Tag: ancestral spirits

Kyoto’s Daimonji

August 11, 2020 / John D. / 0 Comments

It’s said that ancestor worship is Japan’s true religion, and in my experience that’s true. The sense of continuity that this gives is reassuring, and the sense of immortality it conveys is a wonderful antidote to the finality of death. There are moral implications too, for if your actions are being monitored by previous generations, it’s a great incentive to keep on the straight and narrow.

The Obon period coming up this weekend is a grand celebration of the living dead, when ancestral spirits return to the family home. There are welcome festivals to greet the spirits on their annual return, and there are sending off festivals to guide them on their way back to the other world. The most famous of these is Kyoto’s Daimonji, held on August 16th every year. I’m lucky enough to see the hill where it happens from my study window.

It turns out that this year pranksters have been at work and ruffled a few feathers in these Corona times. Joking with ancestral spirits is no laughing matter, and the Asahi newspaper covers the reaction to the elaborate hoax in the article below.

**************** Fake bonfire stunt gets Kyoto residents riled amid bon season
By DAISUKE MUKAI/ Staff Writer
August 10, 2020

Photo/Illutration — *A character resembling “dai” is seen lit up in Kyoto’s Sakyo Ward on Aug. 8. (Provided by Masao Nomura)*

KYOTO–Pranksters pulled off a spectacular stunt late Aug. 8 by lighting up a mountain slope on the eastern side of this ancient city with a giant rendition of the kanji character “dai,” meaning big, apparently to fool residents that an iconic annual summer festival was being held as usual, only earlier.

The Gozan no Okuribi festival, known locally as “Daimonji,” is traditionally held on Aug. 16 and involves setting the slopes of five mountains surrounding the ancient capital ablaze in a gesture to send off the spirits of deceased ancestors to the afterlife after revisiting their former homes during the Bon holiday season.But the festival is being scaled back this year due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Startled residents alerted police around 11 p.m. to report the lights in the Mount Daimonji area. It later emerged the stunt was staged on Mount Nyoigatake in the city’s Sakyo Ward.

Officers attached to the Kawabata station of Kyoto prefectural police scrambled to a rooftop and confirmed the light show.

Masao Nomura, a 41-year-old radio DJ, saw a character resembling “dai” from his home in Sakyo Ward.“This is not the festival night. What on earth is going on?” he asked himself as he snapped photos of the lights.

The “dai” character is usually formed with giant bonfires lit at 75 spots. But this summer, festival organizers decided to reduce the number of locations to be lit to avoid a mass congregation of bonfire workers. As a result, there are no plans this year for bonfires to denote the character.

The unexpected “dai” character, which police speculated was a prank, took residents as well as festival organizers by surprise.”Usually, bonfires are like a wavy flame,” Nomura said. “But this one was different. The light was bluish white and appeared to be very clear and artificial.”

Hidefumi Hasegawa, the 75-year-old chairman of the daimonji preservation organization, was far from happy about the matter. “It is upsetting because we spend a long time preparing to send off the spirits of our ancestors,” he said. “With the assistance of the police and local administrative authorities, we will make sure this never happens again.”

Carp and animal rights

April 24, 2017 / John D. / 2 Comments

As Shinto spreads in the West, one hears more and more about it being a religion that prizes nature and is ecological in essence. Unfortunately that is far from the case in Japan, where the ancestral element in Shinto leads to tradition trumping environmental issues.

One such instance to come to light recently is in the abuse of animal rights at a Shinto ceremony involving carp. This was highlighted in an article in the UK’s Daily Mail (hardly noted as an environmental campaigner, one hastens to add). For Shintoists in Japan keeping up the ways of their ancestors is far more important than compassion for animals. It’s a pattern one sees again and again, serving as a reminder that Shinto is far from being simply a nature-loving religion.

***********************

He drinks like a fish! Call to ban traditional Japanese ceremony where a carp is plied with wine in a bid to banish evil spirits

Ceremony is conducted every year in the city of Tonami, western Japan
It is due to superstition that women are unlucky at age of 33 and men at 42
Custom has been criticised after it was shown on television programme

By Emily Chan For Mailonline Published: 13 January 2017 |

Campaigners have called for a ban on a traditional Japanese ceremony in which a carp is made to drink wine in a bid to banish evil spirits.

The ceremony is conducted every year in the city of Tonami, western Japan, due to a superstition that women are unlucky at the age of 33, while men are unlucky at 42 – with participants desperate to reverse the ‘curse’.

However, the custom has now been slammed online for being ‘abusive’, after a television programme showing the ceremony taking place was aired in Japan.

Scroll down for video

Campaigners have called for a ban on a traditional Japanese ceremony in which a carp is made to drink wine in a bid to banish evil spirits

The ceremony is conducted every year in the city of Tonami, western Japan, due to a superstition that women are unlucky at the age of 33, while men are unlucky at 42

During the ceremony, the men carry a live carp in a bucket to the river, while the women carry a bottle of Japanese rice wine, led by a Shinto priest, Rocket News 24 reported.

When they get to the riverside, the men hold the fish still while the women pour the wine, called nihonshu, into their mouths.

