A dying samurai stands transfixed with a sword through his neck. This ghastly image sums up the horror of the ‘Realm of the Beasts’ that was the Japanese battlefield.
The birth pangs of modern Japan began during the last few years of the Tokugawa Shogunate when conflict arose over the future of Japan. The opening up of the ‘closed country’, forced upon the Shogunate by the arrival of Commodore Perry’s fleet in 1854, was a development that was far from welcome to many in Japanese society. Whereas the supporters of the Shogun cooperated with the Western nations by signing treaties and promoting trade, their opponents believed that his acquiescence to Western demands was a sign of weakness and a betrayal of traditional Japanese values. The perceived threats that this posed also brought out into the open many dissenters who had been dissatisfied in general terms with other policies followed by the Tokugawa family over the years. These people had their own ideas of how to face the new dangers posed by foreign nations, and soon came to believe that the main obstacle hindering the expulsion of the ‘barbarians’ was the continued existence of the Shogunate, which should be replaced by the restored rule of the emperor. Political opinion was profoundly divided, and was backed up by terrorist acts from both sides of the argument. Modern Japan was therefore born out of years of feuding and tension when samurai swords found many victims.
The actual Meiji Restoration began late in 1867 when a newly formed army of conscripts together with the more traditional samurai forces of the han of Satsuma and Chōsh
captured Kyōto. The Shogun accepted defeat and tendered his resignation. In January 1868 diehard supporters of the Tokugawa attempted to recapture the city but were heavily defeated at the battle of Toba-Fushimi. This was the beginning of the Boshin War, during which the imperial army marched on Edo, where they captured the ex-Shogun without bloodshed. The city was renamed Tokyo (the eastern capital) and became the seat of the new Meiji government, although fighting continued in the north of Japan until 1869. Meanwhile, the new Meiji government instituted many reforms in what is usually portrayed as a largely peaceful process of embracing the new: a time of hope when enthusiastic and progressive samurai eagerly replaced their top knots with top hats. However, the breathtaking speed of the growth in international trade, the development of railways, commerce and communications hid numerous internal contradictions and conflicts to which the world of the sacred was far from immune.
In spite of all the modernity that it enthusiastically embraced – much of which, it must be said, was originally inspired by a desire to make Japan strong enough to withstand foreign powers in a possible war – the Meiji Restoration was born out of something that was of itself very ancient and very Japanese: the idea that the emperor would rule over a Japan that was at one and the same time a modern country and a semi-divine, paternalistic and authoritarian state. The emperor could certainly embrace modern technology – indeed he must – but his kingship by right of descent from the Sun-Goddess owed nothing to Western ideas of monarchy and even less to Western ideas of divinity. Shintō ideas had inspired those who had brought about Japan’s great change, and Shintō would benefit most from them in religious terms. As explained earlier, Christianity caught the backlash of this viewpoint. What is more extraordinary is the way in which Buddhism was hit by the full force of resurgent Shintō, ensuring that the Japanese world of the sacred would never be the same again.
Akechi Mitsuhide, who usurped Oda Nobunaga in a treacherous attack in 1582, but was soon defeated at the battle of Yamazaki. Here we see him in hiding, exhausted and wounded, receiving comfort from a loyal retainer inside the bamboo grove from which he will shortly emerge to face his death.
At the time of the Tokugawa regime’s founding, Shintō had been at a low ebb. The kami were honoured by ritual as they had always been, but Confucianism provided the model for government and Buddhism acted as its loyal and subservient means of social control. Even Shintō priests and their families had to register at their local temple, just like everyone else in Japan, and they were almost always forced to have Buddhist funerals, a matter that caused great resentment. Buddhist priests inevitably held higher positions than Shintō clergy, who could do little about it because many shrines were subordinate to a temple. The theological and pastoral role of the shrine/temple complex was in the hands of the Buddhist clergy. Shintō priests had roles that hardly went beyond liturgy, as they served the needs of popular devotion to the kami for rewards that were of a ‘this-worldly’ nature. They had no particular doctrine, and no need of a professional priesthood.1
Shintō ideas experienced something of a revival during the 18th century through the growth of kokugaku (national learning): a movement that examined the ancient history of Japan on the basis of the Japanese classics. Its pioneers came to reject Confucian and Buddhist opinions in favour of Japanese virtues. Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), to whom Shintō was a fully fledged Japanese religion, was to produce the classic definition of kami cited earlier. Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) became a passionate spokesman for the purification of Shintō from Buddhist and Confucian influences and mercilessly criticized Ryōbu Shintō. The Tokugawa regime did not agree, and silenced him for the last few years of his life.2 Kokugaku was eventually to provide the intellectual and political background for the Shogunate to be overthrown in the name of imperial restoration.
