Fudō, ‘the immoveable one’, shown holding a sword in his right hand and a rope in his left hand while surrounded by flames. This statue is in the courtyard of the Yashimaji near Takamatsu.
In the year 1592, as the Japanese invasion fleet was about to set sail to attack Korea, there was a slight pause in the proceedings while Matsuura Hōin Shigenobu (1549–1614) performed a brief religious ritual. Dressed in his finest robes and holding aloft a heihaku (a symbolic offering made of paper), he climbed up on to the raised deck of his ship and turned to face in the general direction of the distant Iwashimizu shrine, which was dedicated to Hachiman, the kami (god) of war. He bowed three times. Guns were fired and his followers gave three war cries. Shigenobu’s commander-in-chief, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98), sent a messenger to enquire after the reason for the noise. Shigenobu reported back that on board his ship they were paying their respects to the Hachiman shrine in acknowledgement of the similar occasion in ancient times when the Empress Jing
had led an invasion of Korea. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was delighted.1
This little ceremony, performed at the start of what was to prove one of Japan’s cruellest and most disastrous wars, provides a neat illustration of the subtle relationship between the samurai and the sacred. At the heart of the interaction taking place on board Shigenobu’s ship is the worship of and reverence for one of the kami, the numinous entities that are the focus of worship in the religious system that is known as Shintō. Kami is often translated simply as ‘god’, and the word ‘Shintō’ means ‘the way of the gods’.
Since the 8th century AD Japan has often been referred to in official documents as ‘the land of the gods’ (shinkoku),2 and any interested visitor to Japan nowadays cannot help being struck by the apparent all-pervasiveness of the sacred in modern Japanese life. Shintō shrines (jinja) large and small appear to be everywhere, from household altars to huge architectural complexes. Shrines also exist as tiny memorials on beaches, where anonymous victims of drownings are enshrined, and can even be found within the precincts of the Buddhist temples, which provide another very prominent visual reminder of the enduring religious life of the Japanese people. But sacred objects do not end there. One comes across little stone statues by the roadside, while the courtyards of temples and shrines appear to house fortune-tellers’ booths. Wandering monks dressed in full medieval robes turn up in the doorways of restaurants to bless the diners. New cars are ceremoniously purified, and the spires of Christian churches may occasionally be seen protruding from hillsides behind shrines to Confucius.
This situation of apparent harmony has been dubbed ‘the Japanese religious supermarket’, where, with some notable exceptions, not only have the various religious traditions intermingled throughout history, but Japanese people today also seem happy to participate in rituals from different systems. As the popular saying tells us, the Japanese are ‘born Shintō and die Buddhist’, with perhaps a wedding in a Christian church somewhere along the journey of life. This accommodative approach to religion has been seen as an example of an assimilative tendency in Japanese culture, whereby ‘newly introduced traditions did not uproot the indigenous but were invariably assimilated into a kind of homogeneous tradition which might itself be called Japanese religion’.3
Matsuura Shigenobu’s spontaneous act of devotion to the kami as he was about to set off to war provides an illustration of how religion has permeated Japanese society throughout history. The world of the samurai and the world of the sacred were not opposing entities. Instead, the two aspects coalesced into one unitary world view where the denizens of the spirit world interacted with men. The kami may have been mysterious, but they were also accessible and could be moved to anger or compassion according to whether they were honoured or neglected.
Shigenobu has prudently honoured one very powerful kami by his prayers, and will set off on his expedition confident that Hachiman will aid him. Here we see an interesting emphasis being laid upon precedent and tradition. Shigenobu wishes his military expedition to be a success, so he invokes the example of a previous triumph in the same direction by choosing to honour one kami in particular. Hachiman is the deified spirit of Emperor Ojin, who lived between AD 201 and 310 according to the traditional reckoning. When his mother, Empress Jing, carried out her own legendary invasion of Korea she was pregnant with the future emperor and put a stone in her sash to delay his birth.4 Hachiman, as Japan’s primary ‘god of war’, was therefore a very suitable kami to invoke before an invasion. The imperial connection further exemplifies one other very important characteristic of Shintō: its close links with the emperors of Japan, who claimed a direct descent from Amaterasu, the ‘Sun-Goddess’ – the greatest of all the kami.
