A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE ISE SHRINES 9781474272797, 9781474272780, 9781474272810

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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE ISE SHRINES

Bloomsbury Shinto Studies Series editor: Fabio Rambelli The Shinto tradition is an essential component of Japanese religious culture. In addition to indigenous elements, it contains aspects mediated from Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and, in more recent times, Western religious culture as well –​plus, various forms of hybridization among all of these different traditions. Despite its cultural and historical importance, Shinto studies have failed to attract wide attention not least because of the lingering effects of uses of Shinto in the ultranationalistic propaganda of Japan during WW II. The Series makes available to a broad audience a number of important studies that help to problematize the widespread misconception that Shinto is intrinsically related to Japanese nationalism, and at the same time promote further research and understanding of what is still an underdeveloped field. Mountain Mandalas: Shugendo in Kyushu, Allan G. Grapard The Origin of Modern Shinto in Japan: The Vanquished Gods of Izumo, Yijiang Zhong

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE ISE SHRINES

Divine Capital

Mark Teeuwen and John Breen

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Mark Teeuwen and John Breen, 2017 Mark Teeuwen and John Breen have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN:

HB: 978-​1-​4742-​7279-​7 ePDF: 978-​1-​4742-​7281-​0 ePub: 978-​1-​4742-​7280-​3

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Teeuwen, Mark, author. | Breen, John, 1956– author. Title: A social history of the Ise shrines: divine capital / Mark Teeuwen and John Breen. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Bloomsbury Shinto studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016037789| ISBN 9781474272797 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474272810 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Ise Daijingū–History. | Religion and sociology–Japan–Ise-shi–History. | Ise-shi (Japan)–History. | BISAC: RELIGION / Shintoism. | HISTORY / Asia / Japan. | RELIGION / History. Classification: LCC BL2225.I8 I7975 2017 | DDC 299.5/61350952181–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037789 Series: Bloomsbury Shinto Studies Series design by Dani Leigh Cover image © Ise sanguˉ ryakuzu (Sketch of pilgrimages to the Ise Shrines) by Hiroshige, printed by Ebisuya Sho ˉ shichi in 1855 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

CONTENTS List of Maps and Illustrations Prologue Note to the Reader

vi vii x

INTRODUCTION DIVINE CAPITAL: ISE AND ITS AGENTS

1

Chapter 1 ANCIENT ISE: DIVINE WRATH AND COURT POLITICS

9

Chapter 2 CLASSICAL ISE: HOSOPHOBIA CODIFIED

31

Chapter 3 AMATERASU’S ESCAPE FROM ISE

55

Chapter 4 ISE IN THE KAMAKURA PERIOD: LANDS AND SECRETS

75

Chapter 5 ISE IN THE MUROMACHI PERIOD: WAR AND PILGRIMS

101

Chapter 6 ISE RESTORED AND SHINTOIZED

121

Chapter 7  ILGRIMS’ PLEASURES: ISE AND ITS PATRONS IN THE EDO PERIOD P

139

Chapter 8 MEIJI ISE: AMATERASU’S MAUSOLEUM AND THE MODERN PILGRIM

163

Chapter 9 ISE AND NATION IN TAISHŌ AND EARLY SHŌWA JAPAN

187

Chapter 10 CRISIS AND RECOVERY: ISE’S POST-​WAR TRANSFORMATIONS

211

CONCLUSION: PHASES OF REDEVELOPMENT

235

Notes References Index

243 271 283

LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS Maps 1 2 3 4

The compounds of the Inner and Outer Shrines Ise in ancient Japan Yamada, Uji and Furuichi in the Edo period New transport routes in postwar Ise

xi 10 111 226

Figures 0.1 Aerial view of the old and new Inner Shrine compounds (summer, 2013) 0.2 Prime Minister Abe Shinzō at the Inner Shrine (2 October 2013) 1.1 Beads found within the Inner Shrine precinct 4.1 Esoteric diagrams attached to Rishu makaen 5.1 The Rock-​Cave of Heaven 5.2 Uji Bridge with kanjin mendicants 6.1 Maps of the (a) Inner and (b) Outer Shrine precincts (1649) 6.2 Tokugawa Iemitsu’s amulet 7.1 Tea-​pourers and clients in a Furuichi teahouse 7.2 Oshi performing kagura in Yamada 7.3 The pleasures of pilgrimage: Mount Asama and Futami 7.4 The Mikkaichi Inn, Yamada 8.1 The Meiji emperor enters the Inner Shrine 8.2 Inner Shrine compound, eighteenth century 8.3 Inner Shrine compound, nineteenth century 8.4 Sacred Garden at the Inner Shrine 8.5 The Kuratayama complex 9.1 Prime Minister Hamaguchi in Ise, 2 October 1929 9.2 The Taishō emperor entering the Inner Shrine, 1915 9.3 The spoils of war at the Inner Shrine 10.1 Ise amulets 10.2 Oharai Machi (a) before and (b) after renovation 10.3 The Ise logo and slogan 10.4 Ise doodle-​do 10.5 The Sun Goddess’s progress

2 4 23 93 109 110 126 130 142 147 148 151 165 170 170 182 183 190 197 208 223 228 231 231 233

PROLOGUE This book is the fourth volume on Shinto history co-​authored, co-​edited or co-​translated by John Breen and myself. The need to write a history of the Ise Shrines occurred to us while we were finishing A New History of Shinto (2010). In that book, we investigated the implications of the recent understanding of the concept of ‘Shinto’ as much less ancient than the shrines, myths and rituals on which it draws. This insight raised many questions. What were shrines, myths and rituals about before they were incorporated in Shinto? Who and what made the conceptualization of Shinto possible, and ultimately successful? What did ‘Shintoization’ entail in actual practice, and what were the dynamics behind that process? In A New History of Shinto, we chose to analyse Shintoization by focusing on an important yet not too central shrine –​Hiyoshi Taisha, near Kyoto. Our reasoning was that the history of a somewhat peripheral shrine would give a clearer picture of the changes that occurred when shrines were redesignated as sites of Shinto in early modern and modern times. We assumed that the Ise Shrines would be less representative, because Shintoization was, we believed, a process of assimilation to Ise. That choice served its purpose, but, as John once put it, it also left an ‘Ise-​ shaped hole’ in our account. What was the status of the Ise Shrines in different periods of its history? Did Ise indeed function as the reference point of Shinto, and if so, what did that notion of Shinto entail? Was Ise a driving force of Shintoization, or rather a passive object, itself Shintoized by outside forces? These were the key questions that launched this book. As we were writing this book, however, our focus soon moved away from a narrow focus on Ise’s relation to Shinto. There were two reasons for this. First, the history of Ise proved to be what we had anyway expected: one of extraordinary interest and daunting complexity. To get at the dynamics of thirteen centuries of crisis and reinvention, we needed to hone in on the people who had made and remade Ise Japan’s pre-​eminently significant sacred site. It soon became apparent that there was a frequent turnover of the human agents who shaped Ise. As agents changed, so did the shrines –​physically, economically, socially and theologically. Second, we found that while categories like Shinto played an important role in this history at various junctures, most notably from the seventeenth century onwards, the forces that prompted historical change lay beyond Ise. It is now less obvious to us that shrines were assimilated to Ise on a wide scale, although there is no doubt that Ise was often held high as a model of Shinto in its purest or most original form. Perhaps Ise was, and is, too different from other shrines for such assimilation to work in practice. Also, the notion of a pure Shinto was not applied to Ise itself until early modern and modern times. Like other shrines, Ise ‘became’

viii

Prologue

Shinto late in its history, and a narrative that depicts Ise as the cradle and timeless mainstay of Shinto has no roots in historical fact. Thus it is that the book spotlights the people who made Ise ‘work’ at different stages of its history, while the questions of Shinto’s conceptualization and the Shintoization of shrines remain on the periphery of our account. Rather than tracing the history of Shinto through Ise, we put Shinto issues to one side to get a clear vista of Ise’s social history. We hope this approach enables us to explore the major turning points in Ise’s remarkable story without stumbling into the pitfalls of Shinto ideology and nostalgia. This book is co-​authored. I wrote Chapters 1–​6, and John wrote Chapters 7–​ 10. The Introduction and Conclusion are the result of a cooperative effort. The maps are drawn by Kirsten Berrum of the Faculty of Humanities, Oslo University. We could not have written this book without the help of numerous friends and colleagues over many years. I  would like to thank Mayumi Tsunetada, Sakurai Haruo, Nitta Hitoshi and Murei Hitoshi (formerly) of Kōgakkan Daigaku for making my research on Ise possible in the first place, for many stimulating discussions about aspects of Ise’s past and present and for practical assistance of many kinds. Through channels unknown to me, but no doubt involving the late Sakurai Katsunoshin, I was allowed to witness the Outer Shrine sengyo in 1993; more than anything else, this experience has sustained my fascination with Ise through all these years. Yahata Takatsune, formerly of Jingū Bunko, was very helpful in unlocking the secrets of that great archive, and Kurata Katsuhiko of the Jingū Shichō forestry division gave me a full-​day guided tour of the shrine forests. Nitta Shigemi, Tanaka Kazunori and Tanaka Masae have been extremely kind to me and my family in a thousand ways. Steven Trenson has given me helpful comments on Chapters 4 and 5. John would first like to extend his gratitude for all sorts of help and advice to a cluster of people in Ise. Foremost among them are Otowa Satoru of Jingū Shichō; Ishikura Mami of Ise’s municipal library; Iwasaki Miki, formerly of NHK’s Tsu bureau; and the local historians Iida Yoshiki, Seko Tomiho and Akita Kōji. He benefited greatly from the advice of Kōgakkan historians Sakurai Haruo, Shirayama Yoshitarō and Taura Masanori. No one was a more interesting or enthusiastic correspondent than Chieda Taishi, once of Kōgakkan, now of Chūkyō Daigaku in Nagoya. He also wishes to thank Takagi Hiroshi for two opportunities to speak on Ise at Kyoto University’s Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo. The research John conducted on modern Ise was funded by a Japan Society Promotion of Science grant. A  week-​long visit to Oslo was supported by the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages of Oslo University. Further thanks are due to the institutions and individuals who gave us permission to use the images included in this volume:  Jingū Shichō, Nikkōsan Rinnōji, Waseda University, Iida Yoshiki, Saigū Rekishi Hakubutsukan and Meiji Jingū. Both John and I presented our findings on different periods of Ise’s history in a range of forums over the last years, and we would like to record here our debts to those who took the trouble to interrogate us. A particularly stimulating

Prologue

ix

event was the international conference Tenkanki no Ise, held at Nichibunken in July 2013; a book based on this conference has been published as John Breen, ed., Hen’yō suru seichi: Ise (2016). We would finally like to express our thanks to all others who showed an interest in our work and inspired us to think with greater clarity. Mark Teeuwen

NOTE TO THE READER This book follows the standard convention of giving Japanese names in Japanese order, with the family name followed by the given name. Pre-​1873 dates are given according to the lunisolar calendar used in the sources. At times, lunisolar dates are cited in the abbreviated format day.month.year, for example, 19.6.1031. Note that this date does not correspond to 19 June 1031 according to the Gregorian calendar; in fact, it fell on 14 July of that year. A number of conventional period names are used in the text. For easy reference, their dates are listed here: Nara

710–​794

Heian

794–​1185

Kamakura

1185–​1333

Muromachi

1336–​1568

Edo

1600–​1867

Meiji

1868–​1912

Taishō

1912–​1926

Shōwa

1926–​1989

Heisei

1989–​

The Nara and Heian periods are at times referred to as the ancient or classical period, Kamakura and Muromachi as the medieval period, Edo as the early modern period and Meiji and beyond as the modern period.

newgenprepdf

Map 1  The compounds of the Inner and Outer Shrines

1a: Inner Shrine

1b: Outer Shrine

1. Goshōden (main hall) 2. Hōden (treasure halls) 3. Shijōden (pavilion) 4. Inner torii 5. Mizugaki fence 6. Inner tamagaki fence 7. Outer tamagaki fence 8. Itagaki fence 9. Okitama no Kami Shrine

1. Goshōden (main hall) 2. Hōden (treasure halls) 3. Mikeden (hall of divine food) 4. Shijōden (pavilion) 5. Inner torii 6. Mizugaki fence 7. Inner tamagaki fence 8. Outer tamagaki fence 9. Itagaki fence

Introduction D IV INE C APITAL:  I SE AND I T S   A GE N T S

There can be little disputing that Ise is the most prominent shrine complex in Japan. Ise has enjoyed a unique social status since ancient times, and in the post-​ war period it has held an unassailable position as the supreme sanctuary of Shinto, as defined by Jinja Honchō, the Association of Shinto Shrines. In the early years of Japanese state formation, the imperial court invested heavily in the Ise cult. In later centuries, Ise won the sponsorship of military warlords, and in modern times the state radically redesigned the shrines for the purpose of nation-​building. But it was not only the wielders of power for whom Ise was beyond compare. From the late medieval period onwards, Ise acquired renown as a site of popular pilgrimage, and in subsequent centuries it grew into an unrivalled national centre of worship and entertainment. The Ise Shrines experienced many ups and downs in the course of their long history, but they never fell into obscurity. They have consistently been among the most prominent symbols of Japanese identity. The Ise Shrines are located in what is now Ise City, a modest town with a dwindling population of 130,000 inhabitants on the southern edge of a plain that stretches northwards along Ise Bay. It is an hour and a half by train from Nagoya and just over two hours from Osaka and Kyoto. Ise consists of no less than 125 shrines, spread out over a large area; many of the smaller ones are local shrines administered by the Ise Shrine Office (Jingū shichō), which runs the entire complex. At its core are two main shrine precincts, located some five kilometres apart in what, until 1889, were two separate towns called Uji and Yamada. The main site today is the Inner Shrine, situated at the entrance to a scenic valley, with a backdrop of heavily forested hills that rise up to almost 500 metres. The slightly smaller Outer Shrine precinct, closer to the city centre, is located in a forested area with steep hills of up to 100 metres. The main kami halls of the Inner and the Outer Shrine look remarkably similar. Both are constructed from untreated hinoki wood, roofed with kaya thatch, and surrounded by multiple wooden fences that hide the most sacred structures from view.1 Before reaching these fenced-​in kami halls, visitors cross bridges, regarded today as borders between secular and sacred spaces, and walk through artfully designed gardens. They pass by so-​called Kagura halls, where they can sponsor specially staged performances of sacred dance (kagura), and purchase amulets, kami shelves, scrolls and other goods. Beyond these buildings, visitors encounter

2

A Social History of the Ise Shrines

Figure 0.1  Aerial view of the old and new Inner Shrine compounds (summer, 2013). Source: Mizugaki 225, 2013.

a number of minor shrines and other structures that serve various ritual purposes, before reaching the fences that mark out the Inner and Outer Shrine compounds. Normally, prayers are offered in front of curtained gates in the second fence, at a respectful distance from the halls where the kami reside; only their thatched roofs are visible. The main kami of the Inner Shrine is the Sun Goddess and imperial ancestor Amaterasu; the Outer Shrine accommodates a kami now identified as Toyouke, kami of food. The Ise Shrines employ 120 priests and over 350 others, including administrators, craftsmen, foresters, museum curators and guards. In addition to the shrines and their grounds, Ise comprises large forests, sacred rice fields, a site for drying abalone, a saltern, two weaving halls, a timber yard and factory, stables, four museums, a training facility for Shinto priests (Jingū dōjō), offices, residences, an archive, a kindergarten, and the spacious headquarters of the Association of Ise Worshippers (Ise Jingū sūkeikai).

The 2013 Rebuilding The Ise Shrines are first and foremost ritual sites. Shrine priests perform daily and annual rites, mainly focusing on the preparation and presentation of food and other offerings to the kami. Unique to Ise is a sequence of rituals that takes place on a twenty-​year cycle. These rituals revolve around the construction, on adjacent plots of land, of exact copies of Ise’s two main and fourteen subsidiary shrines;

Introduction

3

solemn progresses of the kami from the old sites to the new; and, finally, the dismantling of the vacated shrine halls and their gates and fences.2 This elaborate (and phenomenally expensive) process of construction, progress and dismantling is known nowadays as shikinen sengū, where shikinen refers to the twenty-​year cycle and sengū the physical relocation of the sanctuary. The most recent sengū took place in 2013 after eight full years of preparations. These involved the felling of 14,000 trees, their transport to Ise and their processing before the construction work could begin. Then there was the manufacture, by first-​rate craftsmen from around the country, of some 2,500 precious offerings of gold, lacquer and silk. When all this highly ritualized production work was complete, the Sun Goddess was the first kami to move into her new abode in a rite known as sengyo, the ‘transfer of the kami body’. On the night of 2 October 2013, that body, a mirror, was carried out of the old kami hall. Wrapped in silk and encased in a golden box and a wooden chest fashioned anew out of cypress wood, the kami body was borne by multiple priests. The chest’s bearers were surrounded by more priests holding up silk curtains, impregnable even to infrared cameras. All lights were extinguished before the procession departed from the fenced compound. A select audience was seated on folding chairs along the route between the old and the new compound, from where they observed the progress in reverent silence. In this manner, Amaterasu made her stately way through the night to her new abode. A brief discussion of the distinguishing features of the latest sengū, and especially of its climax in the sengyo rite of progress, will illustrate one of the central arguments of this book: namely, that while there is ritual continuity in Ise history, there have also been vital ruptures. The sengū itself has been an occasion for negotiation and innovation every time it has been performed. The 2013 sengū differed from those of 1993 and 1973 in at least two ways: one relates to politics and the other to pilgrimage. In the realm of politics, the Inner Shrine sengyo of 2013 saw the unannounced participation of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō and eight members of his cabinet (Figure 0.2). They took their place in the escort that followed the Sun Goddess as she made her way to her new sanctuary. The only precedent for this form of political representation was set in 1929 by Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi. Abe’s conspicuous presence gave to Ise and its sengū a public quality they had not enjoyed since the 1920s. There was potential for controversy here, because legally the Ise Shrines are a private religious charity, and their rites are private religious events. Article 20 of the Constitution forbids the state from engaging with them. And yet here was the prime minister playing an active ritual role. Strikingly, however, Abe’s participation elicited very little criticism, even in the left-​leaning press. The public character of the 2013 sengū was further underlined by the participation of the emperor. Amaterasu’s progress started at 8 p.m., on a signal from an imperial envoy. At precisely that moment, the emperor faced Ise from his Tokyo palace, prostrated himself and performed ‘worship from afar’ (yōhai). His remote presence was thus pivotal to the progress. He was represented in Ise during the

4

A Social History of the Ise Shrines

Figure 0.2  Prime Minister Abe Shinzō at the Inner Shrine (2 October 2013). Source: Mizugaki (226), 2013.

sengyo progress not only by the envoy but also by his second son, Prince Akishino no Miya. The imperial house was intimately involved in other ways as well. The date of the sengyo had been determined by the emperor, who also contributed to the rebuilding fund with annual donations (gonaidokin), paid from moneys defined as ‘private’ so as to avoid a breach of article 20. Some of the furnishings of the new shrine hall contained silk woven by the empress; she had raised silkworms for this purpose in the palace. This was a new initiative in 2013, duly commented upon in the televised broadcast of the event, which treated viewers to expert commentary and glimpses of the sengyo progress. Finally, the emperor and empress made a ‘private’ three-​day pilgrimage to Ise in late March 2014. Of symbolic significance was the fact that the emperor brought with him two of the regalia, the sword and the jewel. The third treasure of the regalia is Amaterasu’s mirror, enshrined at the Inner Shrine. The emperor customarily travelled in the company of the sword and jewel before 1945, but after the war this practice was revived only in 1974, on the occasion of the imperial Ise pilgrimage following the 1973 sengū. The practice underlines the significance of Ise as a national sanctuary of imperial Japan, and undermines the official definition of the emperor’s visit as private. These intrusions of officialdom and politics were particularly striking in 2013, but no less conspicuous was the sheer number of pilgrims who flooded into Ise in the run-​up to the sengyo, and beyond. The Ise Shrine reported that 8.8 million pilgrims visited the Inner Shrine in 2013, compared with the previous record of 5.5 million in 1993.3 More Japanese visited Ise in 2013 than at any time in its history. What struck locals, beyond the sheer size of the crowds, was the number

Introduction

5

of young people, especially girls. They also remarked on the extent to which people dressed up for their shrine visit, and on the new norm of turning to bow towards the main kami halls at every torii gate within the precincts. Local businesses made good use of this wave of new customers. At the time of the 1993 sengū, the area in front of the Inner Shrine was given a major facelift at the initiative of the Ise Chamber of Commerce and Industry, with significant input from the Akafuku company that has sold its rice-​and-​adzuki confections to pilgrims since the eighteenth century. In 2013, however, investment was concentrated on the approach to the Outer Shrine, especially the newly pedestrianized street that leads directly to that shrine from Ise City Station. A ‘Sengū Pavilion’ (Sengūkan) was built on the banks of the Outer Shrine’s Magatama Lake. It displays copies of the kami treasures and offerings presented to Ise’s kami, and there is a life-​size reproduction of the gable of the Outer Shrine’s main hall. The area between Ise City Station and the Outer Shrine precinct had decayed steadily since the 1960s as the flow of traffic shifted to the Inner Shrine, largely due to improved access. The closure of the nearby Jusco and Sanco department stores in 1996–​2001, after the 1993–​94 boom had turned into a post-​sengū slump, did not help. Ise businesses worry now that there will be a similar price to pay for the huge visitor turnouts of 2013–​15. They also worry about losing out to non-​local businesses; many of the shops near the Inner Shrine have been taken over by large corporations from Osaka and elsewhere, which can afford higher rents than Ise’s smaller entrepreneurs. Ise City already started planning for the next twenty-​year cycle in 2014, anxious to avoid an intervening collapse.4 In 2013, then, the general public visited Ise in greater numbers than ever before. The public were involved in other ways too. In 2006 and 2007, some 200,000 people participated in log-​pulling (okihiki) rituals, ferrying logs into the Inner and Outer Shrine precincts in elaborate parades. Then in August 2013, 230,000 people from across Japan entered the new shrine precincts for the pebble-​laying rite. They covered the Inner and Outer Shrine compounds with white and black pebbles drawn from the Miyagawa River. These events allowed people to participate directly in the building work itself, giving them a sense of ‘ownership’ of the new shrines. This was important because the entire cost of the rebuilding, around 57 billion yen, had to be raised from the public. The imperial contributions were of great symbolic value, but they did not stretch far in footing this impressive bill.5 More than half was paid for by the shrines themselves, principally from the sale of amulets and performances of kagura dance –​both defined as religious, charitable transactions, and therefore exempt from taxation.6 The remaining 22 billion was raised, with apparent ease, from companies and individuals, by the ‘Association for Support of the 62nd Ise Sengū’ (Dai62kai zaidan hōjin Ise Jingū shikinen sengū hōsankai). This Ise Supporters’ Association was chaired by none other than Toyoda Shōichirō, retired president of the Toyota Motor Corporation and former chairman of the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren). The fact that the Ise Shrine Office now depends entirely on charitable donations has a great impact on the way it presents the shrines to the media, and influences the way it manages the sengū in many subtle ways.