For the whole of the Edo Period Buddhism served the Shogun as his faithful lapdog, and as long as the Shogunate survived, Buddhism’s future was secure. When the Tokugawa fell from power Buddhism was forced to stand on its own as an institution and had to survive without special privileges. It was then that the backlash began, at a governmental level, an intellectual level and from anyone in the population who saw the opportunity to settle old scores.
With the ideology provided by kokugaku to propel them along, the reformers of Meiji Japan turned their attentions towards purging Shintō of its Buddhist ‘impurities’. As has been noted so often in this book, the two were so thoroughly mixed that they were practically inseparable. The Great Shrine of Ise provides a striking example of the fusion of the two traditions at the time of Meiji. Though it was Japan’s holiest Shintō establishment, by 1868 nearly 300 Buddhist temples existed in its immediate vicinity. The recitation of Buddhist sutras in front of altars of the kami, who were believed to be in need of these prayers to attain salvation, was fully accepted, and many Buddhist priests travelled to Ise on pilgrimage. Even the imperial family were affiliated with a Buddhist temple – the Sennyji in Kyōto – and there was a special room in the palace for the family’s butsudan (Buddhist altar). This was done away with in 1871 and the ihai (funerary tablets) sent to the Sennyji.3
Yet this apparent religious harmony conceals a great tension that lay beneath the surface. In their prayers at Ise Buddhist priests were, perhaps unconsciously, reasserting an enduring authority over the native gods that had originally been bestowed upon Buddhism by the Nara court. Every resolution of the kami versus Buddha problem had resulted in the kami being relegated to an inferior position. It was always the gods of Japan that were in need of salvation, not the other way about. To this was added the Tokugawa Shogunate’s use of Buddhism as a means of social control and the position of Shintō priests as ‘second-class citizens’: a situation that was to be completely reversed by a government decree of 28 March 1868 to enforce shinbutsu bunri – the separation of Shintō and Buddhism. What actually happened was the expulsion of Buddhism from long-established Shintō/Buddhist sanctuaries. This was often accompanied by violence and the destruction of property as a thousand years of syncretism came to an end.
The Omiwa shrine, described earlier because of its holy mountain, provides an excellent illustration of the decree’s devastating effects. The place had always had extraordinarily deep ties with the imperial family. Both the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki state that the mountain’s kami was a manifestation of the great kami of Izumo,4 while the syncretic ideas of Ryōbu Shintō identified the mountain and its kami as being of one body with Amaterasu and Dainichi Nyorai.5 Such a glorious coexistence meant that up to the Meiji Restoration Omiwa had three jing
-ji (shrine/temple complexes), of which now only a single structure remains. Following the fateful decree of 1868 the Buddhist monks in Omiwa’s temples were forced to become Shintō priests. The temples’ treasures were removed and orders were given for the demolition of most of the structures that housed them. The largest of the three temple complexes, the Byōdōji, was completely destroyed in 1870, leaving the Omiwa shrine in the ‘pristine’ Shintō form of shrine and mountain that so moves visitors today. Yet none of this history is mentioned in the modern literature published by the shrine. As far as these publications are concerned the identification of Mount Miwa as the shintai of the kami and the mountain’s long-lasting holiness is all there is to say. Centuries of Shintō/Buddhist accommodation were wiped out to make way for the new ‘traditionalism’ required by Meiji Japan.6
The Otani cemetery in Kyōto contains thousands of graves holding ashes of the deceased.
As well as purging existing Shintō shrines of any Buddhist colouration, the Meiji reformers systematized them and controlled the form of activities their newly liberated priests could undertake. Shintō funerals were encouraged, and an attempt was made to replicate the Tokugawa danka system by requiring all households to register at a Shintō shrine. Both these innovations proved unpopular, lasting only two years. Furthermore, when the government was faced with protests at the attacks on Buddhism, which in some cases had gone much further than the government had either ordered or wanted, the Shintō reformers began to think again. What they came up with was even more extraordinary than the forced separation of Buddhism and Shintō. Realizing that the immediate ‘Shintōization’ of Japan was impossible, the Meiji regime created an artificial designation that they called State Shintō, a non-religious or super-religious cult applicable to the adherents of all religions. The Constitution of 1889, which guaranteed religious freedom for the first time, was not intended to exclude any Japanese subject from participating in the rites of State Shintō, which had as their focus the ideals of national morality and a fierce patriotism through devotion to the emperor. All shrines were classified and graded into a hierarchy.7 The government also created several new shrines, of which the best known is Japan’s famous, and to many people notorious, Yasukuni shrine, built to honour the nation’s war dead. As the controversy over the meaning and significance of the Yasukuni shrine is such a complex one, we must first examine the whole issue of death and the warrior.