Matsuura Hōin Shigenobu, daimyõ of Hirado, who prayed for victory before taking part in Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea in 1592. From a painted scroll in the Matsuura Historical Museum, Hirado.
It is also noticeable that Shigenobu’s offering to Hachiman is a very low-key and informal affair. As on so many other occasions throughout history, we see less evidence of a ‘religious service’ in the Christian sense than an example of an individual turning to the kami in times of personal need. Nowadays people visit Shintō shrines at certain times, such as for festivals and personal rites of passage, as well as casually dropping in to pray. Matsuura Shigenobu is praying for victory in battle: a common occurrence in the history of the samurai that often involved a visit to an important shrine where a particular kami had been enshrined. When Oda Nobunaga (1534–82) set out on the march that led to his victory at the battle of Okehazama in 1560, he wrote a prayer for victory and deposited it at the Atsuta shrine near present-day Nagoya. Takeda Katsuyori made a point of visiting the shrine of his father, the late Takeda Shingen, before setting off on the fateful campaign that ended in his defeat at the battle of Nagashino in 1575. In the case cited above, Shigenobu is unable to visit the Iwashimizu shrine, which is located hundreds of miles away near Kyōto, so he bows in its direction.
The Isaniwa shrine in Dōgo Onsen, Matsuyama, dedicated to Hachiman, the important kami of war. This shrine was built in 1667.
The spire of the Xavier Memorial Chapel, the Catholic church in Hirado, is visible behind the local Buddhist temple.
Finally, the name of Hōin, which is included in Matsuura Shigenobu’s title, indicates that in addition to being the leader of an army of samurai he is also a Buddhist priest, thus showing the characteristic blending of and interchange between different Japanese religious traditions. This image of a Buddhist priest apparently performing a ritual from a different religion is a strange concept for a Westerner to understand. No Muslim cleric, for example, would say Mass. But in Shigenobu’s day there was little practical distinction between Buddhism and Shintō, and he would also have addressed his patron as bosatsu (bodhissatva), a title that gave Hachiman a role in the Buddha’s mission to save all beings.5
There appears to be no expression of any religious traditions in Shigenobu’s ritual other than Shintō and Buddhist elements, but examples of other spiritual perspectives are not hard to find elsewhere in Japanese history. The monk Saichō(767–822), the founder of the Tendai sect of Buddhism, chose Mount Hiei as the location for his temple of Enryakuji: a foundation that was to have an enormous influence on Japanese religion for centuries to come. He chose it partly because it was a holy mountain that was the abode of kami, but also because of Taoist beliefs in lucky directions. A few centuries later, Mount Hiei’s most notorious denizens, its armies of sõhei (warrior monks), would march into battle carrying portable shrines dedicated to the kami that was enshrined on the mountain. Both through their dual roles as priests and warriors, and through their use of Shintō emblems, the sõhei provided a dramatic illustration of the complex and intertwined nature of the samurai and the sacred.
A tiny wayside shrine beside the road in Kyōto. Flowers and an apple have been left as offerings.
This book aims to tell the story of this subtle relationship as it developed throughout Japanese history. The samurai is often seen as almost exclusively a fighting man. Here the depths of faith and culture that supported his better-known role will be revealed. It begins with the world of gods and spirits that permeated every element of the samurai’s career from birth to death, and includes the influence that this religious milieu exerted upon him as a warrior, an administrator and a patron of the arts. From the battlefield to the tea house and back again, this book explores, for example, how the samurai expressed the ideals of Zen Buddhism and Confucianism in his roles as swordsman and leader. The plays he enjoyed in the theatre, the gardens in which he meditated, the way he performed at archery and even the manner in which he was expected to depart this life ensured that the life of a samurai was acted out with the rich colours of a vibrant sacredness.