6

A Social History of the Ise Shrines

Meanings and Agents The 2013 rebuilding saw a multiplicity of agents, all converging on this sacred site at this critical moment in Ise’s post-​war history. We have already noted the priests and administrators in the Ise Shrine Office, members of the imperial family, the government, the Ise Supporters’ Association, and local and not-​so-​local businesses. To this list we might add the national and international media, local authorities of Ise City and Mie Prefecture, Jinja Honchō, transport companies like Kintetsu Railways and, not least, the general public, who were free to make whatever they wished of all the noise about Ise. If the Ise Shrines had a particular meaning, it was in the crossfire between all these agents that it was constructed. That the meaning of Ise and its ritual performances is changing, however subtly, is beyond doubt. When one compares the 2013 sengū with its 1993 predecessor, the participation of the prime minister and eight members of his cabinet constituted a critical difference; at no time under the post-​war Constitution had the state performed such an active role in the sengū proceedings. In general, the 2013 version had a more disciplined feel than that of 1993. There were stricter rules of etiquette for visitors, who were often asked by priests and guides to remove overcoats as they approached the shrines’ compounds or when an imperial emissary passed by. A new formality was noticeable elsewhere, too, with some people stopping to bow at every torii and insisting on worshipping from the centre of the shrine gate, causing long queues. New developments pointed in other directions, too. Both shrines had acquired new ‘power spots’, places claimed to radiate a particularly powerful spiritual energy. The most conspicuous among Ise’s power spots were two sets of stones that had never before enjoyed any special attention. The notion that these stones emitted numinous powers spread through the media and the internet, beyond the control of the Ise Shrine Office. Priests were initially puzzled by the crowds of worshippers who gathered around these stones, stretching out their hands to soak up the energy. They did not necessarily approve, but neither did they interfere, other than by roping the stones off for the sake of pilgrims’ ‘safety’. In publicity disseminated both by the shrine and by Jinja Honchō, Ise was in 2013 often presented as a symbol of the blessings of nature. Nature had been an emerging issue back in 1993, but it was subordinate to other themes such as ‘national renewal’. In 2013 nature was ubiquitous. The new Sengū Pavilion treated the visitor to beautiful images of rice fields and forests, expressing Ise’s sacredness in terms of harmonious coexistence with the natural environment. Jinja Honchō produced a commercial to promote Ise amulets that featured a woman in white, roaming through a pristine forest and giving thanks to nature for the gift of ‘life’ (inochi). Posters, too, expressed gratitude to the sun, the rain, the earth, the forests, the ancestors and ‘my life’.7 Nature, or the natural, also met those who visited the retro shopping area called Okage Yokochō near the Inner Shrine. Across the street, Akafuku sponsored an exhibition of Mori Takeshi’s nature photographs titled ‘The Ise shrine forest: the heart of the Japanese’. A 2014 documentary film titled Umi yama aida (‘In between mountains and oceans’), directed by Miyazawa

Introduction

7

Masaaki with active cooperation from the Ise Shrine Office, likewise stressed ‘the holistic co-​existence between humans and nature’ as Ise’s message to the world. In the same year, Jinja Honchō, in partnership with the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, hosted a major conference in Ise on ‘Culture, Faith and Values for a Sustainable Planet’, featuring ‘700 Shinto priests and international environmental and religious figures’.8 Fearful perhaps that imperial themes might be losing their pulling power, Ise has been actively redefining itself as a site of scenic beauty where the Japanese can rediscover ancestral traditions of harmonious coexistence with nature.

The Purpose of This Book In a recent article, Fabio Rambelli posed the question of whether Ise is a ‘more or less stable unit . . . endowed with its own set of meanings’, or a mere ‘combination of forms . . . that can be associated with any kind of meaning’.9 Rambelli answers his own question by arguing that Ise has been so ubiquitous in Japanese discourses of cultural identity precisely because it has not conveyed a stable meaning. Rather, it has functioned as a ‘floating signifier’ that could be reconfigured whenever circumstances demanded it. New narratives, whether they concern the notion of Japan as an imperial state or as a culture of natural harmony, could be applied to Ise with ease, precisely because Ise was ‘empty’. When new discourses were grounded in Ise, they gained coherence, authority, an aura of ancient truth and an emotional power. Also, ‘emplacing’ such narratives in a concrete site has enabled people to participate physically in what otherwise would have remained a mere abstract idea. Rambelli leaves untouched the question of how these reconfigurations of meaning have worked in practice. It is this question that occupies us in this book. To answer it, we must focus on interactions between the multiplicity of agents who have had some stake in Ise, and resist the temptation to ascribe such reconfigurations to an abstract ‘Ise’, as though the site had a will of its own. Agents, we insist, are the key to unlocking Ise’s past. As we seek to identify these agents, we look beyond the obvious Ise ‘insiders’: priests and their institutions. There is always the temptation to stress the agenda of such insiders, as though they have ruled the ground alone. It is a palpable fact that they have not. The Ise Shrine Office, for example, has had limited influence on the meanings Ise has developed over time. New innovations, be it power spot spirituality or the recent ecological turn, originated elsewhere. The former developed predominantly in women’s magazines and on the Internet; the latter impacted on the Ise Shrine Office’s strategy only after it had first become well established in society at large and had, then, begun to engage the Jinja Honchō leadership.10 These examples remind us that Ise’s priests have only ever been one among many groups of Ise agents, and never the most powerful. This is even more obvious when it comes to Ise’s relationship with emperor and state. Jinja Honchō and the Ise Shrine Office have strong opinions on this, and as we shall see in Chapter 10, throughout the post-​war period they have worked

8

A Social History of the Ise Shrines

consistently to recover a public role for the Ise Shrines. Negotiating this agenda, however, is extraordinarily complicated and involves navigating an ever-​changing political and legal landscape with an endless number of agents and as many pitfalls. This book is a social rather than an intellectual history of Ise. Its focus falls not on the abstract meanings attributed to the Ise Shrines, but rather on the social influences that have structured and restructured them over time. We seek to trace when, how and why new groups of agents gained influence over the shrines, often reshaping conceptions of Ise and its meaning radically in the process. We show that Ise has changed hands at multiple turning points in its 1,300 years of history, and seek to pinpoint when this happened, why it happened at a particular time and what the repercussions were. We study those multiple moments when new meanings were projected onto the site of Ise, but our starting point is always the question of who was doing the redefining, whom they were addressing, and how new meanings emerged out of their endeavours. This approach will lead us beyond questions of meaning to more tangible problems of power and funding. Ise was always a very costly project in need of constant investments, and by the same token a form of ‘divine capital’ that could be exploited in ever new ways. The history we tell is that of the people who invested in Ise, either by making the shrines the basis for their livelihood, or by making donations, pilgrimages or other kinds of contributions to it. We argue that the question of Ise’s signification was closely tied up with the economic and political models of the agents who dominated Ise in different periods. The failure of one model usually condemned one group of agents, but Ise has remained a treasure trove of ‘divine capital’. Time and again, new agents emerged to take over and develop alternative models, each creating a new Ise with a new profile. As it happens, one such model involved rebranding Ise quite literally as Japan’s ‘Divine Capital’ (Shinto) in the early twentieth century. In this book, we set out to challenge a number of very common assumptions. Ise, we argue, does not have ‘two thousand years of unbroken history’, as pamphlets and speech-​makers tirelessly profess, but was created rather abruptly in the late seventh century. It was not always an imperial institution, nor did it become a site of ‘Shinto’ until late in its history. For many centuries, the shrines did not form a single sacred complex in any meaningful sense, and as often as not, their priestly communities had little control even over goings-​on within the shrine precincts. By shedding these and other modern assumptions about Ise and paying close attention to social, economic and political changes on the ground, we hope to give the reader a sense of the real-​world dynamics behind Ise’s numerous reinventions. Our aim is not to ‘debunk’ the mythologies that have given Ise meaning at different times, but rather to explore Ise’s remarkable appeal. We hope that this book bears ample witness to the endless creativity of the people who have shaped and reshaped this most enduring of sacred sites.

Chapter 1 A NCIE NT I SE :  D IVINE W R AT H AND C OURT P OL I T IC S

Who founded the Ise Shrines? When did this happen, and why? What was the nature of the Ise kami at that initial moment? All these basic questions have been the topic of intense debate since, at least, the 1920s.1 There is an enormous amount of literature on Ise’s ancient beginnings, and yet the issue remains clouded in a mist of fundamental uncertainty. This chapter is a preliminary attempt to navigate this mist and locate some solid ground. The main reason why we are condemned to uncertainty is the simple fact that the single source that history has left us on Ise’s earliest days, Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720), is riddled with contradictions and resists reduction to a single, coherent story. Ise, Nihon shoki notes, is the place ‘where Amaterasu first descended from heaven’ and to which this supreme deity eventually returned in the age of Emperor Suinin, tens of imperial generations before Nihon shoki was written.2 Extending the history of sacred places into primeval times is a universal characteristic of the process of myth-​making. So is the obfuscation of human agency: Ise is where it is and what it is, the myth says, because that is the will of the gods. Searching for cracks in this mythical account, while holding it up against the scant archaeological record, is the only method available to those who want to reconstruct Ise’s early history and answer some of our very human questions. Despite the overwhelming volume of writings on the topic of Ise’s beginnings, there are few signs that a consensus is emerging. The official line propounded by the Ise Shrine Office today takes Nihon shoki literally and dates Amaterasu’s arrival in Ise to 4 BC (Suinin 26). Among scholars, the main divide runs between those who date the origins of Ise and Amaterasu to the fourth or fifth century, well before the establishment of the Ritsuryō state, and those who see Ise as a product of the process of state formation that culminated in the decades around 700.3 This divide is ultimately based on differing understandings of the nature of Nihon shoki. ‘Early’ scholars assume that Nihon shoki entries reflect events that occurred during the reigns under which they are filed. While few give credence to the traditional Suinin dating, they do have faith in references to Ise in the chronicles of Emperors Yūryaku or Keitai, or Empress Suiko. ‘Late’ scholars treat Nihon shoki as a document that reflects the time in which its final redaction took place: the reigns of Emperor Tenmu and Empress Jitō in the early eighth century.

A Social History of the Ise Shrines

10

Map 2  Ise in ancient Japan

They assume that little stopped the editors of this work from inserting later (or even completely fictional) events in early chapters whenever they felt a need to create ancient precedents for innovations.

Emperor Tenmu and the ‘Shrine of Amaterasu’ Both the ‘early’ and the ‘late’ camps agree that the so-​called Jinshin coup of 672, in which Emperor Tenmu (formerly Prince Ōama) took the throne by defeating his nephew Ōtomo, represents a watershed in Ise’s early history. What they do not agree about is whether this episode marked the very origin of the Ise cult, or merely represented a new development in a long-​established practice. Either way, few dispute the fact that references to Ise in the Nihon shoki’s account of this coup must have had some root in actual history. Here, perhaps, is our first spot of solid ground. The year 672 was one of political and military drama. Emperor Tenji died in the last month of 671 in his Ōtsu palace after having passed the throne to his son,

1. Ancient Ise: Divine Wrath and Court Politics

11

Prince Ōtomo. Prince Ōama, who was Tenji’s brother and Ōtomo’s uncle, had left the palace when Tenji fell ill in the tenth month of 671. Pretending to renounce the world, Ōama retired to the mountainous region of Yoshino in southern Yamato and bided his time. On 24.6.672, Ōama left Yoshino in great haste with a small band of followers. Picking up horses as they went, they passed through Uda into Iga where they torched a post station and took command of local troops. On the 25th they crossed the mountains into Ise Province under the cover of night. Pelted by a thunderstorm, they finally reached the relative safety of Asake in Ise the next morning, where they set fire to a building to warm the drenched men. At sunrise Ōama’s party went down to the bank of the Tōkawa River, ‘turned their faces towards Amaterasu Ōkami, and did worship’.4 It soon became clear that Ōama had a great many allies, and by the end of the year, Ōtomo was dead and both Ōtsu and Yamato had fallen into Ōama’s hands. On 27.2.673 Ōama assumed the position of emperor in his new palace, Kiyomihara in Asuka, on the southern edge of the Yamato Plain. In this new capacity, he would later be given the posthumous name of Tenmu. For the month following Tenmu’s enthronement, Nihon shoki records a number of highly symbolic events: so-​called cap-​ranks5 were awarded to those who had served him well; a white pheasant was discovered in a distant province and offered to the palace; and scribes were gathered to copy the entire Buddhist canon. Finally, there is a reference to Ise: 14.4.673: The Imperial Princess Ōku is ordered to stay in an abstinence hall in Hatsuse, so that she may be dispatched to the shrine of Amaterasu Ōkami. In this hall she will purify her body before approaching the place of the kami.

What was the historical context of the Ise cult in this setting? Tenmu’s Jinshin coup was a landmark in the history not only of Ise, but of the early Japanese state. It was probably Tenmu who introduced the title of tennō or ‘heavenly sovereign’ and gave the country the new name of Nihon, ‘Origin of the Sun’. These acts of renaming signalled the transformation of the ‘great kings’ (ōkimi) of Yamato into ‘emperors’ of Japan. Tenmu ordered that ‘imperial chronicles and ancient words held by the various houses’ be corrected and edited so as to ‘establish the true’ once and for all.6 With this he initiated the compilation of Kojiki (Record of ancient matters, 712), the oldest extant chronicle of Japan and its ruling lineage. This text gives a central role to the sun goddess Amaterasu in the history of imperial rule:  Kojiki states that this kami (together with the male Takami-​musubi) sent her grandson down from the Plain of High Heaven to the Japanese islands to establish an everlasting celestial dynasty there. The significance of Tenmu’s involvement with Ise must be understood against the background of all these innovations. Tenmu launched his visionary reforms in a time of political chaos and military disaster. Only nine years before the Jinshin coup, in 663, Yamato troops had suffered a crushing defeat in an attempt to stop the Korean kingdom of Silla from obliterating its neighbour Paekche with the assistance of the mighty Tang dynasty of China. Fear of a joint Silla–​Tang invasion may have been one reason behind Tenji’s decision, in 667, to move his palace away from the coast and the Yamato

12

A Social History of the Ise Shrines

Plain to the more sheltered site of Ōtsu. No invasion materialized, but in the 670s the situation was still unclear and threatening. Not least, an influx of Korean refugees, immigrants and prisoners of war had to be managed without upsetting the balance of power in the court’s network of supporters and allies. Tenmu had succeeded in defeating Ōtomo because of widespread dissatisfaction with Tenji’s attempts to centralize power in the hands of the Yamato court at the expense of local elites. If Tenmu was to maintain his grip on that power, he needed to devise new ways to restrain the same chieftains who had supported the coup. Moreover, if his endeavours were to last beyond his own lifetime, he had to build a dynasty with less leeway for struggles about the succession, and also present a convincing argument as to why that dynasty should hold power. Finally, Tenmu had to deal with a spate of calamities and the social unrest they generated: disease, drought and famine. Herman Ooms (2009) has made a detailed analysis both of the problems Tenmu faced and of the political and ‘symbolic’ solutions he pioneered. Some of Tenmu’s strategies are reflected in the Nihon shoki entries that we just saw. By awarding and withholding cap-​ranks, Tenmu manipulated the balance of power among his allies. When he staged the discovery of an auspicious white pheasant, he drew on Chinese techniques of legitimation by producing evidence of heaven’s approval. By having the Buddhist canon copied, he created a large store of merit and represented himself as a Dharma king, a benevolent ruler who assists the Buddha in transforming the land into a realm of enlightenment and prosperity. Finally, by sending one of his daughters to ‘the shrine of Amaterasu Ōkami’, he asserted a special relationship with a kami whose name means ‘Great Deity who illuminates heaven’. Even these first few entries of Tenmu’s reign demonstrate that he felt free to utilize any available stratagem or discourse that could help him in his quest to create a new kind of authority. Among these strategies, Tenmu’s worship of Amaterasu may at first sight appear to be the most traditional; after all, it followed the ancient custom of legitimizing political power in terms of kami worship. In fact, however, the opposite was true. Tenmu’s devotion to Amaterasu was a radical departure from the kami cults of his predecessors. The question is, how is this fact to be interpreted? Does it mean that Ise and Amaterasu were ‘invented’ by Tenmu? Or did he ‘merely’ adopt and adapt an earlier established tradition that had been temporarily neglected? An insurmountable problem, once again, is the complete lack of contemporary sources. Kojiki may well have been the result of Tenmu’s own initiative, but this text ends with the death of Empress Suiko in 628, long before the Jinshin coup. Kojiki and Nihon shoki underwent their final redactions in 712 and 720, respectively, twenty and twenty-​eight years after that coup. Strikingly, the compilers of Nihon shoki not only contradicted the Kojiki’s account on many points, but chose to ignore it altogether. The significant differences between these sources, and between different versions of the same episodes recorded side by side in Nihon shoki, show that there was ample scope for adapting the narrative to new circumstances. It is no easy task to determine what agenda, and of what age, is reflected in any particular detail reported in Kojiki or Nihon shoki. At the very least, the variety of