Throughout samurai history great store was laid on the example set to a warrior by the glorious deeds of his ancestors. A successful samurai would revel in his deeds of valour not just for himself but for the contribution he had made to a long-standing family tradition. This emphasis upon the household (ie) rather than the individual is an important characteristic of Japanese religious belief. There are Confucian elements here, with the emphasis upon kõ (filial piety) as the basis of an ordered society. As the samurai obsession with pedigree shows clearly, the emphasis did not end with the death of a family member. The most important way in which the primacy of the family is expressed in Japanese religion is ancestor worship, whereby the structure of social relationships within the family unit is extended to encompass the dead. Japanese ancestor worship, which is not a separate religious sect but a series of beliefs integrated into the overall religious system, ensures that death does not extinguish a person’s involvement in the life of his family. Instead, by a complex series of rituals designed to keep the ancestors peaceful and content in the successive stages through which they will pass, this continuity is assured.
Lined up with a very un-Japanese symmetry, the graves of the Mōri family lie within trees in the city of Hagi.
In early Japan the dead were treated with a mixture of fear and respect. The corpse was of course a major source of pollution that required Shintō rituals of purification, but the spirit of the dead person was also frightening because it could linger in the realm of the living. In a vivid metaphor, the spirit at the time of death had ‘sharp edges’ and still retained a strong individual personality. If the proper rituals were not carried out the spirit could become unhappy or even unruly. If the process was done properly it gradually lost its sharp edges and became ‘as smooth as marble’, eventually losing all its individuality as part of the collective spirits of the locality.8 The spirits of the dead were therefore venerated and, to some extent, manipulated, along the journey they had to take in order to become ancestral kami.9
The process of guiding the spirits of the dead was carried out through the rituals of Buddhism, and was such an important practice that there was a gradual yet significant shift in the interpretation of what salvation actually entailed. Less emphasis was placed on the salvation of the living and more on the salvation of the dead. Many people came to regard ‘funerary Buddhism’ as the main religious function of the Buddhist clergy. This attitude persists today10 and clearly illustrates the blending of Buddhism with native Japanese beliefs, as the most striking feature of the syncretic process is that when a person dies he ‘becomes a hotoke (buddha)’, a concept contrary to orthodox Buddhist thought. Furthermore, the process of enshrining a spirit does not fit in with traditional Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation, which taught inter alia that the Ten Kings of the Underworld passed judgement on each person’s spirit after death as to which of the six realms of transmigration the spirit should be born into.11 A further contradiction is found with Jōdo Shinsh, whose followers maintain that the believer’s spirit leaves the world immediately for the Pure Land.
For the first 49 days from death the aim is to separate the spirit both from the corpse and from the world of the living. Two temporary ihai (memorial tablets) of unlacquered wood or paper are made. One is left at the grave site, the other is taken away from the cemetery and placed on a low table in front of the butsudan in the home. The butsudan may be an elaborate affair like a miniature version of the altar in a Buddhist temple. The temporary ihai is replaced on the 49th day by the permanent ihai of black lacquered wood on which the deceased’s posthumous name is written in gold. The deceased person will be addressed through the ihai – very important objects known to have been rescued at great personal risk from burning buildings as if the ancestors lived in the tablets.12 In 1615 one samurai rode into battle with a giant 2m-high (6ft 6in) ihai fastened to the back of his armour to show his acceptance of death. It was no doubt with similar, although diametrically opposed views of their worth, that led to their butsudan and ihai being gleefully burned or thrown into the sea by the Jesuits’ first Christian converts.
The daughter of a family near Nara prays during the festival of Bon, the annual event to welcome back into the household the spirits of the dead; as it is the first Bon since the death of her grandmother, well-wishers have presented the paper lanterns seen here.
