his followers put on an entertainment in which they danced around as horses. It was such a success that it’s been continued every year since.

Some kind of animal, but are they lions or birds?

Before the horses got into their stride, there was a vigorous dance which I was told was a Shishi-mai. I’ve seen that many times before in the form of a long-maned Chinese-style shishi (lion), but in this case the dancers clearly had bird feathers on them and looked more like hawks. I couldn’t help wondering if this wasn’t some remnant of an ancient shamanistic dance, the origins of which had been lost in the mists of time, for it reminded me of a shaman’s crow dance I once saw in Siberia.

The festival takes place on September 8, when it’s usually pleasant weather in Tohoku. This year however the lingering summer heat made it unpleasant for those dancing – and even for those watching who couldn’t find shade. It must have been about 30 degrees, and the heavy costumes were clearly not meant for summertime prancing. Many of the young participants were suffering badly in the heat, desperate for a drink and in some cases wilting badly. I guess the festival this year helped towards deepening the spirit of gaman(endurance) which all the world noticed and applauded in the aftermath of the terrible Tohoku tragedy of last year!

The musicians were mainly female, in contrast to the manly horses

A horseman taking a puff before his turn. Some of the dancing was pretty vigorous...

... and some of the participants needed a big drink to cope with the heat.

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For a video with music of the dancing, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDQtUSKIszw

Hokkaido (The road from Shiretoko)

September 9, 2012 / John D. / 0 Comments

Hokkaido
A couple of days ago I took a bus for two and a half hours from the Shiretoko peninsula across the north-east of Hokkaido. I didn’t spot a single shrine on the way, though curiously there was a small Russian orthodox church standing in the middle of nowhere. Interestingly, the area is closer to the Russian border than it is to the Shinto heartland in Honshu.

The countryside is so different from that of Honshu that I couldn’t help wondering whether the kami were alienated by the feel of the land, with its Western-style fields of wheat and extensive horse ranges. It seems the kami have a preference for domains on the lower slopes of thickly wooded hills, overlooking the rice fields.

On the other hand, Hokkaido was once home to the Ainu for whom the world was alive with spirits. Many of the names are Ainu in origin:: Shiretoko for instance means ‘the end of the land’. In the seas around the promintory lived ‘the deities of the deep’ ~ awe-inspiring creatures that rose to the surface to let off great jets of water before plunging down again with a final flip of their distinctive tails. And on land the fearsome bear spirit won the worship of the Ainu through its blood sacrifice each year to them. (There are now 200 brown bears on the peninsula, said to be one the highest densities in the world. I got to see seven of them in all.)

Hokkaido Jingu, an example of how imperial Shinto was spread for it was set up by order of Emperor Meiji in 1869.

Relocation
It’s been said that Shinto is rooted in the soil of Japan, and does not take kindly to relocation. When I visited Brazil, for example, I noticed that though Japanese Buddhism was alive and well in the emigrant community, the same could not be said for Shinto. One of the shrines in Sao Paolo had shut down, and the other was run by an elderly priest who told me he was concerned about its future survival.

Perhaps there is something of the emigrant experience about the adventurers who left for Hokkaido in the nineteenth century. They were pioneers in a new kind of land, yet Shinto is all about tradition and continuity. Trees and rocks are sacred because someone in the distant past decided it was. Festivals are celebrated because they’ve always been celebrated that way. Customs, legends and kami found justification simply by being handed down from the Age of the Gods.

In Hokkaido by contrast was a land filled with the folklore of the Ainu. Whatever else they might be, the Ainu were definitely not the sons of Yamato. Not Wajin at all. Their kami were not even proper kami, but kamui. It must have been unsettling for the settlers.

Nonetheless during the twentieth century shrines were set up, and communities developed festivals and customs of their own. It’s Japan’s largest prefecture and very much assimilated into the country as a whole. Though it still doesn’t have the feel of Shinto in Honshu and Kyushu, perhaps one day it will. And perhaps there is something to be learnt here about how Shinto can spread overseas…. after all, to Meiji-era Japanese, Hokkaido (then known as Ezo) was itself very much overseas.