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13

accounts they contain warns us against drawing quick conclusions about ancient events on the basis of these eighth-​century sources. This is also true, of course, of Nihon shoki’s account of the Jinshin coup. A closer look at the Nihon shoki passage that has Tenmu worship Amaterasu on the Tōkawa riverbank calls up plenty of questions. A common interpretation of this passage is that Tenmu attributed his victory over Ōama to Amaterasu. This is then adduced as the main explanation for the subsequent rise in status of Amaterasu’s Ise Shrine, to become the highest protector of the imperial lineage.7 Yet Nihon shoki does not in fact mention a single instance of divine assistance from Amaterasu or Ise in the course of its account of Tenmu’s campaign. Instead, the chronicle focuses on other kami. We read that Kotoshironushi of Takechi Shrine, Ikumitama of Musa Shrine and Miho-​tsu-​hime of Muraya Shrine protected Tenmu at key moments. These kami, all from Yamato Province, were rewarded with offerings and high ranks. Amaterasu, in contrast, remained silent, and Nihon shoki makes no mention of any promotion. The oldest source to link Amaterasu to Tenmu’s victory is a poem in the imperial poetry collection Man’yōshū (Collection of ten thousand leaves), compiled a generation or two after Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Man’yōshū includes a lament by the court poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, composed on the occasion of the death of Tenmu’s son, Prince Takechi, in 696. Takechi, who played a prominent role in the Jinshin campaign, was in line for the succession, which explains why Hitomaro’s lament sets out by recalling Tenmu’s reign and describing his death. This section of the poem includes the following reference to the campaign: As they struggled like zooming birds, the divine wind from the hall of abstinence in Watarai blew confusion upon them, hiding the very light of day as clouds blanketed the heavens in eternal darkness.8

In 696, then, a court poet ascribed Tenmu’s triumph to the divine powers of the ‘hall of abstinence in Watarai’, the district of the Ise Shrine  –​presumably a hall where the imperial priestess lived a life of abstinence from impurity and worshipped Amaterasu. However, Hitomaro’s description of that hall hardly fitted the situation of 672, a quarter of a century earlier. It was only in 673, well after the end of the campaign, that Princess Ōku was ‘ordered to stay in an abstinence hall in Hatsuse, so that she may be dispatched to the shrine of Amaterasu Ōkami’; she did not reach Ise until 674. Nihon shoki gives us little reason to believe that there was such a hall in Ise before Ōku’s arrival. Tenmu’s predecessor, Tenji, showed no interest whatsoever in either Ise or Amaterasu; the same applied to the four ‘great kings’ and ‘queens’ who preceded him. Even if there was an abstinence hall in Ise in 672, it had stood empty for half a century at least. All this leaves us with a chicken-​and-​egg conundrum: allegedly, Tenmu won victory because of his worship of Amaterasu, and he worshipped Amaterasu because this kami helped him to victory. The Nihon shoki account of Tenmu worshipping Amaterasu at the Tōkawa riverbank post-​dates Hitomaro’s poem by another twenty-​four years.9 There is no

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A Social History of the Ise Shrines

way to determine whether this tale reflects a genuine interest in Amaterasu on the part of Tenmu; if it is a made-​up episode added by the final editors to reflect later practices, it would not be the only such fiction in the chronicles. Tenmu’s dispatch of Ōku to Ise is less easily dismissed, however. A fragment of a mokkan (a document written on a strip of wood) carrying Ōku’s name has been excavated in Asuka, at the site of Tenmu’s court,10 and archaeologists have uncovered a large complex west of Ise (in Taki,11 rather than Watarai District) that served as the quarters of the so-​called abstinence princesses (itsuki no miko or saiō) of Ise. The oldest finds at this site are dated to Tenmu’s time, although it developed into a full-​ fledged compound only in the course of the eighth century.12 Taken together, these finds add credibility to the account of Ōku’s dispatch to Ise. Why, then, did Tenmu choose to resurrect, or invent, the practice of sending imperial princesses to Ise soon after the Jinshin coup? Both Kojiki and Nihon shoki mention princesses who served at Ise long before Ōku. Kojiki names three such princesses, Nihon shoki eight: Reign

Kojiki

Nihon shoki

10. Sujin

Toyosuki-bime

Toyosuki-iri-bime

11. Suinin

Yamato-​hime

Yamato-​hime

12. Keikō

-​-​

Princess Iono

21. Yūryaku

-​-​

Princess Takuhata

26. Keitai

Princess Sasage

Princess Sasage

29. Kinmei

-​-​

Princess Iwakuma

30. Bidatsu

-​-​

Princess Uji

31. Yōmei –​33. Suiko

-​-​

Princess Sukate

40. Tenmu

-​-​

Princess Ōku

In Kojiki, the Ise Shrine is mentioned only in short notes to the names of these princesses as they occur in genealogical lists, typically recording that ‘[this princess] worshipped the Great Kami of Ise’. Nihon shoki, too, mostly mentions the Ise princesses in passing, with a similar wording: ‘[This princess] worshipped the shrine of the Great Kami of Ise.’13 But as we shall soon see, this chronicle also includes a few longer episodes featuring some of them. How can these references to ancient Ise princesses be interpreted? If at least some of them are historical, as many of the ‘early’ scholars believe, the origins of Ise worship by Yamato kings must go back to the sixth, fifth or even third century. ‘Late’ scholars, on the other hand, argue that most or even all these references to Ise princesses were inserted into the chronicles in the eighth century, to create a precedent for Tenmu’s dispatch of Ōku.14 These entries present further vexing problems. Much discussed is the question of what kind of shrine and deity these princesses may have served in Ise, if that is

1. Ancient Ise: Divine Wrath and Court Politics

15

what they did. Is there a difference between ‘the shrine of the Great Kami of Ise’ mentioned in the earliest entries, and the ‘shrine of Amaterasu Ōkami’ served by Ōku? Most entries up to Princess Uji state that these princesses served the ‘Great Kami of Ise’; Sukate is said to have served the ‘sun kami’. Amaterasu is mentioned by name only in Iono’s entry, and then again in the quoted passage about Ōku. Are these all the same deity, or do the name changes indicate a change of deity? Moreover, at least in Tenmu’s time, no other shrines were worshipped through the medium of an abstinence princess. What does this title mean, and why did this ‘Great Kami of Ise’ require such a peculiar form of worship? Nihon shoki contains some tales about the earliest abstinence princesses that shed light on their nature, and, by extension, on the character of the early Ise cult. Especially remarkable is an episode featuring Princess Takuhata, found in the chronicle of Yūryaku’s reign. In a close paraphrase, it runs as follows: A certain Kunimi spread the rumour that an officer of the baths, Takehiko, was sleeping with Takuhata. Takehiko’s father feared this would bring disaster upon his house, and he took his son to the Ioki River and killed him there.15 Questioned by imperial messengers, Takuhata denied the rumours. Then she took the kami mirror and left for the upper reaches of the Isuzu River, where she buried the mirror and hanged herself. The emperor sent officials to look for her, and when they came to the Isuzu River they discovered ‘a rainbow similar to a snake of four or five jō’ (twelve to fifteen metres). They dug a hole at the spot where the rainbow rose from the ground, and recovered the mirror. Takuhata’s body was discovered nearby. When they opened her belly, they found ‘a water-​like substance’ containing a stone. This proved Takehiko’s innocence, and Takehiko’s father took revenge by killing Kunimi.16

At the core of the Ise cult, as it emerges from this tale, were a maiden princess, who was expected to remain untouched,17 a kami mirror and a sacred site ‘on the upper reaches of the Isuzu River’. The mirror contains a kami who manifests itself in the form of a snake-​like rainbow. Takuhata’s name, moreover, identifies her as a ‘weaver of mulberry cloth’. This combination, of a virgin, a snake and weaving, echoes with Ise’s origination myth.

Ise’s Origination Myth Both Kojiki and Nihon shoki mention Toyosuki-​iri-​bime and Yamato-​hime as the first princesses to serve the ‘Great Kami of Ise’. Kojiki merely records their names; Nihon shoki is alone in explaining how these ‘maidens’ contributed to the founding of Amaterasu’s shrine in Ise. The tale is somewhat long-​winded and confusing, but it is our only clue as to the nature of the Ise cult in its earliest phase.18 In the fifth year of Sujin’s reign, the land was struck by an epidemic that killed ‘more than half the people’, triggering a wave of ‘vagabondage’ and a violent

A Social History of the Ise Shrines

16

rebellion. In response the emperor ‘enquired of the gods of heaven and earth about his sins’, wondering what had caused the wrath of the kami. Especially, he feared the presence of two kami in his palace: Amaterasu Ōkami and Yamato Ōkunitama, the ‘Great Spirit of the land of Yamato’. He entrusted these kami to two of his daughters, Toyosuki-​iri-​bime and Nunaki-​iri-​bime. Toyosuki-​iri-​ bime took Amaterasu to the village of Kasanui in Yamato, near the foot of Mount Miwa, to be worshipped there. Still the pestilence showed no sign of abating, and Sujin assembled the ‘eighty myriad kami’ on the plain of Kamiasachi to gauge their will through divination. At that time the kami Ōmononushi of Mount Miwa took possession of yet another maiden, Yamato Totohimomoso, and revealed through her that the emperor’s failure to offer him proper worship was the cause of the country’s calamities. Not much later, Ōmononushi appeared to Sujin himself in a dream and revealed that he would stop his harrying of the country if only he was worshipped by his own descendant, a man by the name of Ōtataneko. When this man was found, Sujin prepared offerings and appointed Ōtataneko as ‘master’ of Ōmononushi’s worship. At the same time, he transferred the worship of Yamato Ōkunitama to a man called Nagaochi. With this, the emperor deemed that it was now propitious for him to worship the eighty myriad kami. He ‘decided which were to be heavenly shrines and which earthly shrines’ and allotted land and service households to them. With that, the epidemic finally gave way, peace was regained, and the five grains once again yielded abundant harvests.19

Amaterasu Ōkami

Yamato Ōkunitama

Ōmononushi

Toyosuki-​iri-​bime ⇒ Yamato-​hime

Nunaki-​iri-​bime ⇒ Nagaochi

Yamato Totohimomoso ⇒ Ōtataneko

Palace ⇒ Kasanui ⇒ Ise

Palace ⇒ ?

Miwa

This tale about Amaterasu, Yamato Ōkunitama and Ōmononushi is often pried apart as though it were a coincidental combination of a set of unrelated origination myths, relating to dissimilar sites and different kami.20 In the narrative of Nihon shoki, however, these events clearly form a unified sequence with a single plot: Sujin’s efforts to stem kami-​induced calamities, culminating in his ordering of the kami realm by introducing a system of ‘heavenly and earthly shrines’. The two main protagonists of this tale are the kami of Miwa and Ise.21 Tenmu’s predecessor on the throne, his brother Tenji, had given special importance to the kami of Miwa, installing the Miwa kami in Ōtsu when he moved his capital there in 667.22 When Ise rose to prominence in the years that Nihon shoki took its final form, this was at Miwa’s expense. The juxtaposition of Miwa and Ise in Nihon shoki’s myth of Ise’s origin indicates that these two kami were once seen as similar in character and function; this must have facilitated the transition of court worship from one to the other.

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17

The Sujin chapter includes a further famous tale about the ‘maiden’ of Miwa, Yamato Totohimomoso, which by association also allows us to speculate about the cultic backgrounds of Ise’s system of abstinence princesses: As the wife (tsuma) of Ōmononushi, Yamato Totohimomoso was not unhappy with the fact that Ōmononushi never showed himself to her in the light of day. She begged him to allow her to see his true form, and Ōmononushi agreed on the condition that she would not be appalled at his appearance. He hid in her comb box until morning. When Yamato Totohimomoso opened the box at dawn, she found a beautiful small snake. In fright she let out a cry, and at this Ōmononushi felt put to shame. He changed into human guise and said to his wife: ‘You have thrown shame over me; now I will shame you.’ With these words he disappeared in the direction of Mount Miwa. Yamato Totohimomoso sat down in shock, a pair of chopsticks pierced her genitals, and she died on the spot.23

This tale shows that kami maidens were regarded as ‘wives’ of the kami they served. They reflect the recurring mythical motif of maidens who became pregnant after sleeping with kami, and/​or who had their genitals pierced by kami. Such kami shared a number of traits. Many were associated with snakes and arrows; others with the sun. Another Kojiki episode about Miwa’s Ōmononushi relates how this kami transformed himself into a red arrow and impregnated a beautiful maiden while she was defecating in a ditch. As a result of her ‘marriage’ with Ōmononushi, this maiden gave birth to a girl who was later chosen as one of the wives of Emperor Jinmu, the first human emperor and original conqueror of Yamato.24 We also learn that this kami fathered Ōtataneko by entering a maiden’s sleeping quarters through the keyhole in the guise of a snake.25 Yet another Kojiki tale relates how a ray of the sun, similar to a rainbow, shone on the genitals of a poor girl in Silla, Korea. As a result she became pregnant and gave birth to a red jewel.26 This jewel was later taken by the Silla prince Ame no Hiboko. When this prince lay down in his bed with the jewel, it transformed into a beautiful maiden and became his wife. The Takuhata episode at Ise, featuring a snake-​like rainbow, a mysterious pregnancy and a ‘stone’, clearly reflects the motif of kami-​ impregnated maidens. A very similar motif can also be found in the main story about Amaterasu in both Kojiki and Nihon shoki, which tells of Amaterasu’s confrontation with her brother Susanowo. Susanowo misbehaved so badly that Amaterasu felt forced to retire into a rock-​cave, plunging the world into darkness. Susanowo’s final misdeed was to throw a flayed horse into Amaterasu’s weaving hall. The weaving maiden –​ or, in some versions, Amaterasu herself  –​was so shocked that she pierced her genitals with her weaving shuttle. The shuttle, incidentally, is called hi, a homonym of the word for ‘sun’. Different versions of this central myth construe the relationship between Amaterasu, the weaving maiden and the shuttle in different ways. In Kojiki, the weaving maiden kills herself with the hi shuttle, while in the main version of Nihon shoki, it is Amaterasu who ‘injures herself ’ with it.

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A Social History of the Ise Shrines

Taken together, all these myths present the image of maidens who are ‘married’ to a special type of kami. Such kami are snake-​like and dangerous, capable of causing epidemics and, in some instances, of controlling thunder and lightning.27 It is the maiden’s task to serve as the kami’s wife and bear his child. The position of Amaterasu within this group of myths is both ambiguous and puzzling. Amaterasu creates children in her confrontation with Susanowo, and subsequently she (or her weaving maiden) has her genitals pierced by the hi shuttle due to Susanowo’s wild raging. All this offers a striking parallel to the fate of Yamato Totohimomoso. Why, however, the need for Amaterasu to be served by a ‘princess’ of jealously guarded virginity if she is herself a maiden? Might Amaterasu once have been a snake-​ like male kami, whose image was at some later stage reconfigured by identifying this kami with the maiden who served ‘him’? Of course, there was never such a thing as an ‘original’ Amaterasu; deities do not have solid identities, but manifest themselves as shifting clouds of meaning that take on different forms in specific historical situations. All we can say is that snakes, thunder and epidemics are among the more obvious ingredients of the cloud in which Amaterasu is hiding. Another ingredient is the motif of the weaving maiden, represented both by Takuhata (‘mulberry cloth weaver’) as a mythical prototype of the abstinence princess, and by Amaterasu herself. The link between Ise and silk is confirmed by an entry in Nihon shoki recording that in 692, the ‘Great Kami of Ise’ addressed Empress Jitō in an oracle, asking that the year’s tribute of silk thread should be exempted from a tax relief granted in that year.28 In his investigation of the place of weaving in early Japanese cultic life, Michael Como (2009) sees Tenmu’s worship of Amaterasu at Ise as a variant on East Asian royal weaving cults that can ultimately be traced back to the Chinese cult of the Queen Mother of the West (Ch. Xiwangmu). Legends related to the Queen Mother of the West contain many motifs that reappear in the figure of Amaterasu.29 Como places heavy emphasis on the role of Korean lineages in the formation of Japanese court myth and ritual, but this appears unnecessary in the light of his own convincing argument that Japan’s cultic traditions were continuous with those of Korea and China at all levels, both at court and in village life. The cult of Amaterasu was a product of this environment, and thus naturally shared many traits both with continental myths and practices, and with the cults of other lineages close to the court, whether they were ‘allochthons’, in the terminology of Ooms (2009), or ‘autochthons’. While Como focuses on the motif of weaving, others have concentrated on Amaterasu’s connections with metalworking.30 Ise’s Amaterasu was not the only deity with this name; at least ten other shrines were dedicated to kami called Amateru or Amaterasu, mostly located in the wider Yamato region, but some as distant as Kyushu and Tsushima. Nine of these shrines were dedicated to an ancestor deity of the Owari lineage (Ame no Hoakari), a deity closely connected with ironworking. That these Amateru/​Amaterasu cults cannot be isolated from Tenmu’s cult of Ise is all the more obvious because the Owari fostered Tenmu as a child and were among the main supporters of his Jinshin coup. The number of kami connected with weaving or with the craft of smiths is endless; so are the kami of the sun or the sea, two other obvious aspects of

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Amaterasu. Rather than venturing into this mythical hall of mirrors, I  will stay as close as possible to the legend of Ise’s origins as recounted in Nihon shoki. The tale of Amaterasu’s removal from the palace reveals that this kami was at one point seen as a dangerous force rather than a benevolent ancestor and protector. Amaterasu may at first sight appear to be a kami of a radically different calibre than the likes of Ōmononushi: not male but female, not an earthly but a heavenly deity, and not associated with snakes and thunder but with the sun. However, a closer analysis of the myths, and indeed the very nature of the abstinence priestess, shows that a more Miwa-​like Amaterasu is hiding behind this ‘classical’ image of the heavenly sun goddess. The question that we need to consider next is whether it was Tenmu who gave Amaterasu her new identity, and whether this was related with the events of 672–​3.