The separation of the spirit from the body is only regarded as complete on the first Bon (the festival of the dead) following the death, the annual event in August when all the ancestral spirits are welcomed back into the household. Springtime cherry blossom viewing, with its timeless association with the brief lives of the samurai, was once an occasion for welcoming returning spirits of the dead, and this persists in some communities.13 The return of the spirits provides a further example of the intangible quality of the Japanese spirit world:
The world beyond cannot be described in any but equivocal phrases. Spatially it is both here and there, temporarily here and now. The departed and ancestors always are close by, they can be contacted immediately at the household shelf, the graveyard or elsewhere. Yet when they return ‘there’ after the midsummer reunion, they are seen off for a great journey. They are perpetually present – yet come and go from periodic household gatherings.14
For the next three or four decades the ancestors will be addressed through their ihai and remembered through various forms of prayer and services. Memorial services for the dead continue to be held until either the 33rd anniversary of death or possibly the 50th anniversary, depending upon the tradition, when a final service is held and the spirit of the ancestor becomes a kami. At this time the ihai is supposed to be deposited in the temple. The ancestral kami now remain eternally in the land, and continue to work for its prosperity and that of the family, but at this stage the various ancestral spirits have not yet become one. When they come back at Bon, they come back as the ancestors of the village, and each goes to his own family as its ancestors. This process is regarded as continuing as long as there is living memory within the family, after which the ancestral kami must be treated as a collectivity.
The ancestors who have been treated appropriately through the years of remembrance outlined above are a benign, friendly presence. If the sequence is neglected, however, the spirits of the dead may become unhappy in the afterlife. What happens to the dead who have no one to mourn for them? They are known as muenbotoke (buddhas of no affiliation). Muenbotoke, lacking the support of relatives during the period of transition, fail to become part of any family’s collectivity of ancestors. From this perspective they are to be pitied rather than feared,15 and food may be left for them when they return at Bon, although the offerings are made outside houses rather than in a family home.
Further complications arise when a person dies a violent or untimely death, and thus ‘remain possessed by the worldly passion in which they died’.16 It is ‘vengeful spirits’ (goryõ shinkõ) or ‘angry ghosts’ (onryõ) such as these – often dead samurai slaughtered on battlefields – that provide rich material for the numerous ghost stories and plays that make up many Noh and Kabuki dramas. The battle of Dannoura in 1185, which ended so tragically for the Taira, was to result in almost an entire family of unhappy spirits roaming the earth searching for revenge.
The needs of battle victims for funerals in situ provided a valuable role for the Buddhist priesthood. This was a charitable duty adopted in particular by monks of the Jish (Ji sect), which derived from the Pure Land preaching of the priest Ippen (1239–89). The name means the ‘time sect’ because of its members’ practice of reciting the nembutsu for six hours of the day. Unusually among founders, Ippen was descended from a samurai family: the Kōno, who had been one of the principal naval powers in the Inland Sea. Ippen used dance to spread his word, and his exuberant joy at the assurance of rebirth in paradise proved to be so great that when he first led his congregation in a dancing nembutsu the wooden floor collapsed.17 Having had no desire to found a new sect, Ippen burned all his books and writings before his death, so the resulting Ji sect is best regarded as a branch of Hōnen’s Jōdo sect. Prominent jish (the same name was used for its members) were involved in cultural affairs such as flower arranging, but they are best known for their role on the battlefield.