At the end of the ceremony, the carp are released back into the water.

It is believed that alcohol has a purifying effect on the carp, believed to be the god of the river

A poll conducted afterwards found that 8,000 viewers believe the custom should stop. Many took to social media to slam the ceremony, arguing that it was ‘unnecessary’ and a form of ‘abuse’.

An expert who appeared on the Morning Show suggested the alcohol does not have much impact on the fish, as the majority of it escapes through the gills. However, a study in 2014 found that giving a zebrafish ethanol did have a significant impact – doubling its swimming speed.

The tradition is thought to have begun in 1816. At the end of the ceremony, the carp are released back into the water

Sugawara no Michizane

April 17, 2016 / John D. / 2 Comments

Children stroke the ox at Kitano Tenmangu, a symbol of Sugawara no Michizane since according to tradition the animal pulling his funeral cart insisted on his burial place by refusing to move any further.

Sugawara no Michizane was a courtier who fell from grace and in so doing became Japan’s second most popular deity, known as Tenjin. How come? Writing in today’s Japan Times, Michael Hoffman relates the story in graphic fashion in his coverage of the Heian Period (794-1187):

Hanging scroll of Sugawara at a Tenmangu shrine

Power at the time, and throughout Heian, was wielded by a branch of the great Fujiwara family. Emperors, mere children, were almost always Fujiwara grandsons or sons-in-law; their abdication before coming of age was a matter of course; a Fujiwara “regent” ruled behind the scenes. The system was rocked by Emperor Uda, a rare adult and non-Fujiwara claimant to the throne who, determined to rule as well as reign, appointed Sugawara, the leading scholar of the day, a poet prodigiously learned in the Chinese classics, as his chief counselor.

The Fujiwaras were undone! Well, not quite. They could have murdered Sugawara; a vicious civil war could have erupted — but this is Heian, and nothing of the sort even threatened. Sugawara instead was falsely charged with treason and, tears his only resistance, packed off to exile in remote Kyushu, where he died of “a broken heart.”

The end? No. A series of disasters in the capital terrorized the Fujiwara into striving to placate the supposedly furious spirit of this docile, feckless man who in life had been putty in their hands. Promoted above mortality itself, Sugawara was made a deity — the god of literature and calligraphy, worshiped, Morris tells us, by more devotees down the ages than any other Japanese god except Hachiman — the god of war.

The deification of Sugawara thus owes itself to the notion of ‘hungry ghosts’, a concept imported from China to denote spirits who carry the unfulfilled desires of the living into the next life. In Taoism ‘hungry ghosts’ were said to occur when people had died unhappily or violently. Sugawara’s broken heart through being exiled from the shining imperial capital is clearly a case in point. The resentment he was presumed to have built up in life was expressed posthumously by his vengeful spirit, here related by Wikipedia:

In the years after his death, the capital city was struck by heavy rain and lightning, and his chief Fujiwara adversary and Emperor Daigo’s crown prince died, while fires caused by lightning and floods destroyed many of residences. The court drew the conclusion that the disturbances were caused by Michizane’s angry spirit. In order to placate him, the emperor restored all his offices, burned the official order of exile, and he was promoted to Senior Second Rank. Even this wasn’t enough, and 70 years later he was elevated to the post of prime minister, and he was deified as Tenjin-sama, which means “heavenly deity”. He became the patron god of calligraphy, of poetry and of those who suffer injustice.

The Japanese term for such hungry or angry spirits is onryō (or goryō for those from the aristocratic class). The earliest examples date back to the eighth century, and rituals were performed to pacify their spirit, both Buddhist and Shinto. Another way of calming angry spirits was to hold a festival (called goryo-e) and to put on various kinds of entertainment. The earliest record of such a festival is 863, and in Heian times a number of goryo gods were identified for whom annual festivals were held. Around Kyoto they still are, most notably at Shimogoryo Shrine where eight vengeful spirits are enshrined.

There are theories of religion that the origin of all supernatural belief lies in the deep desire of humans to think that death is not the end. The belief in the continuation of the human spirit is an immensely powerful force, and ancestral ties in Japan are particularly strong. For Lafcadio Hearn Japanese religion was not only fundamentally ancestral in essence, but the dead had such a grip on the national psyche that they were the real rulers of the country. Sugawara no Michizane’s continuing hold on the popular imagination might be considered a case in point.

***************

For more about Kitano Tenmangu, click here and here. For more about Sugawara and Dazaifu, click here.

Sugiwara no Michizane ema at Kitano Tenmangu Shrine in Kyoto. His spirit is closely connected with scholarship and exam success, making the ema immensely popular at times of entrance exams.

Shrine dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane next to Kyoto’s Gosho (Former Imperial Palace), which stands on the site of his father’s palace where he would have grown up.

Water spout at the shrine above, memorialising the ox that determined his burial place at Dazaifu in Kyushu (Dazaifu Tenmangu marks the spot)

A stubborn ox bathing in the sunshine. The custom (as in the top picture) is to stroke it on the part of the body ailing you in order to heal or strengthen it. People often rub the head too for greater mental power.