Amaterasu as the Leader of the Heavenly Deities Amaterasu’s journey from Yamato to Ise takes up much space in the myth of Ise’s origin. In contrast to Tenji’s removal of the Miwa deity to Hie near Ōtsu, Amaterasu’s resettlement was imagined as a multistage trek and forms the topic of a long passage in Nihon shoki. We have already seen that Sujin placed Amaterasu in the care of Toyosuki-​iri-​bime. This princess, we read, never left Kasanui in Yamato. She was relieved of her duties eighty-​seven years after her appointment, and Amaterasu was now entrusted to a daughter of Emperor Suinin, Yamato-​hime. Yamato-​hime set off in search of a new place to enshrine Amaterasu. First, she travelled to Uda in the mountains to the east of Miwa; then, she headed north for Ōmi. Taking an eastward turn through Mino, she then proceeded towards the south and entered Ise Province. Here she was ‘instructed’ by Amaterasu, who said: ‘Ise, this land of the kami wind, is the land whither repair the waves from the eternal land, the successive waves. It is a secluded and a pleasant land. I wish to dwell in this land.’ Thus Yamato-​hime built a shrine to Amaterasu in Ise and founded an ‘abstinence palace’ on the upper reaches of the river Isuzu, called the Iso or ‘beach’ palace. With this, Amaterasu had returned to ‘the place where [she] first descended from heaven’.31 This account is followed by a variant in which Amaterasu’s final dwelling place is identified as the palace of Watarai in Ise. This variant is of special interest because it tells of an oracle inspired by Amaterasu’s old companion, Yamato Ōkunitama, addressing Sujin’s successor Suinin. Yamato Ōkunitama pronounces that Amaterasu has always governed heaven; now, her imperial descendants have assumed absolute authority over the ‘eighty [myriad] spirits and kami’. With this, Yamato Ōkunitama announces that his tenure as the ruler of the land has come to an end. Finally, he warns that Sujin died an early death because this emperor had not worshipped him in a satisfactory manner. Heeding these words Suinin takes action, establishes a ‘kami site’ for Yamato Ōkunitama and transfers his worship from Nunaki-​iri-​hime to Nagaochi.32 Yamato Ōkunitama’s oracle reveals another aspect of the Ise cult’s significance. As soon as Amaterasu had returned to her proper place, it was time for the old

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master of the land to retire. The spirits and kami of the land were now subject to Amaterasu’s heavenly rule; all that Yamato Ōkunitama now required was proper worship by the emperor. We have seen that Amaterasu herself had been worshipped by Toyosuki-​iri-​bime at the foot of Mount Miwa as another ‘kami of the land’. Transferred to Ise, she now appears in a very different guise, as the supreme kami of heaven whose descendants rule over ‘the land’ as a whole. Yamato Ōkunitama’s oracle echoes Sujin’s quelling of kami-​caused calamities: when Yamato Ōkunitama was entrusted to Nagaochi, the emperor deemed that it was now propitious for him to worship the eighty (myriad) kami, so he categorized them as ‘heavenly and earthly shrines’ and allotted land and service households to them. By establishing heavenly rule over the unruly earthly kami in this manner, he brought peace and prosperity to the realm. This rhetoric of heavenly rule over earthly kami is central both to Kojiki and Nihon shoki, and likewise to the so-​called jingi cult that was created at the Yamato court in the decades around the year 700. Tenmu not only initiated the compilation of Kojiki but was also a pioneer in the creation of this court cult. The word jingi is an abbreviation of tenjin chigi, ‘heavenly and earthly gods’. This term derives from China (Ch. shenqi, tianshen diqi), where it occurs in classics such as the Book of Documents and the Analects of Confucius. However, using the phrase ‘heavenly and earthly gods’ to categorize the gods of the realm appears to have been a Japanese innovation. In Tang ritual codes, the technically correct term for ‘the gods of the realm’ was not shenqi but zhushen (Jap. shoshin), ‘various deities’, a word referring to gods that were to be worshipped by lower, province-​and district-​ level branches of the state administration together with the gods of the soil.33 In China, the term ‘heavenly deities’ referred to the Supreme Lord of Heaven, the sun, moon and the stars, while the ‘earthly deities’ were the gods of the soil. In Japan, however, the heavenly deities were the kami of the court, while the earthly deities were kami worshipped by local lineages. This categorization was intimately linked to the overarching plot line of court myth: how the heavenly gods imposed order on the unruly gods of the earth by forcing them to relinquish power over the land to the ‘grandsons of heaven’, the royal lineage of Yamato. Occurrences of the terms jingi and tenjin chigi in Nihon shoki display a clear pattern. The word appears first in the account of Jinmu’s conquest of Yamato. Suffering losses while approaching Yamato from the west, Jinmu realized that he needed to attack from the east: ‘Sacrificing to the jingi, and bringing on our backs the might of the sun-​kami, let us follow its rays and trample down [our enemies].’34 Amaterasu is obviously central to the concept of jingi here. The notion of invoking the jingi to crush enemies recurs later in the Jinmu chapter. On two occasions, Jinmu is instructed to present offerings to the jingi, or the ‘heavenly and earthly shrines’, in vessels made of clay from Mount Kaguyama, a procedure associated with the rites used to lure Amaterasu from the Rock-​Cave of Heaven.35 The next cluster of occurrences of the term jingi is in the chapters on Sujin and Suinin, related to the tale discussed above. In three different places, Sujin is praised for his worship of the jingi, which made it possible to pacify the realm, introduce a census and establish a system of taxation (Sujin 10; Sujin 12; Suinin 25). It is hardly

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a coincidence that Jinmu and Sujin both carry Japanese names identifying them as ‘the first emperor to rule the realm’ (hatsu kuni shirasu sumera-​mikoto), or that both were later given Chinese posthumous names stressing their relationship to the gods (jin). The term comes up again in the tale of Yamato’s invasion of Silla in the Chūai, Jingū Kōgō and Ōjin chapters. According to Kojiki, this invasion was carried out on orders that ultimately came from Amaterasu. In Nihon shoki, it was Jingū Kōgō’s worship of the jingi on orders of an unnamed ‘heavenly deity’ that enabled her to ‘chastise the West’. When Jingū Kōgō returned, Amaterasu warned her not to take Amaterasu’s own ‘violent spirit’ along to the capital, but rather leave it in the care of a maiden in the harbour where the empress disembarked.36 After this, the word jingi is rarely used until it reappears with a vengeance in the chapter on Tenmu.37 This chapter contains an unprecedented eleven passages referring to jingi or tenjin chigi, as well as two references to heavenly and earthly shrines. This pattern suggests that the term jingi gained new significance during Tenmu’s reign, starting already in the account of the Jinshin campaign. The fighting reached a climax when Tenmu approached Tenji’s headquarters in Ōtsu. Here Tenmu’s son, Prince Takechi, volunteered to take his father’s place and lead the troops into the lion’s den, ‘in reliance on the spirits of the jingi’ (27.6.672). That same night, Tenmu stopped a violent thunderstorm by praying to the tenjin chigi. Tenmu sent offerings to the ‘heavenly and earthly gods’ of the realm four times in the course of his reign.38 These offerings are generally regarded as the first beginnings of the classical jingi cult, which involved the sending of imperial offerings to a network of kami that extended even beyond the heartland of the court, the Yamato region.39 In contrast, Tenmu’s predecessor, Tenji, had ‘deity seats prepared for the various deities (shoshin)’ near his palace and made offerings there (only once during his reign).40 As we have seen, the term shoshin (Ch. zhushen) had some basis in Tang ritual protocol, while jingi did not. The differences in scale and intent between Tenji’s one-​off shoshin rite and Tenmu’s institutionalized jingi cult are quite striking. Tenmu’s chronicle even refers to a special office dedicated to court worship of the kami, the Kami-​tsukasa or ‘Kami Office’ (9.676). In 689, early in the reign of Tenmu’s widow and successor, Empress Jitō, this office was renamed Jingikan, the ‘Council of Heavenly and Earthly Deities’.41 All this suggests that the notion of jingi, which later became a defining concept underlying the entire court cult of kami, was pioneered by Tenmu and Jitō. When Nihon shoki has Jinmu worshipping the ‘heavenly and earthly gods’, or Sujin categorizing all kami as ‘heavenly and earthly shrines’, these are obvious anachronisms, inserted into the court chronicles to mask the fact that the jingi concept was a novel cultic principle that went back no further than Tenmu’s reign. The fact that this act of categorizing was linked to the origination myth of Ise in Sujin’s time (and, beyond that, even in the age of Jinmu) indicates that Amaterasu played an important role in this reordering of the kami realm. In the jingi conception of kami, Amaterasu was the ultimate heavenly deity. In Kojiki, especially, Amaterasu plays a key role as the deity who decrees that the earthly deities are to be pacified, and who sends the heavenly grandson to earth to assume

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rule over Japan. Tenmu’s dispatch of Ōku, then, can be seen as a step in this transformation of Amaterasu from a Miwa-​like earthly deity into the leader of the heavenly deities who legitimized his celestial rule.

Why Ise? This brings us to yet another of Ise’s riddles: if Tenmu intended to raise Amaterasu to such an important status, why did this kami have to be worshipped in far-​flung Ise? The mythical narrative is unambiguous:  it states plainly that Amaterasu was moved away from the palace because this kami was seen as a danger to the emperor. Among scholars, however, interpretations of this narrative vary widely. Again, the main divide runs between an ‘early’ and a ‘late’ camp, as sketched at the start of this chapter. The ‘early’ camp treats the tale of Amaterasu’s relocation to Ise as a truly ancient historical event and looks for explanations. In contrast, ‘late’ scholars read the same tale as a myth inserted into the Nihon shoki during the final stages of that text’s editing, in the first decades of the eighth century. Here, it is striking that those who recognize Amaterasu’s move to Ise as a fact of ancient history on the basis of Nihon shoki do not follow that same chronicle when it comes to explaining the reasons for that move. Almost without exception, ‘early’ scholars put a more positive gloss on Amaterasu’s relocation. Okada Seishi argues that Amaterasu was moved to Ise because this site had a tradition of sun worship and was in Yamato regarded as a sacred place because of its location in the direction of the sunrise.42 Naoki Kōjirō stresses Ise’s strategic location as a gateway from Yamato towards eastern Japan,43 and Tanaka Takashi interprets Amaterasu’s progress to Ise as a military campaign to extend imperial authority into the Ise area.44 Archaeological evidence fails to confirm the image of southern Ise on which these arguments are premised.45 There is, for example, no sign of an ancient harbour in the area where the Ise Shrine was built. Rather, the court used the inlets of Matokata and Fujikata further north for travel and transportation to the east.46 The diffusion of grave mounds (kofun) can give us some idea of the social landscape of southern Ise, because these monuments mark the power bases of local leaders. Such mounds gradually spread southwards, appearing in the Matokata area by the early fifth century and in the Taki area in the late fifth century. Some of these mounds contain grave goods (most spectacularly, richly decorated swords) that suggest close links with Yamato. The building of large grave mounds ceased in the sixth century, perhaps signalling a new political situation where no group in this area was in a position to realize such labour-​intensive projects. At some time around the year 600, a grave mound of remarkable size was constructed in the core area of the later Ise Shrine complex to the east of the Miyagawa River, on a hill overlooking what is now the site of the Outer Shrine. This mound, known as the Takakurayama kofun, displays structural similarities with much smaller mounds in the Taki area west of the Miyagawa. There are no other grave mounds of any significance east of this river, and the appearance of this

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Figure 1.1  Beads found within the Inner Shrine precinct. Source: Jingū Shichō, ed. 1895, Shinto meishōshi (vol. 4), Jingū Shichō.

single spectacular mound is described by archaeologists as ‘abrupt’ and puzzling.47 Grave mounds were seldom built in the direct vicinity of ancient shrine sites, and no archaeological finds indicate early ritual activity within the present Outer Shrine precincts. At the Inner Shrine, on the other hand, caches of beads dated to the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries have been found in a small valley where a brook runs down Mount Asama, a short distance to the north (uphill) from the present shrine complex (Figure 1.1). This site ‘on the upper reaches of the river Isuzu’ was probably a location where rituals related to water supply (mikumari) were performed.48 Yet even after 600 the area east of the Miyagawa remained devoid of large-​scale archaeological remains, though there are more modest signs of early habitation and small numbers of minor burial mounds. These findings show that the floodplain to the east of the Miyagawa River was something of an outpost. Even Taki, on the western side of the river, fails to throw up evidence of powerful local chieftains at any time during the era of grave mound construction. The appearance of the Takakurayama mound signals the sudden intervention of some formidable power in the area, possibly by way of Taki.

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Maybe the lack of chieftain-​sized mounds in Taki reflects effective control from Yamato, rather than local anarchy. However that may be, there was no follow-​up on the Takakurayama project, and even in Tenmu’s time towards the end of the seventh century the area remained underdeveloped.49 Other than the site behind the present Inner Shrine, no evidence indicates significant ritual activity. This stands in contrast to the Taki area, which had large-​scale production sites for haji stoneware (some of which was clearly for ritual use) in the vicinity of the site that later accommodated the compound of the abstinence princesses. We can safely conclude that if the Yamato court was looking to build its most prominent shrine in a strategic or otherwise impressive location, the area east of the Miyagawa would have been a very unlikely option. What about the ‘tradition of sun worship’ adduced by Okada Seishi and others? The location of the Inner Shrine, in a narrow and heavily wooded river valley that opens up only to the north, appears singularly ill-​suited for sun worship. However, references to sun cults in the more developed area to the northwest of the Miyagawa may, in fact, have been connected in some way to the Ise Shrine. Kojiki recounts a tale that can be paraphrased as follows: When Ninigi descended from heaven, he found his path barred by a kami who ‘illuminated the High Plain of Heaven above and the Central Land of Reed Plains below’. On orders of Takami-​musubi, Amaterasu instructed the female kami Ame no Uzume to confront this deity and find out what his intentions might be. The kami identified himself as the ‘earthly deity’ Saruta-​hiko, and explained that he had come to welcome the ‘son of the heavenly deities’ on his way down from heaven. After Ninigi’s descent, Ame no Uzume was ordered to accompany Saruta-​hiko and serve him; their descendants were known as the Sarume. While Saruta-​hiko was staying in Azaka on the Ise coast, his hand got caught in a shell and he drowned as the tide rose. Before ‘returning’ (to the service of Ninigi), Ame no Uzume ordered all creatures of the sea to submit to the rule of the son of the heavenly deities, cutting the mouth of the only creature that would not comply, the namako sea slug. ‘Therefore’, the tribute of seafood from Shima Province, on Ise’s southern border, was forever granted to the Sarume lineage.50

Nihon shoki tells a similar story, although the details are different. Most strikingly, Saruta-​hiko here announces that he will retire to ‘the upper reaches of the Isuzu River’, linking the episode of Saruta-​hiko directly to the site of Amaterasu’s shrine.51 Saruta-​hiko’s dwelling place, Azaka, is located upstream from a major cluster of large grave mounds, in the hills behind the ancient harbours of Fujikata and Matokata. Azaka was the only major shrine in central and southern Ise Province that received court offerings throughout the classical period.52 In later Ise texts, Azaka featured as a lair of ‘evil deities’, pacified by Yamato-​hime on her way to Ise.53 The connections between Saruta-​hiko and Amaterasu, Azaka and Ise suggest that the Ise of Amaterasu was in some way related to a pre-​existing cult of Saruta-​hiko

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that was native to the larger region of southern Ise. However, in contrast to Okada’s argument, the relationship between the cults of Amaterasu and the Saruta-​hiko was clearly antagonistic. The idea that Amaterasu was sent to Ise because that area was already known for its sun worship is difficult to sustain, because the Saruta-​ hiko cult was seen as a thinly veiled adversary of Amaterasu. In conclusion, it appears that the area east of the Miyagawa River was neither of any particular strategic value nor was it among the leading cultic sites in the country, or even in the province of Ise. Rather, it was an out-​of-​the-​way place that was under relatively stable court control. As such, it was not well suited as a symbol of imperial authority, but all the more apposite as a safe place to isolate and keep control over a kami who, as clearly stated in Nihon shoki, presented a potential threat to the emperor.

Empress Jitō and Amaterasu In the last year of his reign, 686, Tenmu was gravely ill. Various measures were taken: lectures were held on the sutra of Yakushi, the Buddha of Healing; temple halls and pagodas were cleaned; a general pardon emptied all prisons. Two weeks after the emperor had taken ill, court diviners discovered that Tenmu’s illness was caused by a curse from the kusanagi sword, once presented to the hero Yamato-​takeru by Yamato-​hime in Ise to help him quell an uprising in the east.54 Immediately, this sword was removed from the palace and sent to Atsuta Shrine in the province of Owari.55 The curse and ensuing ‘exile’ of the kusanagi sword is structurally similar to the tale of Amaterasu’s curse and transfer to a new site in Sujin’s reign. One could even speculate that this incident might have inspired those who drew up the legend of Toyosuki-​iri-​bime. The least one can say is that the understanding of Amaterasu as a deity who lays curses was not a mere remnant of an earlier, outdated mode of thinking about kami. If the kusanagi sword, once held by Yamato-​hime at Ise, was seen as capable of attacking the emperor in the late seventh century, there is no reason why Amaterasu’s mirror could not have been viewed in the same manner. After Tenmu’s death in 686, his widow, Jitō, had the current crown prince killed (Prince Ōtsu, born of another of Tenmu’s wives) and planned for her only son, Prince Kusakabe, to succeed her late husband. However, Kusakabe died unexpectedly in 689, leaving an infant son, Prince Karu. Gary Ebersole has made the compelling argument that the central myth of the descent of the Heavenly Grandson was rewritten to reflect these dramatic events at Jitō’s court.56 Drawing on Ebersole’s argument, Herman Ooms has more recently described Amaterasu as ‘a transparent double’ of Jitō.57 If this is so, Jitō’s reimaging of her ancestors’ descent from heaven adds further weight to the arguments for a late dating of Amaterasu’s shrine in Ise. What was Amaterasu’s role in the tale of descent of the Heavenly Grandson from the Plain of High Heaven to Japan, as the first founder of Japan’s celestial dynasty? According to Kojiki and some variants recorded in Nihon shoki,

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Amaterasu was about to send her son Oshihomimi down to earth to assume rule over the disorderly earthly deities when Oshihomimi informed her that his wife had just given birth to a son, Ninigi. It was then found fitting that this new-​born son should be sent in Oshihomimi’s stead.58 The main (conservative?) variant of this myth in Nihon shoki plays down the roles of Amaterasu and Oshihomimi; other (later?) versions, including the Kojiki account, make them the main protagonists of this crucial episode.59 This inconsistency between variants suggests that Amaterasu’s position was far from stable in court mythology. Another long poem by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, composed for Kusakabe’s funeral in 689 and predating both Kojiki and Nihon shoki, is a likely testimony of Jitō’s take on Amaterasu.60 In this poem, Amaterasu features as the kami who has ‘ruled heaven since the beginning of heaven and earth’, and as the direct ancestor of the imperial line. Hitomaro describes both Tenmu and Kusakabe as ‘high-​rising princes of the sun’, whose spirits have returned to the Plain of High Heaven after their death. As argued by Ebersole and Ooms, this suggests that Jitō envisioned Amaterasu as her ancestor and possibly even identified herself with this deity. This opens up the possibility that Amaterasu and Ninigi were mythical mirror images of Jitō and Prince Karu. We have seen that the Ise origination myth in the Sujin chapter appears to stage Amaterasu as a male deity, served by a kami maiden and ‘wife’ in the same way as the kami of Miwa and others. From a different perspective, it is striking that all other solar deities in kami myth (Takami-​musubi, Ame no Hoakari, Saruta-​hiko and the Amateru/​Amaterasu shrines of the Owari lineage) were clearly male; in fact, the notion of a female sun deity defied Yin-​Yang common sense. If Amaterasu was once male, Jitō would be the only obvious personage to possess the power and motivation to change Amaterasu’s sex. It is striking that Princess Ōku was called back from Ise within months of Tenmu’s death; Jitō never sent a successor. Such a measure might be explained as a logical outcome of Jitō’s feminization of Amaterasu.61 Jitō promulgated the first Chinese-​style law code (Kiyomihara-​ ryō, 689), put the Jingikan on a formal footing and oversaw the construction of the first Chinese-​style capital, Fujiwara-​kyō. She had been Tenmu’s companion since before the Jinshin coup, and she outmanoeuvred a string of court rivals as she secured the throne first for her son and then for her grandson. There is no questioning her boldness or her authority. It would be surprising indeed if the chronicles composed during her reign did not reflect the politics of her court. Events surrounding the construction of Fujiwara-​kyō offer more support for the notion that Jitō invested heavily in Amaterasu and Ise, although frustratingly the evidence remains circumstantial. An unprecedented number of labourers started work on Fujiwara-​kyō in 691, the fifth year of Jitō’s rule. In the first month of 692, the empress travelled to the building site to inspect the grid of avenues and streets that had been laid out in a perfect geometrical pattern. In the fifth month, offerings were presented to the shrines of Ise, Ōyamato, Sumiyoshi and Kii to announce the erection of the imperial palace in the centre of the new city. Right in the middle of this undertaking, which must have exhausted the court’s resources, Jitō announced that she intended to make a tour of Ise Province. She must have

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had good reasons for such a costly expedition at such an inconvenient time. Could Jitō’s tour have been related to developments at the Ise Shrine? Eight days after Jitō’s announcement, the councillor Miwa no Takechimaro protested that an imperial tour in the crucial period of planting would be unwise. When it became clear that preparations proceeded despite his protests, he returned his cap-​rank, signalling his determination to stop Jitō’s plan. Yet the empress did not heed his words and set out on a tour of the provinces of Iga, Ise and Shima.62 Takechimaro was not only a courtier of elite rank but also the leader of the Miwa lineage who served as priests of the Miwa Shrine. Some scholars have therefore interpreted his resistance to Jitō’s Ise visit as a thinly veiled protest against the transfer of court worship from Miwa to the new complex at Ise.63 The sources are silent on the purpose of Jitō’s tour, and Nihon shoki fails to mention the Ise Shrine in this context. However, some months after her return (in the intercalary fifth month of 692), the ‘Great Kami of Ise’ addressed the empress in an oracle, commenting on a tax relief announced to cover the expenses of her tour.64 The fact that this comment was phrased as a pronouncement of the Ise deity opens up the possibility that Jitō’s tour had some connection with the Ise Shrine. Tamura Enchō, for one, suggests that her purpose may have been to oversee the building of a new Amaterasu shrine. However that may be, it is certain that Ise became the court’s most favoured shrine after this date, while Miwa faded into obscurity. As already noted, offerings were sent to the shrines of Ise, Ōyamato, Sumiyoshi and Kii in the fifth month of 692; Miwa was conspicuously absent from the list.65 Six years later (in 698), when Prince Karu had ascended the throne as Emperor Monmu, a new abstinence princess was appointed (Princess Taki). Late in 698, the court chronicle Shoku Nihongi records that ‘the Great Shrine of Taki has been moved to Watarai District’.66 This mysterious entry has generated a great amount of speculation. Authors from the ‘early’ camp have speculated that this Shoku Nihongi entry includes a copying error, and they have proposed various ‘corrections’: the Taki shrine temple, the Taki shrine storehouse or the great shrine office in Taki.67 However, there is no convincing evidence for such an error.68 Tamura adopts the view that on this occasion, the Ise Shrine was moved from Takihara, further up the Miyagawa valley, to its current site; however, Takihara was already in the Watarai District.69 The Taki District, separated from Watarai by the Miyagawa River, was the location of the compound of the abstinence princess. It is more likely, then, that the ‘Great Shrine’ was moved away from this compound to the Isuzu site where the Inner Shrine is located today. Sakurai Katsunoshin offers a variant on such an interpretation, arguing that the Great Shrine of Taki was a hall within the compound of the abstinence priestess where food was offered daily to Amaterasu, whom he believes was already enshrined at the Isuzu site. Sakurai argues that it was the hall of food offerings that was moved to Watarai in 698, and that this marked the origin of the Outer Shrine.70 However one interprets this terse entry, it clearly signals a major transformation of the Ise cult. The building of a new ‘Great Shrine’ in Watarai followed on the heels of the reinstitution of the system of abstinence princesses. The tales of Toyosuki-​iri-​bime,

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Yamato-​hime and Takuhata depicted the abstinence princess as a priestess who physically handled the mirror of Amaterasu. If the Great Shrine was moved away from Taki, the shrine was now finally separated from the compound of the abstinence princess, which had stood empty since 686, the year Ōku was relieved of her duties. Kawazoe Noboru imagines that up to this time, the abstinence princess had worshipped the Ise mirror at an open-​air site in or near her Taki compound.71 To my mind, the Takuhata tale conveys a similar image and helps to give some substance to Kawazoe’s conjecture. The move to the Isuzu site in Watarai would then have marked the final construction of the Ise Shrine, away from the compound of the abstinence princess. The shrine now took the form of a permanent dwelling of the kami, rather than a temporary site where the mirror was installed on ritual occasions. Sakurai’s hypothesis is less dramatic: he assumes that Amaterasu and her mirror had been enshrined in their present location long before Jitō’s time and argues that in 698, only the hall where this kami was offered daily food was moved to Watarai. Either way, the princess was now reduced to a marginal role within the actual ritual proceedings. As we shall see in the next chapter, many of her functions were now taken over by a prepubescent girl called the ‘great abstinence child’ (ōmonoimi). Rather than a kami maiden, the princess was now simply a court overseer. Princess Taki was different from her predecessor, Ōku, because Amaterasu had taken on a different guise:  that of a female heavenly deity and imperial ancestress. The 698 relocation constituted a major investment, and quite possibly marked the very origin of the Ise Shrine in a form that is recognizable today.