Battlefield jish priests, who were effectively Buddhist army chaplains, would tell stories and recite poems during lulls in the fighting, and could also be counted on to perform funerary nembutsu. They might even advance at great risk to their own lives during the midst of battle to offer nembutsu to the spirits of those who had just died. Dying soldiers would also be given the assurance of salvation. According to a letter sent by the chief priest of the Ji sect’s Yugyōji near Kamakura, when the Hōjo were defeated at Kamakura in 1333 the battlefield resounded with repeated nembutsu cries and prayers uttered by samurai on both sides under the kindly influence of the jish.18 Jish also provided memorial services, and would perform the useful act of visiting relatives of the slain and reporting deeds back to the home temple.19
A fascinating account of jish in action comes from Otõ Monogatari, the tale of (the battle of) Otō.20 This clash occurred in 1400 when Ogasawara Nagahide’s rearguard was cut off in the abandoned fort of Otō. After 20 days without food the desperate men decided to commit suicide or die fighting. The slaughter was considerable:
Father and two sons, on the point of suicide, joined hands and faced west. In loud voices they earnestly chanted the nembutsu, the promise and the prayer [of Amida] to receive them and not to abandon them. And each, with repeated blows, committed suicide… Now, the next day, the eighteenth day of the tenth month, in the hour of the tiger [3:00–5:00 am] the forces of the vanguard attacked. They raced each other around and around the fort, took the heads of the dead, and dispatched the dying with a blade through the throat. They stopped those fleeing and cut off their arms and legs. They pursued the dying to the scattered places they had crawled to and took their heads. Their actions were indescribable. Now, the lay priest Kōsaka Munetsugu, second in command of the horse of the left, shut his eyes for a time. What he thought in his very heart was that this was nothing more than the Six Realms.21
The expression ‘the Six Realms’ refers to the Buddhist belief that there are six stages of existence between hell and heaven. All involve some degree of suffering, and in the age of mappõ it was possible to experience the suffering of all of them here on earth.22 The author of Otõ Monogatari seems to see the battlefield as being equivalent to the lower realms of hungry ghosts and beasts, where men were degraded so much that they would even eat the raw flesh of their horses.23 The only hope of escape from this awful world is the vow of Amida Buddha to rescue all sentient beings. Fortunately for the defenders of Otō, a community of jish located nearby in the Zenkōji temple (in modern Nagano) came to the fort to do what they could to help and to assure them on this point:
Now, the Tsumado jish of Zenkoji and similarly the holy men of Junenji heard that the men at Otō had committed suicide. They hurried there and inspected the miserable state of the battlefield. It was a sight too awful to look upon. Men who only recently had appeared so fine and grand all lay dead upon the moor. The corpses of men lay strewn together with the carcasses of horses. [A carpet of] blood-stained creepers, fluttering in the wind like the red leaves of [Mount] Kōya, resembled red brocade spread out in the sun.
Monks and priests who were relatives collected the remains and embraced the dead bodies. They grieved and wept without limit. Such a thing has never been heard of in the past nor seen in our own time. Those jish gathered up one by one the corpses lying scattered here and there. Some they burnt and others they buried. They set up stupas and on each they bestowed nembutsu. Everywhere they raised the hope that Amida would come to lead them to paradise. More and more they acted with the mercy of Buddha. They went as far as to collect [the last] writings from the dead as souvenirs which were sent to the widows and orphans.24
A similar lament for the horror of the battlefield and the degraded state of humans who fight there comes from the eloquent and often angry brush of the monk Keinen, a Jōdo Shinsh priest from Usuki in Bungo province, who was taken along as a chaplain by Ota Kazuyoshi during Hideyoshi’s second invasion of Korea in 1597. Like the author of Otõ Monogatari, Keinen’s diary likens the battlefield to the realm of beasts where the samurai lose every trace of human compassion. On one occasion the peasant labourers are beaten so severely that Keinen sees them metaphorically as so many ‘dumb oxen’, which are ‘slaughtered, their hides are flayed and they are eaten’; this is the Realm of Beasts. On another occasion he makes his most despairing statement of all: ‘I am fearful of all these things. Hell cannot be in any other place except here.’ War had made men descend to the lowest of all the Six Worlds.25
One further element that added to the horror of the samurai battlefield was the well-known practice of cutting off and collecting the heads of dead enemies. The main focus came after a battle, when most of the ritual surrounding a victory celebration concerned the formal inspection of the heads by the victorious general. He would sit in state, while one by one the heads were brought before him for comment. These ceremonies appear to have been quite informal affairs until the 14th century. The Mõko Shrai Ekotoba shows a head inspection taking place during the Mongol invasions. The heads, from which blood is still seeping, have been casually placed on the ground.26 The ceremony later grew into one of considerable formality to which the victorious commander would give his full attention – a matter that proved to be the undoing of Imagawa Yoshimoto in 1560, who was so engrossed in head-viewing that he suffered a surprise attack. A few hours later it was his own head that was being viewed by someone else.
The horror of the battlefield is powerfully conveyed by this print of Akechi Mitsuchika at the battle of Yamazaki in 1582. During Hideyoshi’s inspection of the battlefield the following day, Mitsuchika rose up from among a mound of corpses to try to kill him.
