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Shinto poetry

December 21, 2017 / John D. / 2 Comments

One of the leading arbiters of poetry in early times was Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), a giant of Japanese verse who also compiled Hyakunin Isshu – 100 Poems by !00 Poets. Like others of his time, he saw divine purpose in poetry and was careful to distinguish between Buddhist and Shinto verse.

For Teika and his contemporaries, Japanese poetry had its origins in the Age of the Gods, with the first waka (Japanese poem) being composed by Susanoo no Mikoto. Thereafter it was held that poetry had the power to move the kami and it was closely tied to matters of ritual, proper conduct and even affairs of state. The divine power of words became codified in something called kotodana (word spirit). It’s no coincidence that the ancient word for government was matsurigoto, synonymous with religious ritual.

In Robert Huey’s The Making of Shinkokinshu (2002), the author shows that the Poetry Ministry in Heian times, known as Wakadokoro, divided poems into Buddhist and Shinto despite the syncretism of the age. The latter were given a greater sense of awe than their Buddhist equivalent, because the Japanese kami held power over life and death. This is illustrated in an anecdote about Ki no Tsurayuki, whose inspirational preface about the divine nature of poetry is discussed in an earlier Green Shinto posting here.

Once when riding through Izumi province, Tsurayuki passed by the shrine of the god Aridoshi. As it was dark he did not notice the shrine, and while passing by suddenly his horse dropped dead. Only then did he notice a torii and enquired as to which kami lived there. “Aridoshi Myojin” he was told, “who is easily offended. Perhaps you rode past mounted on your horse?”

Tsurayuki was at a loss and summoned the shrine attendant to ask for advice. However, the attendant appeared to speak with the voice of the kami. ‘Since you did not realise there was a shrine, I should forgive you. But you are highly skilled in the way of poetry, so if you can display those skills as you pass in front of me I shall revive your horse. Thus speaks the god Aridoshi Myojin.’

Tsurayuki immediately purified himself with water, composed a poem, wrote it on a slip of paper and attached it to a pillar of the shrine. He then began to pray, at which his horse revived and the attendant told him he had been forgiven. Here is the poem he wrote:

Since it was midnight. Amagumo no
With heavy rain clouds tatikasanareru
Layered thick, yofa nareba
How was I to know as I passed kami Aritohoshi
That the kami Aridoshi was there? omofubeki kafa

In this way it can be seen that poetry in the Shinto tradition could well be a matter of life and death. Pleasing the kami would bring well-being; violating the Way of Poetry could spell death or disaster. Retired Emperor Hanazono, for instance, who became a Zen monk, wrote in the fourteenth century of a poet who had strayed from the ancient path of poetry and therefore died an unfortunate early death.

Not long afterwards Zeami Motokyo, founder of Noh, wrote that ‘All living creatures and even non-sentient beings have poetry residing within them. The sound of trees, the moving grass, the earth and sand, wind, and ever-flowing water – all of these things embody the soul of poetry. In the spring, a wind from the east makes the forest sing. The wind from the north in the fall blends with the call of insects. All of these sounds are poems in and of themselves.’ (from Takasago)

Exactly!

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For more Shinto poems from the Heian period, please see here.

Ghostly ancestors

December 16, 2017 / John D. / 0 Comments

My attention was caught recently by a book review of Ghosts of the Tsunami in the TLS by Times correspondent, Richard Lloyd Parry. The book is an account of the Fukushima disaster and its terrible tsunami aftermath, and the review called to mind the words of Lafcadio Hearn on ancestor worship (misnomer for honouring the dead). (For Hearn’s writing on the subject, see here or here.)

Green Shinto has posted several items about the important cultural role ancestor worship plays in the Japanese tradition, helping preserve the sense of collective continuity that gives the people a deep-rooted sense of belonging. For centuries now Western visitors to Japan have been struck by the lack of alienation among the populace (manifest in the West in such social phenomena as graffiti, misfits, riots and drug addiction). Like Lafcadio Hearn, Green Shinto sees ancestor worship as central to Japaneseness.