Hokkaido scenery

Island festival

September 3, 2012 / John D. / 0 Comments

Jake Davis has posted a wonderful visual record here of a festival on the small Inland Sea island of Iwaishima. Like many others, I’m a great fan of the Inland Sea and have tried to visit as many of the islands as possible – or at least those that have been spared the unfortunate uglifications of what Alex Kerr terms ‘the Concrete State’. Despite the small and aging populations, some of the small islands manage to preserve traditions that stretch back well over a millennium, as can be seen in the colourful portraits of Jake’s photo essay.

Local festivals are a true treasure in Japan’s cultural mosaic and one of the country’s most appealing aspects. They require a great deal of time and effort, but the collaboration is an important aspect in strengthening community ties and a sense of identity. To me, they are the very building blocks on which the whole modern construct of ‘Shinto’ has been built.

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The Wikipedia entry for Iwaishima runs as follows:

Iwai Island (祝島) is an island of the Inland Sea in Japan. With a total altitude of 82 meters, it lies at the south-eastern edge of the Yamaguchi Prefecture. The name is derived from the ancient ritual of passing travellers and is in fact home to a ceremonial fishing dance specific to the island as noted in the crew journey log of the Hokule on their journey from Micronesia to Japan.

In 1982, Chugoku Electric Power Company proposed building a nuclear power plant near Iwaishima, but many residents opposed the idea, and the island’s fishing cooperative voted overwhelmingly against the plans. In January 1983, almost 400 islanders staged a protest march, which was the first of more than 1,000 protests the islanders carried out. Since the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011 there has been wider opposition to construction plans for the plant.

Iwaishima from the air: don't you just love the shape? (photo taken from the island's offical site)

Australian Shinto

September 1, 2012 / John D. / 4 Comments

Koshinto Australia

The following report has been sent in by Jason Sargeant concerning a new initiative in Australia, which I am sure will catch the interest of our regular readers.

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Greetings all: well, many readers may be surprised to find out that Australia and in fact South Australia has a small Shinto community.

Jason Sargeant

At present we are essentially establishing our organisation in relation to our Shrine and generating greater interest. Hopefully we will attract people who wish to become part of the Shinto way.

So who are Koshinto Australia?

Well, Koshinto was started by Jason Sargent who a Shihan in the Japanese Art of Bujinkan under Dr Hatsumi. After straddling two cultures for the better part of 25 years and practicing Shinto privately for over 10, I started to realise that it was time that I provided others with the chance to experience the wonderful principles and happy view of life that Shinto provides.

So I registered a Website n 2011 and commenced building our Jinja in Australia. Currently we have a small group of participants, and we hope to as mentioned before to grow our Jinja with a spirit of community.

Our planned Shrine will be located at the Goodwood Primary School and will be a non permanent Shrine only from the perspective that we will erect it each month when ceremonies are conducted.

Please visit this link to our site.

Yamakage Motohisa, present head of Yamakage Shinto

We follow the principles and teachings of the Yamakage School of Shinto, however at present we are not affiliated with the Yamakage organisation in Japan, a fact that we hope to change in the near future. I have taken the role of Kannushi (priest) for the organisation for the following reasons:

I have studied the Texts and philosophy of Shinto for over 10 years including the Kojiki

I have researched and participated in the major Shinto rituals (except Weddings)

I have practiced and administered a wide array of Shinto ceremonies

I have completed the 100 Days of Chinkon

While I do not class myself as a Master Kannushi, it is only by practice and refinement that I will one day achieve this goal.

I wish you all the best of health and happiness

Regards

Jason Sargent

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For an explanation of Yamakage Shinto, see the Kokugakuin dictionary entry here. The Dutchman, Paul de Leeuw, the world’s first non-Japanese Shinto priest, practises Yamakage Shinto and has co-translated The Essence of Shinto by Yamakage Motohisa.