The press of battle often left little opportunity for anything other than simple head identification; the formalities had to wait until later. During the Age of Warring States it became most undesirable for a daimyõ to be presented with an untidy trophy. Prior to his inspection the heads would be washed, the hair combed, and the resulting trophy made presentable by cosmetics, tasks traditionally done by women. The heads would then be mounted on a spiked wooden board with red labels for identification. This act of cleaning the heads was in part a sign of respect for fallen warriors. It also represented a tribute to the victors’ pride as men who could defeat heroic enemies. The Azuma Kagami tells us how Minamoto Yoritomo exhibited the heads of 19 enemy samurai after the battle of Azukashiyama in 1189, while a 13th-century warrior called Obusuma Saburō liked to maintain a steady supply of fresh heads hanging on the fence surrounding the riding field of his home.27
A samurai general examines an enemy head brought before him.
For a dead samurai, having had his head removed would cause great problems both for him and his family. Heads thrown away, as in this print, would have caused much distress. The samurai pictured is Endō Naotsugu, who tried to kill Oda Nobunaga during the battle of Anegawa in 1570. He approached Nobunaga in the guise of a friendly warrior presenting him with a severed head, and when his true purpose was discovered he threw the head in the direction of his intended victim and died fighting.
When viewed purely as a means of proving one’s merit, head collection would appear to have no religious context. However, although accounts of head-taking as proof of duty done dominate the narratives, there is also evidence that some heads were used as offerings to the kami in celebration of victory. On one occasion Minamoto Yoritomo went far beyond head collection and sacrificed a prisoner as part of his celebration of victory in his northern campaign. Elsewhere his brother Yoshitsune cut the heads off 20 men and offered them to the gods of war.28
The alternative to displaying heads as trophies was to return them to the victims’ families after the inspection ceremony. This was a merciful act that went beyond mere generosity to a defeated enemy because of one little-known religious belief of the time. There was a deeply held feeling that a fragment of the deceased’s mind and spirit could be found in every part of his body. If some parts were missing the spirit became unhappy in the next world.29 For a dead samurai to have had his head removed would cause great problems both for him and his family. Samurai begged to have the heads of their dead comrades returned to them so that they were ensured rebirth in the life to come,30 as in this Taiheiki account of the siege of Akasaka:
Now there was a holy man who followed Homma to that place, and for his sake recited the name of Amida Buddha ten times at the last. This monk begged Homma’s head to take back to Tennōji, where he spoke of all that had passed to Homma’s son, Gennai Hyōe Suketada.31
In 1581 two senior retainers were sent to investigate what had happened at Shikano castle and discovered that a massacre had taken place. One thing that they did before returning was to match up and replace together the heads that had been separated from bodies.32 One imagines that orders sometimes given by commanders during heated battles that heads should be ‘cut and tossed’ so as not to hinder the momentum of the fight33, would have caused much distress.
In this terrible Realm of the Beasts that was the samurai battlefield the need to pacify the goryõ shinkõ of those who died there was acutely felt by the contemporary mind.34 It was an impulse that went far beyond any human need to bury a corpse and remember a loved one. There was also considerable fear, because the vengeful spirits of the dead could cause havoc among the living by various sorts of natural disasters and pestilences. The belief that all spirits at death had ‘sharp edges’ was multiplied tenfold for an angry ghost produced in the horror of the battlefield.
From about the time of the 12th-century Gempei War, the initiative for commissioning memorial services for the dead of battles usually lay with either the reigning or the retired emperor.35 The larger-than-life Minamoto Yoritomo provides an early exception to this rule by his founding of a temple in Kamakura to offer prayers for the spirits of his brother Yoshitsune and the other samurai who had been killed in the northern campaign of 1189,36 but the first samurai general to take on board wholeheartedly the duty of memorializing the dead was Ashikaga Takauji. As an earlier chapter showed, Takauji was a deeply religious man in a deeply religious age, and he began offering memorial services to pacify the ‘evil spirits’ of his Hōjō enemies in 1335. Two years later, at the behest of the Zen master Musō Soseki, he and his brother Tadayoshi began a remarkable religious building project, whereby a ‘temple of peace in the realm’ (ankokuji) and a ‘pagoda of the Buddha’s favour’ (rishõto) were successfully built in each province. The ankokuji, all of which were Zen temples, were founded to provide a focus and a sacred space for the pacification of the restless spirits of the dead who had been killed in battle.37
In this way, for example, the massacred defenders of Kanegasaki castle, who were believed to have become onryõ, might be placated.38 These spirits were anonymous, but others were known by name. Emperor Sutoku and Fujiwara Yorinage, defeated and killed during the Hōgen Incident of 1156, became angry spirits. One very prominent goryõ shinkõ was the spirit of Taira Masakado, who was killed in battle in 940 and is enshrined in the Kanda Myōjin shrine in Tokyo.39 Masakado was first worshipped there in 1309 after a series of floods, droughts and epidemics had been blamed on his unruly spirit. In the Shõmonki, the chronicle of Masakado’s rebellion, his departed spirit sends a message back to earth to describe how he is suffering the torments of hell, where, ‘My body was placed in the forest of sword-leaf trees where I was made to suffer, and my liver was roasted over smouldering embers in an iron cage… My brothers, you must fulfil my vow in order that I may escape from this suffering.’40
The shrine to Shōni Suketoki, a hero of the Mongol invasions, on the island of Iki.