Summing Up The disjointed bits of information that one can glean from such problematic sources as Nihon shoki and Kojiki are unlikely ever to wield an undisputed account of the early history of the Ise Shrine. Yet this chapter argues that there is circumstantial evidence for the following hypotheses: 1. Emperor Tenmu replaced Tenji’s worship of the kami of Miwa with that of a closely related kami, Amaterasu. 2. This Amaterasu was a male deity, associated with snakes, epidemics and warfare, and served by a virgin priestess. 3. This deity was also associated with weaving, and with ironworking; in the latter guise, he served as the tutelary deity of the Owari lineage that had fostered Tenmu as a child and supported him in the Jinshin coup. 4. In 673, a year after his victory in the Jinshin coup, Tenmu sent his daughter Ōku to Ise to serve this deity as a kami maiden. She served as Amaterasu’s ‘abstinence princess’ in a compound in Taki. 5. Tenmu’s Amaterasu was both a threat to the realm and a supreme deity who formed the apex of a new system of imperial kami worship: the jingi system.

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6. Tenmu’s widow, Empress Jitō, transformed Amaterasu into a female deity and imperial ancestor. Ōku was recalled from Ise. The legend that Amaterasu won the realm for Tenmu in the Jinshin campaign dates from Jitō’s reign, and is first attested in a 696 poem. 7. Jitō’s visit to Ise Province in 692 coincided with Miwa’s displacement by Ise. 8. In 698 Jitō secured the throne for her young grandson Monmu. A new Ise priestess was appointed, and the ‘Great Shrine of Taki’ was ‘moved to Watarai’. At the very least, this marked a further upgrading of the Ise Shrine. 9. The Ise cult of Amaterasu was projected back into history in both Kojiki and Nihon shoki, although Amaterasu’s position within the imperial myths remained strikingly ambivalent in the latter work. This string of events provides a clear starting point for the history of ‘classical Ise’. At the same time, however, it is necessary to call attention to the many gaps that remain in our understanding of early Ise. First of all, nothing is known of the rituals performed at Ise during the period discussed here. Even more worryingly, the sources are silent about its companion shrine, the ‘Outer Shrine’ of Toyuke.72 A  lack of both early sources and archaeological evidence leaves many riddles unsolved. Before jumping ahead to 804, as we shall do in the next chapter, it will be useful to reflect on the nature of early Ise. Traditional accounts emphasize the function of Ise as a focus for Tenmu’s state-​building efforts.73 What often disappears from view in such accounts is the fear of divine violence that is so palpably expressed in the sources. If one thinks of Ise as a place consciously designed as the national hub of a court-​controlled divine hierarchy, its founding myth appears grossly inappropriate. This myth does not relate how a benevolent ancestral deity supported the imperial dynasty; rather, it tells of the ruler’s unremitting struggle to placate vengeful deities. Multiple passages in Nihon shoki praise Sujin for his success in pacifying the country by worshipping the heavenly and earthly deities; yet we also hear that he died early because of a kami curse. The same fate struck other rulers, including even the Heavenly Grandson Ninigi. According to Kojiki, Ninigi made the fatal mistake of casting shame on the mountain kami Ōyamatsumi; in revenge, that deity has since ‘caused all heavenly rulers to die young’. Likewise, Tenmu’s worship of the jingi, including Amaterasu at Ise, was always precarious and often unsuccessful. The court was never quite in control, despite great efforts at maintaining ritual purity at all times. The kami faced by seventh-​century rulers were lethal. Their cult originated in a society that was coming to terms with a series of terrifying crises that ultimately had their source in events on the Asian continent: the rise of the Tang empire and its invasion of Korea. These events brought a spate of plagues (smallpox, measles, influenza) to the Japanese islands. Large-​scale epidemics originating in China first began to spread across the Eurasian continent in the early centuries AD, but Japan appears to have escaped lightly until the seventh century, thanks to its relative isolation and low population density. The Tang involvement in Korea and the Japanese efforts to centralize power in Chinese-​style capitals changed this, and

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throughout the eighth century, court records report severe epidemics at a rate of one every three years.74 Both the boom in temple construction and the court’s intensifying involvement in shrine cults were answers to the horrors of this new threat. The early history court cult of Ise was played out around two overarching themes that, at first sight, seem contradictory. On one hand, Amaterasu appears as a hostile deity who afflicts the land with illness; on the other, (s)he is given the benevolent role of bestowing heavenly authority on the ruler and imposing order on the gods of the realm. This contradiction was a true reflection of the struggles of the early Japanese state. The ambiguous figure of Amaterasu mirrors the ambiguous situation of Tenmu and Jitō, who strained to create a form of emperorship that exuded unassailable legitimacy and superhuman might, while at the same time suffering continuous deadly attacks from the same divine powers that were supposed to protect imperial rule.

Chapter 2 C L ASSICAL I SE :  H OSOPHOBIA C ODI FI E D

In our reconstruction of Ise’s earliest history, mythological accounts of the shrines’ origins have taken centre stage. However, myth is only one strategy for sacralizing places, and arguably not a very effective one. After all, tales about long-​past events are available only to those who can read or hear them, and in ancient Japan, that was a rare privilege indeed. A much more tangible form of sacralization, with a much more convincing effect, is the performance of ritual. Rituals require very real investments of time and resources. They manage society’s relationship with the gods, and they involve many different groups of people: the priests who actually perform the rituals, the producers of the materials used in the procedures, the sponsors who fund them and even outsiders who either witness some part of the ritual process or hear about it. Not every sacred site may need a striking myth, but without regular rituals, no place can retain its sacredness. If little has yet been said about Ise ritual so far, this is because we lack the sources. The first detailed descriptions of the Ise Shrines, their staff and their ritual calendar appeared in 804, well over a century after the formative reigns of Tenmu and Jitō. Kōtaijingū and Toyukegū gishikichō (Protocols of the Imperial Great Shrine and of the Toyuke Shrine) represent by far the oldest records of shrine ritual anywhere in Japan. The procedures of the jingi rituals performed at the court, which were written down around the same time (in Kōnin shiki, begun in 801 and promulgated in 830), are no longer extant, so the earliest information we have about any kind of kami ritual beyond Ise is found in the Engi shiki, a record of court procedures completed as late as 927. The Ise Protocols present us with a unique window on ritual practice at Ise, and they exerted great influence on the later development of kami ritual in general. The 804 Protocols soon gained canonical stature and served as a fixed point of reference whenever Ise was to be ‘restored’ to its ‘original’ state. In early modern and modern times, especially, the Ise Protocols were held high as a timeless model of authentic shrine ritual.1 Some of the most ubiquitous procedures performed at shrines today, such as the offering of tamagushi branches in front of a hidden kami, were standardized as foundational rites of modern Shinto on the basis of these protocols. In the manner of canonical sources, the protocols are often read as unadulterated traditions of great antiquity. In actual fact, however, their contents

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reflect the interests of the moment in history when they were compiled. By 804, the cultic and political landscape surrounding the Ise Shrines had changed dramatically. One key factor of change in the century that had passed since Jitō was the expansion of Buddhism. The Ise of 804 was unique in its own time for its policy of isolating itself from Buddhism. This policy set Ise apart from all other shrines in the country, and would, much later, inspire the notion that shrines represent an indigenous, non-​Buddhist tradition called Shinto. The compilation of the protocols bolstered this new policy of isolation and made it permanent. Another aspect of eighth-​century life that had a clear impact on the protocols was a new variant on an old theme: using Ise to buttress the imperial succession. The protocols were an outcome of a renewed interest in Ise on the part of the court. Needless to say, that interest was not inspired by a concern for Japan’s ancient cultural heritage. Rather, it reflected the court’s belief that Ise was relevant to the issues of the day.

Buddhism and the Imperial Succession Buddhism had spread to all corners of Japanese society already in the seventh century. Jitō built splendid temples in her new capital, and her reign saw the introduction of nationwide Buddhist rituals and state-​ regulated ordination of monks and nuns. Buddhism expanded further in subsequent reigns. Most famously, Emperor Shōmu (r. 701–​56) founded a network of state temples, two in each of Japan’s sixty-​plus provinces, and built the enormous Tōdaiji in the capital as a national ordination platform. These and other Buddhist projects not only outshone the jingi cult completely, but also introduced new ideas about the nature of the kami and their place in the world. As one might expect, it also brought new kami to the fore. Most conspicuous among these was Usa Hachiman, a formerly obscure deity who was moved from Usa in Kyushu to a new shrine-​ temple complex in the vicinity of the capital (Iwashimizu Hachimangū). This same deity was installed as the protective deity of Tōdaiji itself. These developments must be understood in a wider Buddhist context. Throughout Buddhist Asia, divine beings of various kinds were incorporated in a vertically layered cosmology, ranging from various hells at the bottom to the enlightened realm of the buddhas at the top. Humans and gods live in the Sahā world, located between these extremes; humans on the continents below, and gods of increasing rank on the slopes of the central Mount Sumeru and in the lower heavens that lie above that mountain’s summit. The gods are a category of sentient beings, subject to the karmic cycle of birth and death, rebirth and ‘re-​death’ just like humans; only enlightenment, attained by practising the Dharma, can release them from the chains of cause and effect. The highest gods, often identified as Indra, Brahmā and the four Deva Kings, rule the Sahā world from their Sumeru palaces as protectors of the Dharma and lords of all divine beings. At lower levels, powerful gods fade into petty demons in urgent need of Buddhist guidance or, if

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incorrigible, elimination. The gods, then, are either potentially useful foot soldiers of the Buddha or harmful beings awaiting Buddhist subjugation. This discourse allows for various interpretations of the king: from an incarnation of Indra and commander of lesser gods, to a humble but powerful follower of the Dharma who aids the Buddha’s endeavour to bring enlightenment to all sentient beings, both human and divine.2 In Japan, this discourse inspired the founding of temples at shrines (jingūji, jinganji). Such temples appeared already in the late seventh century, but they did not become widespread until a century later. Their monks represented a new kind of kami officiant. Few shrines were permanently manned; even at larger shrines, rituals were performed by members of the lineages associated with them. These lineage representatives served as priests only for the duration of the season’s rituals. Thus, the monks of shrine temples were rarely in competition with kami priests over the signification and control of shrine deities. As many lineages vied for the privilege of expanding their cultic centre with a ‘modern’ temple, shrine temples soon became the norm. In Ise, the situation was different. Ise did have permanent priests, and the intrusion of monks was not welcomed. A strong counter-​reaction transformed the shrines into an island of explicit non-​Buddhism in an increasingly Buddhist world. The development of such a non-​Buddhist identity at the very heart of the court was of enormous historical importance. It was around Ise, as a high-​prestige and yet explicitly non-​Buddhist site of imperial ritual, that Shinto would be construed in subsequent centuries. The 804 Protocols are the earliest sources to document the existence at Ise of such a non-​Buddhist identity. The first section of the protocol of the Inner Shrine includes a list of words that are subject to ‘taboo’ (imi). More than half of these are Buddhist terms:  Buddha, sutra, pagoda, monk, lay practitioner, temple and vegetarian food. The remaining tabooed words referred to various causes of impurity:  beating, crying, blood, meat, death, grave and illness. The inclusion of basic Buddhist vocabulary in this list implied that temples and monks were as defiling as blood and death. Strikingly, there is not a single reference to Buddhist practices anywhere else in the protocols. In an age when Buddhism was transforming shrine sites across the land and Buddhist procedures were rapidly becoming the norm for all ritual, the compilation of these non-​Buddhist, or even anti-​Buddhist protocols is remarkable. There are reasons to see this turn against Buddhism as an eighth-​century innovation, rather than a continuation of an older tradition. Turning Ise into an explicitly non-​Buddhist space may well have been one of the goals of the compilation of protocols in 804. In 816, an unprecedented incident occurred that supports such a reading. In this year, Ōnakatomi Kiyomochi was punished and removed from his post as head of the Office of the Ise Shrines (Daijingūji) after Jingikan diviners had established that his engagement in Buddhist practices had caused divine wrath (tatari).3 If no such accusation had been made against earlier Ise heads, this was hardly because they had all kept their distance from Buddhism.

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This scandalous firing of Ise’s highest administrator, then, appears as an attempt to enforce new routines, as spelled out in the 804 Protocols. By 804, Buddhism may have had a presence at Ise for more than sixty years. Daijingū shozōjiki (Record of miscellaneous matters pertaining to the Ise Shrines) records the founding of a shrine temple in Ise in 742:4 3.11.742. The Minister of the Right, Tachibana no Moroe, enters the Ise Great Shrine. Referring to an imperial edict, he announces that a temple must be built in response to the emperor’s vow.

Daijingū shozōjiki covers shrine events from the mythical age of Ise’s origins until 1069. Having passed through the hands of many authors and copyists, it is not necessarily a reliable witness to eighth-​century events. This particular entry would later play an important role in medieval redefinitions of Ise; therefore, one must expect that it served the agenda of another age.5 Yet it can be confirmed that an Ise temple called Ōkasedera was in existence by 766. This temple was located on the western bank of the Miyagawa. One possible reading of the sources is that Shōmu founded this temple in order to fulfil a vow that he made at the time of a 740 rebellion, subdued after the court had dispatched special offerings to Ise and other sites.6 If this is correct, Ise was among the first shrines to be ‘rewarded’ with a temple for special services to the court. Also, it would imply that Shōmu was convinced that Amaterasu, like other kami, was in need of Buddhist sublimation. The Buddhicization of the court was further intensified under Empress Kōken/​ Shōtoku, who occupied the throne twice under different names (749–​58 and 764–​ 70). Shōtoku, as I shall call her here, broke all precedent by appointing monks of various lineage backgrounds to the highest offices of the court bureaucracy. This culminated in the promotion of her Buddhist councillor, the Hossō monk Dōkyō, to the novel position of ‘Dharma King’, putting him on a par with the empress herself. Towards the end of Shōtoku’s reign, in 669, there was even talk of an oracle inspired by Usa Hachiman, allegedly promising peace and prosperity if Dōkyō were enthroned as emperor.7 A  military officer was sent to Usa to investigate and, contrary to expectations, Hachiman opposed Dōkyō’s promotion, declaring in a subsequent oracle that ‘the Heavenly Sun dynasty must always keep the succession within the imperial line’.8 The officer was accused of counterfeiting an oracle and sent into exile, but Hachiman proved to have allies in the capital, and Dōkyō soon lost his footing. After Shōtoku’s death in the following year, Dōkyō was sidetracked to a rural abbotship far from the capital, where he soon died. The affair’s most dramatic effect was a dynastic shift from the lineage that derived from Tenmu to that of his older brother Tenji: Shōtoku was succeeded by Tenji’s grandson Kōnin. These events focused attention on the dynastic succession, its relation to the jingi cult, and the potential of Buddhist monks to undermine it. This potential had first become obvious during Empress Shōtoku’s 765 ceremony of offering first fruits to the jingi (the daijōsai), reinstating her as empress after she had

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become a nun. Famously, she issued the following edict on this momentous occasion: First we will serve the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha); next we pay homage to the deities of heaven and earth; and lastly we . . . exercise compassion on the princes, ministers and common people of the realm. There are those who believe that the deities should be kept separate from the Three Jewels, but if one reads the sutras one discovers that it is the deities who protect and pay homage to the Buddhist Dharma. Surely therefore there should be nothing to stop either those who have become ordained or those who have taken lay orders becoming involved in the worship of the deities.9

This edict does not downplay the importance of the jingi; rather, it seeks to recruit them for a new era of explicitly Buddhist rule. Shōtoku continued to pay the jingi lavish attention. She provided funds for the repair and construction of numerous shrines and awarded court rank and a tax base to many. Special attention was given to the new and old deities of the imperial line: Hachiman and Ise. Shōtoku expanded the Hachiman cult in 767 by setting up a shrine temple for Hachiman’s divine consort, Yahata-​hime.10 In the same year, an auspicious cloud was observed over an Ise mountain. When this was reported to the court, it was celebrated with the inauguration of a new period name (nengō): Jingo-​keiun, ‘Auspicious Cloud of Divine Protection’. Months later an imperial order designated Ōkasedera as Ise’s official shrine temple ‘for all time’.11 These moves appear to have been planned well in advance: already in the previous year, a large Buddha statue had been cast for ‘the shrine temple of the Great Ise Shrines’.12 Dōkyō’s fall from power in 770, however, changed everything. Ise’s shrine temple was moved away from the shrines twice, in 772 and in 780; after this final move, it disappears from the sources. These events were described in slightly different terms in records of the court (Shoku Nihongi) and the shrines (Daijingū shozōjiki). The former notes that in 772, a princess was caught in an ‘abnormal storm’. Court diviners identified this storm as a curse of the deities of Tsukiyomi Shrine, which formed part of the Inner Shrine complex at Ise. Offerings were increased and the shrine itself was promoted; also, the Ise Shrine temple was moved to a site in the more distant Iitaka District. In 780, the Jingikan concluded that the anger of the kami had not abated because the temple ‘was still close to the shrine districts’, and permission was given to move it even further away. Ise records present a more local perspective. In 773, two low-​ranking Ise priests who passed by Ōkasedera ended up fighting with one of its monks. The temple complained to the office of the district governor, and the priests were forced to apologize. Two years later, in 775, two locals were attacked by three (or five) monks as they were fishing for ayu sweetfish near the temple. Their catch was intended for use in the twice-​daily offerings of food at the Outer Shrine. In a formal complaint to the Jingikan, the temple was accused of ‘defiling the offerings and abusing the people of the shrine districts’. As a result, it was stripped of its status as Ise’s official shrine temple.13