In the passage below reviewer Gavin Jacobson writes of the way the Japanese of the Tohoku region have dealt with the tragedy that inflicted them…

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One of the book’s central themes is the status of spirituality in Japan. Buddhism and Shinto may have little bearing on private and national life there. ‘But over the centuries,’ Parry explains, ‘both have been pressed into the service of the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors.’ The religious scholar Herman Ooms has argued that, ‘It has always made perfect sense in Japan as far back as history goes to treat the dead as more alive than we do.’ Parry describes how, in households that had lost children in the wave, he would be asked if he should like to ‘meet’ the dead sons and daughters:

I would be led to a shrine covered with framed photographs, with toys, favourite drinks and snacks, letters, drawings and school exercise books. One mother commissioned carefully Photoshopped portraits of her children, showing them as they would have been had they lived – a boy who died in primary school smiling proudly in high-school uniform, an eighteen-year-old girl as she should have looked in kimono at her coming-of-age ceremony… every morning, they began the day by talking to their dead children, weeping love and apology, as unselfconsciously as if they were speaking over a long-distance telephone line.

If there is something comforting about this communion with the dead, the idea, as Ooms contends, that death becomes a variant of life, not a negation of it, there is a more unsettling side of this spiritualism. Towards the end of 2011, reports of ghosts began to emerge from the areas affected by the tsunami. These ranged from sightings of lost friends and relatives, uncanny dreams and feelings of unease, to chilling ‘episodes’ of total possession. One of the most interesting characters in Parry’s book is Kaneta, a Buddhist priest from Kurihara, who performed exorcisms on the possessed, such as Takeshi Ono, a local builder who one night began crawling on all fours, snarling at his wife, ‘You must die. You must die. Everyone must die. Everything must die and be lost.’ The wild, menacing nature of these possessions was explained by the concept of gaki: when people die violently suddenly, or in anger, they become ‘hungry ghosts’, trapped in a netherworld of pain, unable to communicate with the living except through terrorising their bodies and souls.

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Small wonder then that Lafcadio Hearn, such a devotee of ghost stories, became enamoured of the Japanese folk tradition!

Straw decorations

December 12, 2017 / John D. / 2 Comments

Capturing beauty of straw decorations

The Yomiuri Shimbun December 11, 2017

Shimekazari are rice straw decorations generally put up in or outside Japanese homes to welcome the Toshigami god that bestows good fortune on New Year’s Day. Although shimekazari remain a fixture of modern Japanese households, many lack knowledge of their various characteristics.

There are actually a wide variety of shimekazari that differ by size, design and decoration, and they often differ by region. Each ornament has unique features and beauty, according to a recently published book by graphic designer Sumako Mori.

Photos courtesy Daily Yomiuri

Titled Shimekazari: Shinnen no Negai o Musubu Katachi (Shimekazari: shapes looped with wishes for the New Year), the 200-page book is based on field research Mori conducted over many years.

Mori became interested in shimekazari while working on a research project about the traditional ornament for her graduation from art school. Ever since, she has traveled throughout the country around the New Year holiday to observe how locals decorate home entrances or kamidana home altars with shimekazari.

The book illustrates the ornaments’ beauty through black-and-white and full-color photos Mori took, and describes her encounters with rice farmers and craftspeople. It also explains various decorations attached to shimekazari, such as fans and daidai bitter orange [which is considered a good omen because ‘daidai’ can be translated as “from generation to generation”, signifying longevity of the household].

“At first sight, shimekazari pieces appear identical, but they each have their own distinctive shapes,” Mori said. “I hope readers will rediscover the beauty of the decoration.”

Shrine murder (Tomioka Hachiman-gu)

December 10, 2017 / John D. / 1 Comment

All over the news this week has been the murder of the chief priest at a Tokyo shrine named Tomioka Hachiman-gu. The female head priest was apparently cut down by her sword-wielding brother, who afterwards killed his accomplice lover and then himself. Established in 1627, the shrine was once the largest Hachiman shrine in Tokyo and its summer festival one of the three great festivals. For such a major shrine to be the setting for a crime of violence of this kind is shocking indeed.

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Female chief priest and her two attackers dead in Tokyo Shinto shrine stabbings

A violent attack with Japanese swords and survival knives at Tokyo’s famed Tomioka Hachimangu shrine has left three dead — including the chief priestess and her brother — in an apparent family feud that turned deadly.

Head priestess Nagako Tomioka, 58, and the two suspected attackers, her brother Shigenaga, 56, and a woman in her 30s, died Thursday evening, Metropolitan Police Department sources said.

After attacking his sister, Shigenaga Tomioka apparently killed the female suspect and then himself, police sources added. Nagako Tomioka’s driver, 33, was also seriously injured in the attack.