There is an interesting modern coda to this story. Masakado had been a rebel against imperial rule, and in 1874, when the institution of the emperor was being strengthened against the memory of the overthrown Shogun, Masakado was condemned as an enemy of the emperor. As Emperor Meiji was planning to visit the Kanda Myōjin shrine, it was decided to move Masakado’s spirit from the main shrine to a sub-shrine. But when this was done local people refused to go to the main shrine, boycotted its annual festival and held back on financial contributions. The reason they gave was that it was wise to keep an unruly spirit pacified, and that if Masakado’s spirit was deprived of its proper shrine then it would start causing trouble again. He was eventually restored to his status as principal kami of the shrine in May 1984.41
Jizōis the protector of children, and this is the role symbolized by these childlike Jizō statues erected to commemorate mizuko (dead children). The emphasis is on providing a memorial for children who died very young, and also through stillbirths, miscarriages and abortion.
As the reader will no doubt have realized, customs regarding death provide a further example of the accommodative tendency in Japanese religion. Burying the dead and enshrining them are two separate but related activities that reflect, as it were, the ‘division of labour’ between Buddhism and Shintō. So, for example, the loyal Forty-Seven Rōnin are buried in Tokyo, where they performed their act of revenge, but since 1912 have been enshrined hundreds of miles away in Bansh Ako, their late lord’s castle town; prayers may be offered to them in both places. Buddhism provided the essential ritualized link between the graveyard, the temple and the family butsudan with its gleaming black and gold ihai. As noted above, many would say it is too involved in these rituals and has become a vulgarized ‘state religion’ of ‘funerary Buddhism’, with a consequent loss of spirituality.42 Shintō is involved more with rituals relating to birth and rites of passage, and is more communally orientated. Shintō shrines, where unhappy spirits such as Taira Masakado are enshrined for their own good and the good of the entire nation, are places where no body is buried, and are therefore very different in character from cemeteries. These points are of vital importance in considering the nature and function of Japan’s most controversial shrine: the Yasukuni Jinja, built to enshrine the Japanese dead of her modern wars.
Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine does not enshrine ancient kami, nor members of the imperial family, nor even exalted figures from Japanese history, but, in the main, individual commoners who died in the wars.43 From the time of its founding the Yasukuni shrine received a respect exceeded only by the Great Shrine of Ise, a status it acquired when the emperor himself went there to pay tribute to the souls of the war dead. It was therefore a great honour to be enshrined there, but the political ideas that lay behind this simple act of religious charity are quite evident. As noted earlier, the need to inculcate the ordinary soldier with the spirit of the samurai provided an enormous challenge to the Meiji government. To the provision of patriotic Buddhist chaplains during this life the authorities added some reassurance of recognition in the afterlife. The act of enshrinement of a person at Yasukuni meant that he or she was symbolically changed from being a mere ancestor of some household to being attached to the nation as a whole.