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Temples moving into shrine territory and meeting with local opposition was nothing new. A famous case from Tenmu’s reign was that of Kudara no Ōdera, which had to be moved after angering local kami.14 The reason for removing a temple from shrine lands was not that Buddhism in general was defiling; rather, it was a way to defuse a particular conflict of interests. The fate of Ise’s shrine temple is described in similar terms in both surviving sources. Yet the episode also marked a radical change in Ise’s relation to Buddhism. It set the scene for the more radical exclusion of Buddhism from the shrines prescribed in the 804 Protocols. That more radical leap occurred against a background of upheaval at court: the end of the Tenmu dynasty and the return to the line of Tenji. It is reasonable to expect that at this time of transition, Ise gained increased importance as a guarantor of imperial legitimacy. Takatori Masao has pointed out that both Kōnin and Kanmu sent their crown princes to Ise (in 778 and 791).15 These princes were ill and offered prayers for their own recovery. This was unprecedented, because at all other times such prayers had been conveyed by the abstinence princess or by imperial envoys. Takatori therefore proposes that these extraordinary visits by designated crown princes also served the aim of strengthening the ties of these future emperors with Ise. The 804 Protocols were submitted to the court of Kanmu (r. 781–​806) towards the end of his eventful reign. Kanmu had been an unlikely candidate for the throne. His mother was from a family of Paekche origin, and Kanmu himself had held various bureaucratic posts, serving for a while as head of the court’s Confucian academy. His father, Kōnin, had become emperor at the advanced age of 62 for the single reason that he was the father of Prince Osabe, whose mother was Shōmu’s daughter. However, Osabe and his mother had been accused of ‘sorcery’, and both died in exile in 775. It was with Kanmu, then, that the final link with the Tenmu lineage was broken. This fact is often related to Kanmu’s determination to leave the capital of Nara, in the heartland of the old regime. Founding first Nagaoka-​kyō (in 784)  and then Heian-​kyō (i.e. Kyoto, in 794), Kanmu lived under constant threat from both living and dead opponents. Among the latter was his younger brother, Prince Sawara (fl. 785), whose ‘angry spirit’ was believed to be the cause of many deaths in Kanmu’s household, as well as a series of epidemics and floods. Sawara had come under suspicion because of his close connection with Tōdaiji, which, naturally, was determined to stop the abandonment of Nara. These various circumstances go a long way towards explaining why Kanmu was interested in strengthening the Ritsuryō state, its jingi cult (which had fallen into a precarious state of neglect16) and the Ise Shrines in particular. Kanmu was the first emperor who had actually visited Ise (albeit as crown prince, in 778), with the possible exception of Jitō. The imperial line’s narrow escape from Dōkyō’s attempt at establishing a Buddhist theocracy, the subsequent switch of the succession to Tenji’s line and finally the transfer of the capital in the face of Buddhist opposition all contributed to Kanmu’s interest in underpinning imperial authority in a manner that did not depend solely on the Buddhist establishment of Nara. Grooming Ise for the role of ancestral fane and protector of his imperial lineage was a part of that project.17

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The Ise of the Protocols Ritsuryō law consisted of succinct and often rather abstract articles that needed much specification if they were to be translated into actual practice. Such specifications were known as shiki, ‘procedures’. Kanmu initiated the first systematic collection and compilation of a normative set of shiki. This endeavour eventually resulted in the Kōnin shiki, a work of forty volumes completed in 820. Both the Kōnin shiki and its successor, Jōgan shiki (871), are lost, but much of their content survives in the Engi shiki of 927, which is extant. The Ise Protocols of 804 display considerable overlap with book 4 of the Engi shiki, which deals with the Ise Shrines. This leaves little doubt that the protocols’ compilation was initiated as part of Kanmu’s shiki project. The protocols were drafted by Ise priests, who sent their reports to the Jingikan in the capital, where they were checked and sent on to the Daijōkan or Council of State, the court’s main administrative institution. They were designed as regulatory documentation for the court bureaucrats who funded and oversaw Ise. This explains why the protocols spend more time on the economic resources and requirements of the shrines than on the details of their daily running. Even so, they allow us to visualize the Ise complex of 804 in an amount of detail that no other early shrine can match.18 First of all, it is striking that the shrines submitted two sets of protocols rather than just one. One shrine is styled the Amaterasu Great Imperial Shrine, and the other the Toyuke Great Shrine; we shall refer to them as the Inner and Outer Shrines, even though these designations first came into use half a century later.19 Ise, then, consisted of two independent shrines run by separate groups of priests. Since at least 781, their management was coordinated by the Daijingūji, the Office of the Great [Ise] Shrines, staffed by court officials; its head was also known as daijingūji.20 The Inner Shrine outshone the Outer in terms of sheer numbers of shrine halls, priests, offerings and so forth. The difference in status was reflected in the shrines’ titles: while both were ‘great’, only the shrine of Amaterasu was ‘imperial’. There was also a third complex, not described in the Ise Protocols: the Saigūryō or Office of the Abstinence Princess, located about eight kilometres northwest of the Miyagawa. It does not figure in the protocols because it was an independent imperial institution. It outsized and dominated both the Daijingūji Office and the shrines themselves. The Saigūryō appears to have been put on a formal footing in 727, when it employed 121 officials in eleven sub-​offices.21 The abstinence princess (itsuki no miko or saiō) was an unmarried imperial princess who lived a life of ritual purity dedicated to the Ise deities, staying permanently in the Saigūryō until she was relieved of her duties. She attended the three most prominent rituals performed at the shrines (tsukinami in the sixth and twelfth months, and kanname in the ninth month), as well as a range of ceremonies performed within the Saigūryō itself. The Ise Shrines proper occupied an impressively large area. The Inner Shrine’s Protocol put its boundaries at Mount Asama in the east, some small islands along the Ise coast in the north, a small stream called Shitabi no Ogawa (probably near today’s Matsusaka) in the west and the mountains of Shima Province in the south.

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This area includes the Outer Shrine, which did not claim its own boundaries. The shrines’ territory was referred to as ‘the two shrine districts’ of Watarai and Taki as early as 692.22 A third district, Iino, had been separated off from Taki in 664; the Inner Shrine Protocol designated it a third shrine district, but it did not in fact become so until 889.23 The 800 or so statutory households within Ise’s two shrine districts were service households (kanbe) of the Ise Shrines. In addition, the shrines were granted the labour and lands of a further 152 service households in other parts of Ise province, as well as 338 in other provinces. Some of these kanbe produced designated goods for use in Ise rituals. Their corvée duties and tax obligations were channelled through the Daijingūji Office (or, beyond the shrine districts, local provincial governors) and the Jingikan.24 The total tax base of the Ise Shrines was larger than that of any other shrine, with the possible exception of Usa Hachiman Shrine, but much smaller than that of the largest temples. Ise’s shrine districts housed a large number of shrines. The most impressive, of course, was the Inner Shrine, although it was rather small compared with even modest temple halls. The main kami hall had an elevated floor, reached by ten-​ step stairs, and was decorated with gilded fittings. Its thatched roof was weighted down by ten billets or cross-​beams (katsuogi), and its gables were accentuated by distinctive crossed rafters (chigi). The protocols refer to this hall as shōden, a term otherwise reserved for the main building of the imperial palace. It housed three kami: Amaterasu in the centre (enshrined in the form of a mirror), Tajikarawo at the right (a bow) and Yorozuhatatoyoaki-​tsu-​hime at the left (a sword). Tajikarawo figures in both Kojiki and Nihon shoki as the kami who pulled Amaterasu out of the rock-​cave; Yorozuhatatoyoaki-​tsu-​hime appears in Nihon shoki as the mother of Ninigi.25 The kami bodies of these deities were kept in three chests (mifunashiro); Amaterasu’s mirror was further contained in an inner box (mihishiro) and wrapped in six layers of precious cloth. The main shrine hall resembled a traditional type of elevated granary, but it was furnished as a dwelling. Amaterasu had two ‘beds’ (miyuka), both consisting of two layers of cloth and two padded spreads (mifusuma). The bed that was ‘laid out’ (idashi-​suuru miyuka) came with no less than seventy-​two items, including clothing, shoes, scarves, combs and two pillows. Amaterasu’s two companion kami had no beds. The doors of her hall were rarely opened. With few exceptions, worship was performed in front of the shrine’s closed doors or underneath its raised floor. The main hall was set in spacious grounds surrounded by five fences:  one ‘auspicious’ (mizugaki), three ‘jewel-​ like’ (tamagaki) and finally one ‘board fence’ (itagaki). Access was through no less than eleven gates, three of them with thatched roofs; the first gate led to an open courtyard where rituals were performed. At both sides of this courtyard there were pavilions for use of the abstinence princess during her three annual visits. The eastern one offered seating to the princess herself, and the western one to her ladies-​in-​waiting (nyojuji). Within the innermost mizugaki fence, at the northern end of the enclosure, the main hall was flanked by two smaller treasure halls. They were used to store a large array of divine treasures (kandakara) as well as offerings, mostly of silk thread and

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cloth, that were presented to the shrine by the emperor on four annual occasions. The treasures included gilded miniature implements for spinning and weaving, mirrors, bows, arrows, quivers, swords, saddles, shields and a koto, all made of exquisite materials. These treasures made the shrines attractive targets for thieves. In 791  ‘many thieves’ broke into the eastern treasure hall to steal the silk thread that was stored there. One of them threw a torch into this hall, and the ensuing fire destroyed all the buildings in the inner courtyard; perhaps they stood close together. The mirror, bow and sword that served as the kami bodies in the main hall escaped the fire by ‘flying away to the top of the mountain in front of the shrine’, but all offerings and treasures were lost. These included unknown amounts of brocade fabrics, eight chests of unspecified offerings, 1,400 hiki of silk (1 hiki is more than 200 metres!), 460 skeins of silk thread, 690 swords, untold numbers of bows, arrows, halberds and shields, a mirror, and many other ‘divine treasures’.26 To prevent such disasters, the area within the triple tamagaki fences accommodated four sentry posts that were manned continuously by shrine personnel. The main shrine precinct displayed a number of apparently archaic traits. In contrast to most temples, the shrine buildings were made of plain timber, supported by pillars set in potholes rather than on stone foundations, and their roofs were thatched rather than tiled. In the warm, moist climate of Ise, such structures were not designed to last. By at least the 760s, but probably some decades earlier,27 the entire shrine complex was rebuilt with new materials and refurnished with new treasures on an adjoining plot once every twenty years. The protocols dedicate much space to specifications of the materials needed for this great undertaking, as well as its ritual proceedings. Much has been written about the significance of this practice. It was not as though contemporary building techniques did not allow for more permanent structures; some seventh-​century temples, such as Hōryūji, are still standing today. One may wonder whether the shrines were willingly kept in an ‘archaic’ style in order to emphasize their difference from other contemporary sites of ritual. Was Ise’s architecture designed to underscore the ancient, ‘native’ origins of the imperial court, in contrast to the ‘modern’, continental architecture of temples? The taboo word for ‘temple’ (tera) was ‘tiled roof ’ (kawarabuki); did thatch serve as a symbol of ancient nativeness? Most probably it did not. In the eighth century the Ise Shrines would not have appeared as ‘archaic’ as they seemed later. In fact, their layout was strikingly similar to that of provincial headquarters throughout the land. Such outposts of the court bureaucracy consisted of rectangular compounds surrounded by fences. They were invariably oriented along a north–​south axis, with the main building facing south. Most structures rested on pillars that were set in potholes, and had thatched roofs. The buildings were placed symmetrically, with an open space in front of the main south gate. This pattern was of continental origin; in Japan, it defined both the imperial court and most other contemporary compounds, secular or religious. The Ise Shrines were no exception, and they hardly stood out as unique in any way. One scholar has argued that the placement of buildings in the Ise precincts copied early temples such as Yakushiji and Hōryūji, which had been built by

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A Social History of the Ise Shrines

Korean artisans in the seventh century.28 Fukuyama Toshio, who has reconstructed classical Ise on the basis of the 804 Protocols, points at a particular architectural element in the gables of the main kami halls (kagamigata no ki) that appears to have been copied from a similar feature in the Golden Hall of Hōryūji.29 The untreated timber of the shrines was decorated with gilded ornaments that were hardly designed to communicate primordial primitiveness. All in all, Ise’s design would have struck ancient visitors as neither ‘native’ nor particularly archaic; this was a quality that the shrines acquired only much later, when pillars set in potholes and thatched roofs no longer seemed appropriate for monumental architecture. What must have been a fairly standard compound became striking only due to the fact that early ritualization of the building process prevented the design from being updated. The codification of existing procedures in 804 impeded later innovation, causing the shrines to become increasingly exotic as time went on. The main shrine hall displayed one other remarkable feature. Centrally placed below this hall stood a post that stopped short of the floor. This post, referred to in the protocol as the shin no hashira (pivot post) or imi-​hashira (abstinence post),30 was the object of much ritual attention. Perhaps the most common modern interpretation of this post is that it represents a relic from an earlier period in the shrines’ history, when there was as yet no shrine building. At that early stage, the abstinence princess would have suspended the mirror of Amaterasu from an ‘abstinence post’ in a procedure similar to that described in the myth of the Rock-​ Cave of Heaven.31 Others argue that the post formed a set with the mirror, both serving together as the permanent seat of Amaterasu.32 The post would then have symbolized the state of abstinence-​induced purity in which this kami dwells. The protocols give few answers; they neither relate the post to myth nor explain its meaning. Yet there is little doubt that the pivot post had great ritual importance. It was made from a tree that was especially selected for this purpose, and put in place before the building of the hall itself was begun, in a ritualized process overseen by court priests of the Inbe lineage. The most solemn of offerings were presented at the foot of this post under the hall’s floor, rather than in front of the stairs leading up to the doors. Although the post was not an object of mythification, it was clearly seen as the ‘heart’ (shin) of the shrine’s ritual space. The Inner Shrine’s inner compound, focusing on the main hall of Amaterasu, was surrounded by a considerable number of other buildings. There was an enclosure for the brewing of different kinds of sake, and another where food and drink were shared by priests and other ritualists as the last stage of ritual proceedings. The size of the latter, called the naoraidono, gives an indication of the number of people involved in the main rituals: it consisted of three pavilions of thirty, fifteen and twelve metres long, each reserved for participants of different ranks. A cluster of four storehouses stocked rice, various goods paid to the shrine in tribute (mostly cloth), salt and ritual implements such as mats and offering tables. The abstinence princess had her own fenced-​in compound on the bank of the Isuzu River, consisting of main hall, a dressing hall, a storehouse for the palanquin that was used to transport her and a small toilet house by the waterside. Elsewhere in the shrine grounds was a group of four buildings where the princess

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and her train took their meals while they were at the Inner Shrine. Finally, the princess was provided with a stable for horses and oxen and yet another building for her palanquin. A number of similar but more modest compounds were reserved for the many categories of ritualists who served the shrine. The one used by the main priest or negi contained an abstinence hall (imidono), smaller buildings for maintaining a ritually pure fire, cooking and eating, a storehouse, and a stable, all surrounded by a fence. An office (mandokoro) was located elsewhere in the shrine grounds. Ritualists of lesser rank occupied fourteen smaller compounds. Not surprisingly, shrine records note numerous cases of fires occurring in these compounds, typically resulting in fines or even dismissal of their occupants. The protocols specify that all these ritualists, starting with the negi, were to ‘dwell permanently in their abstinence halls’ and consume only food that was prepared on the pure fires that were kept there. Yet they also had ‘back houses’ (shirie), implying that they stayed in the shrine’s abstinence halls only at times of ritual importance. To ensure that no defilement was transferred to the shrine from these back houses, ritualists were obliged to make sure that even these were kept in a state of purity, and there were periodic rites to ensure that no impurity accumulated at either the abstinence halls or the back houses. In addition to the main shrine, the shrine grounds also included lesser shrines. By far the most important among them was the Aramatsuri Shrine, to be found immediately north of the main shrine. This shrine housed the aramitama or ‘violent spirit’ of Amaterasu. It was rather more modest than Amaterasu’s main shrine, but still featured mizugaki and tamagaki fences, a gate and two guard posts. This shrine was the foremost among the four ‘auxiliary shrines’ (betsugū) that belonged to the Inner Shrine. The other three, the Tsukiyomi, Takihara33 and Izawa Shrines, were all located in separate shrine grounds, at considerable distance from the main Ise precinct. The kami of the Takihara and Izawa Shrines was Amaterasu, as in the main shrine.

The Inner Shrine’s Auxiliary Shrines, Their Kami and Kami Seats Aramatsuri no Miya

aramitama of the main shrine

Mirror

Tsukiyomi no Miya

Izanagi; Izanami; Tsukiyomi; Tsukiyomi’s aramitama

Tsukiyomi: statue Others: unknown

Takihara no Miya

Site for worshipping Amaterasu from afar

Mirror

[Takihara no] Narabi no Ibid. Miya

Ibid.

Izawa no Miya

Ibid.

Ibid.

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A Social History of the Ise Shrines

Tsukiyomi Shrine gained the status of an auxiliary shrine only in 772, after the storm that caused the court to move Ise’s shrine temple was ascribed to this deity. To pacify Tsukiyomi, the shrine was henceforth to be presented with a horse at the annual kanname ritual and raised to the same status as the Aramatsuri Shrine. At the same time, Tsukiyomi’s ‘violent spirit’ and the two kami Izanagi and Izanami were granted treatment as ‘court-​sponsored shrines’ (kansha) within the Tsukiyomi Shrine.34 This shrine was exceptional in that its kami were the only ones in the Ise complex (beyond Amaterasu herself) to have any obvious connection with court myth. Tsukiyomi was enshrined in the form of a statue of a man clad in purple, riding a horse and carrying a sword. This is the oldest example of any kami being represented by a statue. Other Ise kami resided in mirrors, stones or even water; many had no kami body at all. In addition to these four auxiliary shrines, the Inner Shrine presided over no less than forty lesser shrines, spread across a wide area in the Watarai District and beyond.35 None of these shrines had any obvious connection with Amaterasu. They were placed under the control of the Inner Shrine simply because they were located on Ise Shrine lands. Many of the kami names in the protocol relate to rivers and floods (ōmizu). This has a natural explanation:  the Ise Shrines stood in an area where a number of rivers ran into the sea through ever-​changing riverbeds, and even the main shrines themselves were vulnerable to flooding. Other shrines carried names that referred to crops or to the hills surrounding the floodplain. Of all these shrines, only one was situated within the grounds of the Inner Shrine: Takimatsuri. This shrine, originally located on the shore of the Isuzu River, featured neither a building nor a kami body but was, nevertheless, serviced by its own dedicated monoimi, because it presided over the source of water used in Inner Shrine ritual. The Inner Shrine grounds further accommodated a host of minor deities known generically as ‘shrine-​roaming kami’ (miyameguri no kami). As a part of the Inner Shrine’s main rituals, offerings were provided to 124 such nameless deities. The Outer Shrine may well be described as a smaller version of the Inner Shrine. The main sanctuary was similar in shape but smaller. The main difference from the Inner Shrine precinct was the presence of a ‘hall of divine food’ (mikedono or mikeden), located between the tamagaki and itagaki fences, where food was offered twice daily to Amaterasu, Toyuke and the other kami who shared the main halls. Beyond the main compound, the Outer Shrine comprised an area with three storehouses, a stable and a hall for the princess’s palanquin, an enclosure with three naorai pavilions, a compound where the princess would take her meals, a compound for brewing sake, a shrine office, and finally a group of abstinence halls for the shrine’s priests and other ritualists. The hall of divine food (henceforth referred to as the mike hall) was central to the Outer Shrine’s identity. In its account of the shrine’s origins, the protocol refers to a dream in which Amaterasu instructed Emperor Yūryaku: I have settled in the place I decided upon while I still stayed in the Plain of High Heaven. However, I  am alone and much distressed. To make matters worse,

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I am unable to partake of divine food easily. I wish to be joined by my kami of divine food (mike-​tsu-​kami), Toyuke, who resides in Hiji no Manai in Tanba Province.36

Yūryaku, we are told, immediately moved Toyuke to the Yamada Plain, where the Outer Shrine is still located. This myth defined the main function of this kami’s shrine: to prepare and serve food offerings to Amaterasu. This has given rise to the hypothesis that the Outer Shrine first originated as an ‘extension’ of the mike hall.37 It would imply that the Outer Shrine grew, within a short period of time, from a site with a particular ritual function into a full-​fledged shrine complex. If so, the Outer Shrine was not the only site to develop in that manner; sites for the production of salt or cloth also gave rise to (much smaller) shrines, while retaining their original functions. The mike hall was the only Ise hall built as a notched log construction, similar to the Shōsōin in Nara. As such, it is believed to retain an older architectural design than other Ise halls. It was refurnished every year with fresh woven draperies used to cover the walls and the ceiling, and contained deity seats in the form of ‘beds’ (miyuka) for Amaterasu and Toyuke, as well as a simpler seat for the gods who shared their halls. It featured doors to both the north and the south, which were opened twice every night when food was offered. This suggests that the gods of the two shrines were thought to ‘enter’ this hall from opposite directions. The Outer Shrine had only one auxiliary shrine, Taka Shrine, housing Toyuke’s ‘violent spirit’. The protocols list another twenty-​four minor shrines administered by the Outer Shrine. The shrine names suggest that their kami, too, were local deities of rivers, wells and fields –​with the exception of yet another Tsukuyomi (Tsukiyomi) Shrine. Finally, the shrine accommodated more than 200  ‘shrine-​ roaming’ kami, as well as two kami guarding the wells that served the main and Taka halls.