Authorities suspect a row between the brother and sister over the shine’s chief priest position had prompted the apparent murder-suicide. After receiving emergency reports of a rampage with a blade, police rushed to the site and found four bleeding people near the shrine in the Tomioka district of Tokyo’s Koto Ward. The four were sent to a hospital, where the three were confirmed dead.

The attack began around 8:25 p.m., when Shigenaga Tomioka attacked his sister with a Japanese sword as she exited her car on the shrine grounds. The female suspect, meanwhile, chased down Tomioka’s driver, who had tried to escape on foot, and attacked him about 100 meters away. The driver suffered injuries to his right arm and chest, though they were not life-threatening.

The two attackers then moved to the shrine premises, where Shigenaga Tomioka stabbed the woman in the chest and stomach and then stabbed himself in the left side of the chest multiple times. Police said the attacks were captured by security cameras and that two survival knives and two Japanese swords were left at the scene.

Shigenaga Tomioka was arrested some 10 years ago for blackmailing his sister. After he left the post of chief priest in 2001, he sent a threatening postcard to his sister in January 2006 in which he wrote, among other things, that he would send her to hell. At the time, his sister had held a post known as negi, the second-highest rank at a Shinto shrine after the chief priest.

The shrine, established in 1627, is known for its annual Fukagawa Hachiman festival, one of Tokyo’s three major festivals from the Edo period. The shrine, located roughly 100 meters east of Monzen-Nakacho Station, also has close links with the sumo world.

Tomioka Hachimangu found itself in hot water with the Jinja Honcho (Association of Shinto Shrines) in 2010 over the appointment of the shrine’s chief priest. The shrine left the association on Sept. 28 this year and Nagako Tomioka became the chief priest shortly after.

Trees R Us

December 10, 2017 / John D. / 0 Comments

Some inspiring thoughts from Brain Pickings about the wonder of trees. As one of the most awe-inspiring phenomena of nature, it’s small wonder that they feature so prominently at Shinto shrines. The sacred forests there speak to our hearts and leave the visitor refreshed and renewed by their soaring vigour.

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“Trees speak to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons,” an English gardener wrote in the seventeenth century. “When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse rhapsodized two centuries later in his lyrical love letter to our arboreal companions, “then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.”

For biologist David George Haskell, the notion of listening to trees is neither metaphysical abstraction nor mere metaphor.

In The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors, Haskell proves himself to be the rare kind of scientist Rachel Carson was when long ago she pioneered a new cultural aesthetic of poetic prose about science, governed by her conviction that “there can be no separate literature of science”because “the aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth,” which is also the aim of literature.

It is in such lyrical prose and with an almost spiritual reverence for trees that Haskell illuminates his subject — the masterful, magical way in which nature weaves the warp thread of individual organisms and the weft thread of relationships into the fabric of life.

Illustration by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

Haskell writes:

For the Homeric Greeks, kleos, fame, was made of song. Vibrations in air contained the measure and memory of a person’s life. To listen was therefore to learn what endures.

I turned my ear to trees, seeking ecological kleos. I found no heroes, no individuals around whom history pivots. Instead, living memories of trees, manifest in their songs, tell of life’s community, a net of relations. We humans belong within this conversation, as blood kin and incarnate members. To listen is therefore to hear our voices and those of our family.

Photographs from Cedric Pollet’s project Bark: An Intimate Look at the World’s Trees.

Haskell visits a dozen gloriously different trees from around the world — from the hazel of Scotland to the redwoods of Colorado to the white pine of Japan’s Miyajima Island — to wrest from them wisdom on what he calls “ecological aesthetics,” a view of beauty not as an individual property but as a relational feature of the web of life, belonging to us as we to it. (Little wonder that trees are our mightiest metaphor for the cycle of life.) From this recognition of delicate mutuality arises a larger belonging, which cannot but inspire a profound sense of ecological responsibility.

Haskell writes:

We’re all — trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship.

Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were.

We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature.

Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.

Art by Cécile Gambini from Strange Trees by Bernadette Pourquié, an illustrated atlas of the world’s arboreal wonders.

In the ceibo Haskell finds a living testament to the nonexistence of the self to which we humans so habitually cling. A century after young Jorge Luis Borges contemplated how the self dissolves in time and relationship, Haskell writes:

This dissolution of individuality into relationship is how the ceibo and all its community survive the rigors of the forest. Where the art of war is so supremely well developed, survival paradoxically involves surrender, giving up the self in a union with allies. … The forest is not a collection of entities… it is a place entirely made from strands of relationship.