Originally founded in Kyōto as the Shōkonsha (‘the shrine for calling the spirits of the dead’) the shrine was transferred to Tokyo in June 1879 and renamed the Yasukuni-jinja. The spirits of all those who had died in the fighting leading up to the Meiji Restoration were then transferred to Yasukuni from their previous places of enshrinement. Yasukuni means ‘the shrine of the peaceful land’, and from then on the spirits of soldiers killed in all the wars of Japan were enshrined there.44 This now includes no fewer than 2,460,000 named individuals who died in battle or of disease or accidents while on active service. Some civilians who were mobilized by the military are also included, but not purely civilian non-combatants, such as the thousands who died in the fire-bombing of Tokyo. Nor are the spirits of those who died opposing the Meiji emperor included – they have a small memorial elsewhere that was erected in 1872. Because of the distinction between a shrine and a cemetery, all the Japanese war dead are buried somewhere else as well as being enshrined at Yasukuni. Curiously, Japan also has a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, established in 1959, that houses the ashes of one person chosen to represent all the war dead.45 Ninety-five per cent of the names in Yasukuni are of people who died between 1931 and 1945, so it is easy to see why the shrine has such an important role to play in the nation’s remembrance.46 Soldiers going off to war would often say to each other, with perhaps not a little touch of irony, ‘See you in Yasukuni!’47
Until 1895 only those who actually died in battle were enshrined there. To die of wounds was regarded as a disgrace, though as the following example shows, there were exceptions. A soldier called Kuga Noboru was thought to have died fighting in China in 1931 and was scheduled to be enshrined at Yasukuni. However, he had in fact been captured and imprisoned. When he recovered sufficiently from his wounds he escaped from capture, reached the Japanese lines and then committed suicide to atone for the disgrace of being taken alive. The shame he felt at his failure to die in action was echoed at an official level because he was removed from the list of those destined for the great privilege of being enshrined at Yasukuni. He was, however, reinstated after public opinion forced a special dispensation.48
The main hall of the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, founded to enshrine the spirits of the war dead. Note the large imperial chrysanthemum on the curtains.
During the Meiji Period the existence of Yasukuni provided a focus for the education of the nation’s children about how they were expected to behave in similar circumstances:
Around 1893 a board game became highly popular with school-children, in which the quickest way to win was to land on a certain square by a role of the dice. ‘Death’ in that position took the player to instant enshrinement at Yasukuni. The game, reinforced by the custom of school trips to Yasukuni, carried a powerful message. The notion that death in battle followed by enshrinement at Yasukuni was in fact a victory was voiced even by bereaved survivors.49
The most controversial aspect of the Yasukuni shrine is the inclusion among its millions of enshrined spirits of certain Class A war criminals who were executed after the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, such as the wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō.50 The ‘child’s guide’ to Yasukuni describes them as follows: ‘There are also 1,068 who had their lives cruelly taken after the war when they were falsely and one-sidedly branded as “war criminals” by the kangaroo court of the Allies who fought Japan.’51
These war criminals were not enshrined immediately after their executions but over 30 years later in a quiet ceremony in 1978. Few people were aware that this had happened until the Chinese government protested about the 1985 visit to Yasukuni by the then Japanese prime minister.52 The year 1978 is significant because it was 33 years after the men’s deaths, by which time the mourning process had finished and their spirits had become kami. To add to the controversy over their enshrinement, there has been a great deal of comment both within Japan and outside it over the visits to Yasukuni made by successive Japanese prime ministers since this date. Reported in the Western media as acts of ‘worshipping the war dead’ or ‘condoning Japan’s past aggression’, these visits have provoked considerable protest in China and Korea. The first visit to cause controversy was made by the then Prime Minister Nakasone on the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II. Strangely enough, this was not the first visit by a prime minister. Official visits had been made as far back as 1951 with no major political repercussions, but Tōjō and the others were not enshrined at Yasukuni then.
Should the visits really be seen in this wholly negative light? As Kuroda reminds us, because Yasukuni enshrines people and not ancient kami the activities associated with such spirits of the dead fit in with beliefs about the need to pacify angry spirits.53 The name Yasukuni is also written with exactly the same characters that can also be read ankoku: the name given to the temples founded by Ashikaga Takauji in the 14th century to pacify the spirits of those killed in battle.
A detail from the graveyard of a Jodō Shinsh temple in Takefu.
It is, however, important to realize that the notion of pacifying angry spirits at Yasukuni was not mentioned in the words used by the Meiji emperor at its dedication. Instead he stated that the spirits of the dead would be ‘worshipped and admired’.54 The pacification of angry ghosts only becomes apparent as an overt aim in 1969 in a government bill introduced to achieve control over the shrine by denying its religious nature, where it is stated that the shrine will ‘pacify and appease’ the spirits.55 Nine years later the Class A war criminals were enshrined there, and from this time on Yasukuni became more than a shrine for honouring the dead who had fought to protect Japan from its enemies. The shrine now also had the role of protecting the country from certain spirits by ensuring their pacification. However, this is still a matter of controversy and some will argue that the spirits in Yasukuni are concerned solely with safeguarding the nation’s peace and security.56 Nevertheless, helped considerably by its chilling museum next door where Japan’s recent military past is unexpectedly glorified in recently refurbished displays, Yasukuni still retains a role as a place where there is something quite sinister about the link between the samurai and the sacred.57