The Ise Priesthood The Inner Shrine had a staff of forty-​three priests, maidens and ritual craftsmen; the Outer Shrine employed a further twenty-​one. The protocols identify all staff by name and rank and list their main tasks. The Inner Shrine priesthood consisted of the following people: one negi (‘supplicant’) three uchibito (‘inner staff ’) thirteen monoimi (‘abstinence children’), of which one each served at the Aramatsuri, Tsukiyomi, Takihara and Izawa Shrines thirteen monoimi no chichi (‘monoimi fathers’) thirteen kouchibito (‘lesser inner staff ’), of which two served at the Tsukiyomi Shrine, and one each at the Aramatsuri, Takihara and Izawa Shrines

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A Social History of the Ise Shrines

At the top was the negi, Arakida Kiminari, who held a very modest court rank (junior seventh, higher grade). As the highest local official, he was under orders of the Daijingūji; indeed, it was to this office that the protocols were addressed. The negi was to lead the shrine’s ritualists in the proceedings of offering rice, ‘grown by the Watarai District’s governor and prepared by the monoimi maidens’, and seafood, ‘paid in tribute by the kami households in Shima’; he also recited the norito prayers. He was to keep silkworms in his shirie back house and present silk thread to the kami in the sixth and ninth months. Silk was produced only at the Inner Shrine, and there was no corresponding practice at the Outer Shrine. In addition to the negi, one of the Inner Shrine’s lesser uchibito (called hinomi no uchibito) was permanently engaged in the production of silk; the Inner and Outer Shrines may be contrasted to each other as specializing in silk and food offerings, respectively. The leader of the three uchibito had the special task of preparing futo-​tamagushi, branches hung with mulberry cloth (yū) that were stuck in the ground at various places in the precinct during rituals. The protocol states that these futo-​tamagushi represented the sakaki tree used in heaven to lure Amaterasu out of the rock-​ cave;38 once put in place, the futo-​tamagushi were referred to as the ‘eightfold sakaki of heaven’ (ame no yae-​sakaki). When norito were read in front of the shrine, the main celebrant (the head of the Daijingūji) was ‘hidden’ in this ‘forest’ of decorated branches.39 Of the remaining two uchibito, one was responsible for the seafood and the sake that was offered at the shrine’s main rituals, and the other for the food and drink that was presented to the princess and her entourage. The uchibito also shared the guard duties at the various posts within the shrine grounds. The monoimi were young children accompanied by their ‘fathers’  –​a term that could also include other relatives, some of whom were mothers or aunts. The monoimi were mostly young girls, but some tasks were set aside for boys; in 804, seven of the monoimi were girls and two were boys. The monoimi performed all the ritual tasks that required close contact with the kami. They were led by the ‘great monoimi’ (ōmonoimi), whose main duty was the actual presenting of food offerings during the shrine’s main rituals. Among all the shrines’ ritualists, only the ōmonoimi maiden was never to leave the shrine grounds; she must ‘stay within the great fence of the abstinence hall and may not return to her back house’.40 The protocol notes that ‘at present, it is the ōmonoimi rather than the abstinence princess who approaches the Great Kami and serves her in close proximity’.41 In 804, then, the ōmonoimi was understood to perform a ritual role that had once been reserved for the princess. The ōmonoimi was the first to touch the doors of the main hall before they were opened. Her elevated position was also signalled by the handouts she received after major rituals: the negi and ōmonoimi were granted more silk and cotton than other ritualists. The other monoimi carried specific titles that indicated the duties that defined their function. Mostly, these duties had to do with the offerings of food, sake and salt presented to the Inner Shrine’s deities. Two presented food offerings to the

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two kami who shared the main hall with Amaterasu, and one to the Takimatsuri Shrine in the Inner Shrine grounds. The others were tasked with assisting the preparation of those offerings and offering vessels: two were responsible for the brewing of unrefined and refined sake, another for the seething of salt, one for preparing stoneware, one for making offering tables and chests, and the last and tenth monoimi cut branches for use as futo-​tamagushi sticks. The final category of ritualists comprised six lesser uchibito. Four of them were craftsmen who produced various objects that were used in the shrine’s rituals, the fifth specialized in purification and the sixth took care of the shrine’s horse. Like the Inner Shrine, the Outer Shrine had one negi and three main uchibito, but only six monoimi and monoimi fathers, and five lesser uchibito. All Outer Shrine monoimi were girls. In contrast to the Inner Shrine, the rituals at the Outer Shrine included the growing of rice, and some of the monoimi had specific tasks in this connection. The so-​called sugadachi no monoimi opened the year’s cycle of cultivation; the ‘father’ of the ōmonoimi was then responsible for tending the shrine’s rice field. The central task of the Outer Shrine was the presentation of twice-​daily offerings at the mike hall. Here, the mikashigi no monoimi prepared the rice and assisted the ōmonoimi in presenting it, together with salt and sake made by two other monoimi. The uchibito were responsible for the production of mulberry cloth, metal implements (knives, chopsticks, axes, hoe blades), and straw hats and raincoats; one specialized in purification, and the last and fifth took care of the Outer Shrine’s horse. Some uchibito supplied both shrines: mulberry cloth, for example, was made only at the Outer Shrine; while stoneware offering vessels and wooden tables and chests were an Inner Shrine specialty. Among all these various ritualists we can perceive different kin groups. The negi of the Inner and Outer Shrines were of the Arakida and Watarai lineages, respectively, as were some of the uchibito and monoimi, but at both shrines most of these lower-​ranking priests were of the subordinate Isobe lineage, a name that disappeared from shrine records in medieval times. The protocols have nothing to say about the origins of the Arakida and Watarai lineages. Myths about their ancestors appear first in later sources. By the late Heian period, both lineages had created lineage myths that claimed equality with the Ōnakatomi, who monopolized the post of Daijingūji head. The Watarai traced their lineage back to Ame no Murakumo, a kami who fetched water from a heavenly well for Ninigi and deposited some of it in the Outer Shrine’s own well. The Arakida likewise maintained that their divine ancestor, Ame no Mitōshi, had played an important role in the rituals that lured Amaterasu from the Rock-​Cave of Heaven.42 These myths reveal more about the strategies of legitimization in the eleventh and twelfth centuries than about the actual origins of the Watarai and Arakida lineages, which remain unknown, and probably unknowable. More instructive is the tale of Tsuchinushi, negi of the Outer Shrine.43 In the eighth month of 851, while a typhoon was wreaking havoc throughout Ise Province, a wolf entered Tsuchinushi’s house and devoured his 13-​year-​old son.

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A Social History of the Ise Shrines

None in his household noticed anything until dawn, when they found the boy’s head and left leg in front of the hearth. Fearful of ritual impurity, Tsuchinushi immediately left the house and stayed away from his family for three weeks. At that point he returned to his shrine duties, only to find that another of his sons and a daughter died in quick succession in the course of the ninth month. A year later, ‘heavenly disturbances’ and imperial ill health prompted the Jingikan and the Yin Yang Bureau at court to perform divination. It revealed that the problems were caused by a death pollution that had provoked the anger of a great deity to the southeast of the capital. Soon, a messenger from the court found out about Tsuchinushi’s premature return to duty. As a result Tsuchinushi was ordered to perform a ‘great purification’, which included paying a hefty fine, and fired. Appealing was useless:  twelve years earlier the same Tsuchinushi had been suspended for causing impurity in connection with the daily food offerings. One wonders whether this unfortunate negi had made himself some powerful enemies, whether divine or human. The shrine records abound in tales similar to Tsuchinushi’s. Inadvertent breaches of ritual purity, such as dead bodies or animal carcasses found in the shrine precincts, births occurring in those precincts, or deaths in ritualists’ families, triggered immediate divine retribution and, in particular, imperial illness. Divination by court specialists would identify Ise as the source of the pollution, and the wrongdoers were ordered to perform ‘medium’ or ‘great’ purification, and sometimes dismissed. Such episodes display the ideal of tight court control over all aspects of the daily running of the Ise Shrines. They also prove that despite the lavishness of Ise ceremonial, its deities still inspired fear and were treated with extreme caution. Finally, they help us visualize Ise’s setting as a place where wolves roamed, wild dogs gnawed on skulls, drowning was commonplace and rainstorms regularly caused rivers to burst their banks.

Ise Ritual Every night at 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., water, rice, salt and seafood were offered to the deities of both shrines at the hall of divine food in the Outer Shrine. These solemn offering rites were only the last step in a long process of production. The rice is a case in point: The beginning of cultivation is marked by the ceremonial preparation of the hoe. Both negi, all uchibito, and two monoimi44 with their ‘fathers’ proceed to the hill of the sacred hoe where they perform a mountain entrance rite (yamaguchi-​sai) that involves twenty gold effigies, twenty halberds, twenty mirrors, cloth, seafood and rice wine.45 Climbing up this hill, they locate a yew tree and repeat the same rite at its foot. After a prayer has been read out, the sugadachi no monoimi uses a sacred axe to mark the beginning of cutting the tree. Kanbe workers then do the real work and fashion the wood into a hoe. All officiants don wreaths on their heads and follow the monoimi down

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the mountain to the rice field, where she uses the hoe to break the soil of the rice field for the new growing season.

This procedure exemplifies the ritualization of the entire process of preparing the offerings:  not only the rice itself, but also the tools used to cultivate it, and even the process of collecting materials for making those tools were steeped in ritual. The overwhelming concern of all this ritualization was to avoid divine wrath by observing a hosophobic regime of purity. In advance of these proceedings, the back house of the sugadachi no monoimi was ‘cleansed of all offences (tsumi)’, and she was obliged to stay in an abstinence compound (imidate) at the shrine for an unspecified period of time before the hoe ceremony. Impurity was easily transmitted from one setting or person to the next, and pollution at any point in the process was thought to bring down the entire edifice of multilayered purity. The same principle explains the rationale behind the sengū cycle. Within a time span of twenty years (usually every nineteenth year), new kami halls were erected and furnished on a plot adjacent to the existing precinct, and the kami were moved to their new ‘palace’ (miya) in an elaborate nocturnal ceremony in time for the annual harvest ritual of kanname. Again, every step in the preparation of the palace and its furnishings was ritualized. As with the daily offerings, the process began with a mountain entrance rite, at which the Outer Shrine’s yamage no monoimi cut grass and shrub with a sacred sickle. Next, a tree was cut for use as the pivot post, the site where the new shrine would be built was ‘pacified’, the site was levelled, material was collected to construct the chests in which the kami bodies would be kept, and so on. For every ritual of this building process the Inner Shrine Protocol lists the effigies, mirrors, halberds, swords and tools that the uchibito smith must prepare, as well as the cloth, foodstuffs and offering vessels that must be collected as ‘kami taxes’ by the Daijingūji Office. The proceedings reached a climax in the ninth month of the nineteenth year, when the new hall stood ready to receive the kami. According to the Inner Shrine Protocol, the Nakatomi envoy and the Daijingūji head would place the new furnishings at the bottom of the stairs in front of the new main hall. The ōmonoimi climbed up and touched the door; the negi then opened it. Torches lit up the inner room of the main hall as the furnishings were put in place. After this, it was time to transfer the deities from the old to the new hall. A cloth ‘carpet’ covered the c. 300 metres that separated the two halls. Ritualists carrying futo-​ tamagushi branches proceeded in two rows. The ōmonoimi and the negi opened the door of the old main hall, and the kami bodies of Amaterasu and her two companion deities were lifted out of their chests. The negi carried the mirror of Amaterasu; the leading uchibito and the ōmonoimi father held the other two kami bodies. As the procession arrived at the tamagaki gate it paused, and a priest crowed three times, like a rooster.46 The Nakatomi envoy proceeded no further and waited here. The crowing was repeated at the innermost mizugaki gate, and, again, at the stairs. After the kami bodies had been installed, the negi read out a

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register of all furnishings, deposited the register on Amaterasu’s miyuka bed and left. Finally, food offerings were presented in front of the pivot post underneath the shrine floor. There has been much speculation about the meaning of the sengū. The first thing to note is that this practice was not peculiar to Ise. In 812, the Jingikan pointed out that the shrines of Sumiyoshi, Katori and Kashima had for some time been rebuilt once every twenty years. Now that this practice had been repeated a number of times, it had become customary, causing what the Nihon kōki refers to as ‘not a few problems’. Henceforth this rebuilding regime should apply only to the main deity halls, while other buildings should be repaired rather than rebuilt.47 At an unknown date, these high-​ranking shrines stopped the periodical rebuilding of their main halls as well. In 804, then, periodic sengū were customary at a number of prominent shrines. Most shrines, it must be noted, had no permanent shrine halls at all. Instead, ‘temporary shelters’ (yashiro) were erected for the kami only on ritual occasions. The preparation of these yashiro, like that of the offerings, was an integral part of the ritual proceedings. The only example beyond Ise where such yashiro proceedings were documented is the daijōsai harvest ritual, performed at the imperial palace to mark the ascension of a new emperor.48 Daijōsai culminated in an offering of first fruits to the deities in autumn, but the proceedings of this largest of all court rituals began already in spring, with the cultivation of rice in sacred fields in two provinces and the cutting of timber for the building of temporary halls. The daijōsai procedures display many similarities with Ise’s sengū.49 In both, for example, young girls marked the first step of each new ritual phase, both in the process of growing sacred rice and that of constructing the halls where that rice was to be offered. During the seminal reign of Tenmu, one of the sacred rice fields used to grow first fruits was consistently located in the province of Tanba;50 it may be more than a coincidence that the Outer Shrine Protocol placed the origins of Toyuke’s mike hall in that same province. Both the Ise sengū and the daijōsai were extraordinary variations on the annual harvest ritual, expanded into a grand occasion. The daijōsai buildings were taken down shortly after the rituals had ended; ordinary harvest rituals (niiname) took place in permanent palace facilities. The buildings of Ise were neither custom-​made for only one season, like the daijōsai halls, nor permanent, like the palace; they were kept standing for a regulated time span of up to twenty years. Ise architecture, then, can be described as a compromise between yashiro-​ type ‘temporary shelters’ like the daijōsai buildings and miya-​type ‘palaces’ that accommodated the kami permanently  –​ in the manner of Buddhist temples. Periodic rebuilding allowed the tradition of ritualized yashiro construction to continue, even while allowing the shrine to take on palatial dimensions and gain a minimum of durability. Ise’s ritual calendar followed three cycles, revolving around daily, annual and vicennial rites of offering. These offering rites followed roughly the same proceedings, but on an ascending scale of grandeur. The main annual rituals were kanname in the ninth month, and tsukinami in the sixth and twelfth months.

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They were almost identical; various details marked kanname out as more elaborate, since it coincided with the harvest.51 Each was performed first at the Outer Shrine and then repeated with minor variations at the Inner Shrine. The main procedures stretched over two days. The first day was run entirely by the local priesthood, without the participation of court representatives. In short, it consisted of purification rites, food preparation and offering (at 10 p.m. and again at 2 a.m. the following morning), and a concluding banquet for all ritualists and their families. In contrast to the daily offerings, food was presented not at the Outer Shrine’s mike hall, but in front of the pivot posts underneath the main halls of the Outer and Inner Shrine. On the second day, the abstinence princess, court representatives and the Daijingūji head took centre stage, offering gifts and prayers to the newly nourished kami. Tsukinami gifts consisted mainly of silk thread produced by Ise service households, while at kanname, an imperial delegation presented offerings of silk fabric and clothing.

Ise and Court Ritual The rituals of Ise were closely tied in with the calendar of jingi ceremonies performed at the court. Among the many jingi rituals, four were highlighted by the court itself as particularly important. These were kinensai in the second month, tsukinami in the sixth and twelfth months, and niiname in the eleventh month. What made these occasions stand out was the fact that they required the presence of priests from listed shrines in the Jingikan courtyard, where they received special offerings to take home and present at their own shrines. It was through these ceremonies that the central idea of the jingi cult was acted out: they staged the emperor as the pacifier of all deities of heaven and earth. Yet the emperor was never present at the actual distribution of offerings. He took no part at all in the kinensai, to which priests were summoned from all court-​registered shrines (with the sole exception of Ise, which received its kinensai offerings through imperial envoys). At tsukinami and niiname, offerings were distributed to shrines in the Yamato heartland only, but again, the emperor played no part in this. He did, however, perform other rites that were less concerned with projecting imperial power across the land, and more with the inner safety and protection of the imperial house and the imperial person. Ise’s tsukinami and kanname formed an integral part of this latter set of imperial rites. Within the imperial quarters, tsukinami began with a ceremony in which a team of diviners burnt tortoise shells in order to predict the emperor’s health over the coming six months (ōmima no miura). It ended with a nocturnal rite in which the emperor offered food and drink to the gods, and then partook of it himself (jinkonjiki). That latter rite was repeated in almost identical fashion during niiname, both in its annual form and in its more elaborate variant, the daijōsai, when performed by a newly enthroned emperor. These events are usually interpreted as rites of state and emperorship, as they indeed became in later centuries. What, however, did these imperial rites mean in classical times?