Photo John Dougill

The Songs of Trees is a resplendent read in its entirety, kindred to both Walt Whitman’s exultation of trees and bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s poetic celebration of moss. Complement it with the fascinating science of what trees feel and how they communicate.

Cat shrine

November 29, 2017 / John D. / 1 Comment

“Cat shrine” status causing problems for Japan’s millennium-old Izumoiwai Shrine

Casey Baseel Nov 15, 2016 Rocket News

[Cats often feature in Japan’s news and tourist sights. There are cat islands, cat cafes, and cute cat contests. Now from Rocket News comes news of a cat shrine….]

Izumoiwai Shrine in Moroyama-machi, Saitama-ken

Priests struggling to humanely keep cat population under control, asking for visitors’ help.

Shinto shrines and cats are often a heartwarming combination, whether the collaboration stems from historical folklore or purely photogenic reasons. Many places of worship welcome their unofficial status as a “cat shrine,” which usually adds a cheery atmosphere to the shrine grounds and helps to draw visitors who offer prayers and donations.

However, Izumoiwai Shrine’s feline connection has become a source of concern for its priests. Located in the town of Moroyama in Saitama Prefecture, the shrine is said to have been founded in the eighth century during Japan’s Nara period. It’s been designated as an Important Cultural Property by the Japanese government, and each spring and autumn it holds demonstrations of yabusame (horseback archery).

However, over the last few years the shrine has also become known for the large number of stray cats that have made it their home. Head priest Masaomi Shidou says that in the beginning only two strays were living on the shrine grounds, but before he realized it their number had grown to more than 10, and now some social media users report seeing more than 30 in a single visit.

Unfortunately, a sudden increase in the cat population also means a sudden increase in the amount of cat droppings, which the priests say give the shrine grounds an unpleasant odor. More troubling still is the damage the animals’ claws have been causing to facilities such as the wooden collection box, and the priests worry the shrine’s main altar may also be damaged in the future.

The compassionate priests don’t want to resort to culling the cats, and so have been looking for ways to halt the feline population growth. Last year, an animal welfare organization neutered roughly 40 cats found living on the grounds, marking the ears of those who’d received the operation. Eventually, though, non-neutered males were once again spotted living at the shrine, though where they’re coming from is unknown.

The shrine is now asking for visitors’ cooperation in its cat population control efforts. With word of Izumoiwai’s cat shrine status being spread through social media, it’s become a popular destination for cat lovers, and though the priests don’t mind visitors giving the kitties loving looks and attention, they’ve put up signs asking them to not feed the cats, in hopes of bringing the problem under control in a humane manner.

Hiedano Shrine photo visit

November 28, 2017 / John D. / 0 Comments

Larger than life entrance torii

A shrine that dates back to 709. A huge imposing torii. And next to it an ancient sake factory, now a museum, in front of which tourist coaches pull up throughout the day.

It’s only half an hour from Kyoto, in the town of Kameoka, so you might imagine that Hiedano Jinja would be better known. Apart from the torii, one has the feel the shrine has seen better days, yet it’s not without interest or character as I found out on a recent visit.

The shrine compound is compact and surrounded by a sacred grove.

Shrine buildings, surprisingly small compared to the torii, have a certain rustic charm

Explanations of how to bow are in Japanese, English,. Korean and Chinese. The Japanese is necessary nowadays because young people are often ignorant of the traditional manner.

Shakuhachi maestro, Preston Houser, looks through the stone ring. If you pass through with pure heart and focussed intention, your wish will come true. Perhaps he was wishing well for his next performance…

This iwakura (sacred rock) had most eye-catching pattern and colours, perhaps the reason why it was selected for special attention. It’s said to have a special power (‘Desire for Victory’ is its name), and placing both hands on it to absorb its energy while wishing will enable you to achieve your aim.

Some of the trees in the sacred grove are breathtaking in the way their narrow trunks soar upwards to improbable heights.

The shrine pond is said to have been used in the past by villagers for misogi (cold water purification) to ensure a good harvest. Still today some cup water in their hands as a symbolic gesture.

in the surrounding copse are shrines that speak of human immersion in nature.

The ornate guardian komainu display a fine pair of teeth and protruding red tongue.

There are various reasons why certain trees are singled out for sanctity and others not. With this one it is not hard to guess the reason why.