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An 833 commentary on civil law (Ryō no gige) compared the emperor’s niiname rite in an almost demeaning manner to ‘commoners’ worship of their house deities’. Such worship appears to have been a widespread custom. A decree issued in 866, for example, banned ‘guards, servants and self-​serving individuals’ from ‘bullying people into giving them drink, food and gifts in the sixth and twelfth months, when commoners purify themselves and entertain the gods with food, music, drunkenness and dancing’.52 The emperor’s personal worship of his ‘house deities’ at tsukinami occurred within this setting of general mayhem at the court. The emperor’s sharing of food and rice wine with his house deities at night here appears as an in-​house ritual, extended into a public occasion of regional (tsukinami) or national (niiname, daijōsai) importance by the distribution of offerings to selected jingi deities at dawn. The tsukinami ritual at Ise carried the same name and was performed at the same time as the tsukinami at the palace, suggesting that it was understood as an element of the ceremonial of worshipping the imperial house deities. Kanname, however, preceded niiname by two months. Different explanations have been suggested for this. One holds that the offering of first fruits to Amaterasu at kanname in the ninth month took precedence over the court ritual of niiname, causing the latter to be pushed back to a later date. Kanname would then have served as the ‘hidden essence’ of the more public court ceremony of niiname.53 No contemporary sources support such a reading, however. Ryō no gige suggests a less ideologically charged reason. Rice taxes, it notes, were collected between the ninth and eleventh months, depending on the early or late timing of the harvest under local conditions.54 Kanname may then have marked the beginning of the harvest season, and niiname the end. Whatever the relationship between kanname and niiname may have been, it is clear that both were regarded as matters of personal interest to the emperor. In 897, when Emperor Daigo wrote a summary of the duties he expected his son and successor to perform, he listed niiname, jinkonjiki and the dispatch of a court delegation with offerings for Ise’s kanname as a single set.55 This not only confirms that these rituals were indeed closely connected, but also underlines that fact that, in contrast to other jingi ceremonies, they required the participation of the emperor in person. What image of Amaterasu emerges from this group of interrelated rituals? In the previous chapter we found that Amaterasu displayed two different faces that may at first sight appear contradictory. On one hand, this kami was a threatening force, capable of unleashing disaster over the land and over the imperial lineage in particular. On the other, Amaterasu acted as the leader of the heavenly deities and granted the emperor the authority to impose order on the divine realm. Both aspects recur in tsukinami, kanname and niiname. Tsukinami at court began with a divination rite, seeking to predict the risk of imperial illness during the coming six months. Ise records make it abundantly clear that imperial illness was the most obvious effect of any breach in Ise ritual protocol; in fact, as crown prince, Kanmu had himself paid a personal visit to Ise for that very reason. In these contexts Amaterasu appears as a potential menace to the emperor. On the other hand, tsukinami and niiname were combined with

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grand distributions of offerings to longer or shorter lists of deities, appearing to draw on the image of Amaterasu as the leader of the heavenly deities who ordered the divine realm by subduing the earthly deities. As we saw in Chapter 1, these twin aspects of Amaterasu formed the centrepiece of Ise’s origination legend in Nihon shoki. Emperor Sujin’s reign was struck by the anger of three deities, including Amaterasu, and resolving this crisis finally enabled him to ‘distinguish between heavenly and earthly shrines’ and restore peace and prosperity. It was this episode that first introduced the central concept of the jingi cult, even while depicting Amaterasu as a vengeful and violent force. A crucial detail provides a further link between this legend and jingi ritual. Nihon shoki dates Sujin’s solution of the crisis, including his ordering of the divine realm into heavenly and earthly shrines, to the day of the niiname/​daijōsai ritual.56 This must mean that the Sujin legend proclaimed the origin not only of the Ise Shrines and the jingi cult, but also of niiname/​daijōsai. In this foundational tale, all three come together in a perfect circle. Ise’s main rituals, then, were extensions of court rituals performed in the palace, and they were tightly integrated in the imperial jingi cult. Does this finding shed further light on the question of Ise’s origins? If Ise was a site with well-​established local traditions that were ‘adapted’ to court use by adding imperial rituals such as tsukinami and kanname to its calendar, one would expect some lingering traces of earlier practices. The absence of such traces in the protocols, however, indicates that any preexisting cults were irrelevant to Ise’s later history. Ise ritual derived from the court, not from local Ise traditions. Lesser Ise rituals, too, are instantly recognizable as borrowings from court ceremonial. The leading idea behind this body of lesser rites was that Amaterasu should be treated in the same way as the emperor. An early example of such a rite is the ‘ritual of divine raiments’ (kanmiso-​sai). It is of special interest because its origin can be convincingly dated to c. 701. Twice yearly, rough and fine silk cloth was offered to the Inner Shrine, together with silk thread and sewing tools, presumably so Amaterasu could fashion it into seasonal clothing. This mirrored the presentation of new sets of seasonal clothing to the emperor at court (though on different dates). The silk thread offered at kanmiso-​sai was produced by specialized service households on the Atsumi Peninsula, who first appear in the sources at the time of Emperor Monmu’s daijōsai in 701. The fine silk that was offered to the Inner Shrine was woven from this thread by a hereditary lineage of weavers, the Kanhatori; these weavers too made their debut at Monmu’s daijōsai.57 It would appear, then, that the production of this Atsumi-​Kanhatori silk was initiated in celebration of Monmu’s daijōsai, and transferred to Amaterasu’s shrine in Ise not much later, where it took the form of the annual ritual of kanmiso-​sai. One imagines that the ritual calendar of Ise was gradually expanded through a similar process of transplanting imperial ceremonial. The 804 Protocols give many obvious examples of this. On the first day of the year, for example, both the emperor and the Ise kami were served medicinal sake mixed with an herbal mixture known as byakusan. On the first day of the rabbit in that same month, Ise ritualists prepared sticks and offered these to the kami; on the same day, palace guards and

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court officials presented ‘rabbit sticks’ to the emperor in Kyoto as a means to ward off malevolent spirits. Many of these rites were originally performed at the court’s Confucian academy and mimicked Chinese court ceremonial.58 Some date back to the reigns of Tenmu and Jitō, while others were more recent. There is no way of knowing when exactly such court rites were inserted into Ise practice. In view of the fact that Kanmu had served as head of the court’s Confucian academy before he became emperor, one might speculate that the proliferation of Confucian court ceremonies at Ise betrays Kanmu’s influence. This would certainly fit his interest in grooming Ise into a non-​Buddhist site of imperial ritual. The classical Ise that emerges from the Protocols of 804 was a thoroughly imperial place. It was dominated by the Office of the Abstinence Priestess (Saigūryō), which had the dimensions of a secondary imperial court. The princess oversaw a set of rituals that was directly derived from court ceremonial. The central concern of Ise’s rituals was to contain, by way of a hosophobic system of multilayered purity, the potency of Amaterasu, who had a proven record of unleashing calamities –​ most typically, by causing the emperor to fall ill. At the same time, the emperor’s ability to prevent Amaterasu from striking out formed the foundation of the nationwide jingi system, which defined his authority in terms of the Sujin myth: as the kami descendant who ordered the divine realm and thus guaranteed peace and prosperity. The protocols did not change these basic premises of the court’s Ise cult as it had first been designed around 700. Yet they also reflected the circumstances and interests of Kanmu’s reign a century later. The order to compile these protocols displayed a special interest in Ise, and it was inspired by the need to codify and thus solidify recent changes. The elaborate regime of ritual purity and the fear of secondary and tertiary contamination that are so striking in the protocols are typical of late-​Nara court culture, and less so of Tenmu’s and Jitō’s time. The proliferation of minor rituals formerly associated with the Confucian academy forms a perfect fit both with Kanmu’s past and with his agenda as an emperor struggling to redefine the position of the imperial line and to contain the power of Buddhist temples. Most striking, and crucial for Ise’s further development, was the protocols’ edge against Buddhism. Such an explicitly anti-​Buddhist stance was not present during the reigns of Tenmu and Jitō; indeed, Ise’s design as a ‘palace’ that permanently enshrines a deity, and perhaps even some concrete aspects of the shrines’ architecture, mimicked Buddhist temples. This turn of events can be understood only in the light of Dōkyō’s Buddhist coup some decades earlier, and the resulting change of the imperial line to Kanmu’s father. The codification of Ise ritual came at a time when Kanmu had good reasons to feel threatened by vengeful spirits, when jingi ritual was declining rapidly, and when the divine realm itself was looking increasingly unfamiliar. Kanmu was besieged by the ‘angry spirits’ of court enemies, and the kami of old had long since lost their dominance within a sacred realm that was populated by divine and demonic beings of Buddhist and Yin-​Yang origin. In the same year, 804, Kanmu dispatched the young monks Saichō and Kūkai to China, from where they would return with new bodies of ritual, new types of Buddhist

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discourse, new conceptions of imperial authority and new ideas about the realm of other-​worldly beings. Not much later, the centralized control of the court’s Ritsuryō bureaucracy eroded, and new elites emerged on the political and economic scene. Needless to say, these developments had a deep impact on late classical and early medieval Ise, transforming it much more radically than Kanmu had done.

Chapter 3 A M ATE R ASU’S E SCAPE FROM   I SE

In the sixth month of 1031, the Arakida priests, the abstinence priestess and court envoys were gathered within the inner compound of the Inner Shrine to perform the tsukinami ritual. The princess at this time was Yoshiko, who had already spent fifteen years in the Taki compound (Saigūryō). At the very moment the princess was to present a futo-​tamagushi branch, it suddenly began to rain heavily. Thunder and lightning shook heaven and earth. The princess screamed. All flocked to the pavilion where she was seated. In a state of great agitation, she began to pronounce an oracle: I am Aramatsuri no Miya, the first among the auxiliary halls of the Imperial Great Shrine. On orders of the Great Shrine, I  grant this abstinence princess an oracle. The reason for this is as follows. The head of the Saigūryō, [Fujiwara no] Sukemichi, his wife Fujiwara no Kokikoso and their followers have over a number of years uttered clever but crazy words, saying: ‘The two Great Shrines have flown here to take possession of us, man and wife! The Aramatsuri and Taka Shrines have taken possession of this boy and this girl! The five auxiliary halls have possessed these ladies!’ They utter such words claiming to act as mediums, alleging that this is a miracle wrought by the two shrines.1

While giving this speech to the baffled priests and courtiers, the princess drank ‘several tens of cups’ of the sake that was at hand to be offered to the kami of the Inner Shrine. Lower-​ranking ritualists immediately seized Sukemichi and Kokikoso and forced them to cross the swollen Miyagawa River, no doubt at risk to their lives. This put them out of the shrines’ inner zone of purity and reduced the danger of further kami provocation. The princess was too distraught to stand and had to be left in her pavilion until the next morning. Even then, the priests had to take down a section of the outermost fence of the shrine compound, so that they could evacuate her in her palanquin. Early in the next month, the priests of both shrines turned up at the Saigūryō with a group of local villagers, rushed into Sukemichi’s compound, and burnt down the shrines that the couple had set up there. A month later, court orders arrived for the arrest of Sukemichi and Kokikoso. They were to be exiled to the desolate islands of Sado and Oki. However, just

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as the matter appeared to have reached a conclusion, there was another oracle. Amaterasu revealed that the thunderstorms that whipped the capital on the night when the court decided its verdict on Sukemichi and Kokikoso had been her doing. She was angry because part of the oracle had been left out of the official report. She also insisted that Sukemichi should not be sent to Sado but to equally dismal Izu. The court complied immediately, and then finally wrapped up the case by sending another delegation to Ise with gifts and an apologetic imperial message. What did this drawn-​ out scandal mean? The Shinto historian Okada Shōji argues that the incident shows that oracles from the imperial ancestor Amaterasu carried more weight than court orders because, as Amaterasu put it in her first oracle: ‘The emperor and I [Amaterasu] are entwined like the strands of a rope.’2 Okada stresses that in responding to this affair, the shrine priests, the Saigūryō and the Ōnakatomi envoys from the court all worked together towards the same goal: to stop Sukemichi and Kokikoso. The fake oracles of the Saigūryō head and his wife were countered by real oracles, on which the court acted promptly and decisively. In the way this crisis was dealt with, Okada sees a united court and priesthood, collectively defending the sacred traditions of kami ceremonial in an age when the old system of imperial government was in rapid decline. The 1031 scandal shows, in his eyes, that Ise still retained its ancient supremacy. There are, however, other ways to interpret these events. Okada’s vision of kami authority and seemless unity between all shrine agents is clearly at odds with the sources. Half a year after Sukemichi and Kokikoso were exiled, they received an ‘extraordinary pardon’ and returned to the capital.3 Clearly, there were ways to circumvent even Ise’s divine orders. More importantly, I  argue that the oracle scandal was a result of new divisions and power relations at Ise. This chapter traces the breakdown of unchallenged court control over Ise in the late Heian period. What happened when previously powerless agents gained some autonomy, and made the powers of Ise’s kami available to new groups of sponsors? As we shall see, Sukemichi and his wife were the harbingers of profound change at Ise.

The Ritsuryō Funding System Unravels The root cause of the upheaval was, in a word, the demise of the ritsuryō model of governance. Power was no longer channelled through an imperial bureaucracy, but was concentrated in the hands of Fujiwara regents and their associates. At the same time, bureaucratic control over agricultural land slipped away. The ritsuryō bureaucracy had registered the population, allocated public land to statutory households and collected taxes in return. By the tenth century, this system had been scrapped and instead, ‘custodial governors’ (zuryō) were given an almost free hand in extracting taxes from their assigned provinces without much court interference; excess takings were theirs to keep. The eleventh century, moreover, saw the rise of an entirely new method for people of power to secure income from

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land:  the commended estate (shōen). Under this system, ‘proprietors’ (ryōke) sought to secure complete or partial freedom from taxation by commending their lands to a powerful personage or institution, who then received a designated portion of the produce as ‘guarantor’ (honke, honjo) of those lands. As a result of these changes, bureaucratic government gave way to lineage-​ based politics at the centre, while in the provinces, the rise of custodial governors as local potentates, new tax arrangements and the proliferation of commended estates shifted the balance of power. These changes had a profound impact both on the court cult of Ise and on the broader jingi cult that gave meaning to Ise. The costly policy of projecting imperial overlordship across the islands by distributing regular court offerings to a large number of shrines was abandoned. Instead, the court focused on a much smaller network of shrines with direct ties to the imperial line and the Fujiwara lineage, plus a few shrines of proven efficacy in placating vengeful spirits and securing rain. Most of the jingi rituals supervised by the Jingikan were discontinued or simplified beyond recognition, and the Jingikan itself was much reduced. Amaterasu’s shrine in Ise was among those that continued to be favoured by the court, but with the demise of the jingi cult, its significance was transformed. While Kanmu had sought to profile Ise as a national shrine, it now took on the character of a lineage shrine of the imperial house. A striking sign of this transformation was an event in 938, when court ladies suddenly ‘discovered’ a mirror of Amaterasu in a chest that had been kept in one of the storehouses of the naishidokoro, the quarters of court ladies within the palace. The mirror Amaterasu had given to Ninigi in the Age of the Gods constituted the sacred essence of Ise; now, it had a double in the palace. There the naishidokoro mirror became the focus of regular rituals, notably, in the eleventh century, an annual performance of songs and dances (mi-​kagura). During the 1031 oracle crisis, Emperor Go-​Ichijō visited this mirror ‘every night’, the court diary Shōyūki reports.4 His visits represented a clear break with ritsuryō practice, in which the abstinence princess formed a buffer between Amaterasu and the person of the emperor. Amaterasu’s return to the palace at this time served a clear purpose: she was now needed to give substance to the increasingly feeble imperial line, and to function as a counterweight to the Fujiwara deities who had such a prominent presence in the capital. The appearances of Amaterasu in the palace and in the compound of Sukemichi and Kokikoso may be seen as two examples of a new tendency for this imperial kami to multiply and manifest itself in different places. As a result, Amaterasu now became available as an object of worship to others apart from the emperor. It appears that Sukemichi and Kokikoso gathered a flock of believers around them through their manipulation of the Ise deities. Shōyūki notes that in the capital, too, ‘mediums’ (fugeki) claimed that the Ise Shrines spoke through foxes that they kept and worshipped. In 1034, one such medium claimed to have received an Ise oracle, predicting fires in the palace within the following three days.5 In effect, Amaterasu was escaping from her classical confinement in Ise and once again threatening the court. It is no coincidence that all this occurred simultaneously with radical changes in the power relations between the parties involved in the shrines’ funding and

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running.6 Amaterasu’s oracle referred explicitly to Minamoto Mitsuharu, governor of Iga, who had been exiled because of a complaint from the shrines’ service households (kanbe) in Iga only months before the oracle crisis occurred.7 The Iga kanbe provided the shrines with sake. Mitsuharu had seized the harvest from one of the kanbe fields, depriving Ise of sake. The leader of the Iga kanbe complained to the head of the Daijingūji Office, who passed on the complaint to the court. Mitsuharu tried to force the kanbe’s inhabitants into silence and allegedly had some of them killed –​but to no avail; in the end he was found guilty. This was neither an isolated incident nor was it the first of its kind. Shrine priests had taken more direct action against the governors of Ise and Mikawa in 987 and 1017, respectively. They had crossed the Miyagawa to travel to the capital with a small army of service people from the shrine districts and threatened their opponents with divine vengeance. In 1017, for example, priests in yellow robes broke into the bedroom of the Mikawa governor, whipped its walls and floor with divine sakaki branches, and cursed him.8 In the same period, the shrines had increasing trouble extracting resources from the shrine districts themselves. The court reacted by adding new districts in 940, 962, 973, 1017 and 1185,9 but it proved even more difficult to impose the Daijingūji’s authority in these new areas. The shrines, then, were facing an economic crisis, and had to take unprecedented action to find a way out.

New Strategies in the Struggle for Land In the late classical period, Ise’s political landscape included at least three blocs: the Saigūryō, the Ōnakatomi, and the priestly communities of both shrines, led by the Arakida at the Inner Shrine and the Watarai at the Outer Shrine.10 In ritsuryō days, the Saigūryō had been in complete control. This compound had, at least on paper, hundreds of male and female officials and outnumbered its rivals by a large margin. However, the Saigūryō depended on goods paid as tax from a range of provinces, and forwarded through the court. It was less rooted in Ise’s local economy than its competitors, and more dependent on the ritsuryō funding system. This led to its decline in the late Heian period, and eventually its demise. The Ōnakatomi were a branch of the Fujiwara who had long dominated the Jingikan. In the ninth century, the headship of the Daijingūji Office became hereditary within the Ōnakatomi lineage. In this period the Daijingūji wrestled control over the shrine districts from the governors of Ise Province. First, it took over the responsibility to collect taxes from these districts (817); then it won the right to recruit its own law-​enforcing guards within the shrine districts (897). The Ōnakatomi further reinforced their involvement with Ise by gradually upgrading the position of saishu (‘head of rituals’), which they monopolized.11 This title had earlier been used to designate the imperial envoy who presented regular gifts to the Ise kami. By the early tenth century, however, the saishu had absolute authority over the Daijingūji, and, through that office, over the Ise priesthood and the shrine districts, where he assumed the same role as (absentee) governors elsewhere. In

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the shrine districts, as elsewhere in the country, the unit of taxation changed from service households’ labour to their lands. These lands came to be administrated by the Ōnakatomi from their private headquarters, and the distinction between private Ōnakatomi estates and ‘public’ shrine land overseen by the Daijingūji soon faded away. In the meantime, Inner and Outer Shrine priests invested heavily in the clearing of new land within the shrine districts. In the late tenth century, they devised a new method to secure those lands from confiscation by the Ōnakatomi and reduce taxation at the same time: donating newly cleared land to the shrines as ‘gardens’ (misono or mikuriya) that produced food offerings for the kami. Donating priests retained considerable income from such lands as their proprietors; the shrines merely received a circumscribed portion of the harvest (or marine products) as the gardens’ guarantors. The Ōnakatomi went along with this for various reasons: the garden lands were subject to some taxation, and the procurement of offerings from these gardens diminished the burden on shrine land already under Ōnakatomi control. In the early twelfth century, this construction was developed further as outsiders were allowed to commend lands to the Ise Shrines as garden estates through ‘priestly middlemen’ (kunyū kannushi).12 This proved popular even with the Ōnakatomi, since it offered them a new, relatively cheap avenue towards legitimizing land they were turning into private holdings. To administer and secure their portfolios of garden estates, the priests of the two Ise Shrines set up two ‘priests’ offices’ (negichō). They also succeeded in securing more priest appointments from the Jingikan:  by 1006, the number of negi had increased from two (as in the 804 Protocols) to twelve,13 and there were increases in other categories of ritualists as well. All this ultimately enhanced the collective clout of Ise’s two priestly communities to the degree that, over time, they outperformed the Saigūryō and the Ōnakatomi, and the priests’ offices grew into Ise’s most powerful institutions. In 1039, 1050, 1052, 1091 and 1137, one or both priests’ offices filed complaints against the Ōnakatomi saishu or Daijingūji head, at times leading mobs of service people from the shrine districts to the capital to press charges; as a rule, they were successful. Now that the tax unit was no longer kanbe labour but land, all absentee landholders depended on the services of local strongmen known as tato (‘ricefield chiefs’). Tato was not so much an official title as a loose designation for enterprising strongmen who dominated local communities. Tato, who were often descended from families serving in the lowest ranks of officialdom, organized the actual tilling of estate land, while running private farms on the side. It was ultimately an institution’s ability to attract such local leaders that determined its success. The Ōnakatomi enlisted tato in their guard force, putting them in a good position to extract resources from fellow locals. The priestly communities of the Inner and Outer Shrines, on the other hand, attracted large numbers of tato by offering them the title of ‘reserve priests’ (gonnegi). This not only qualified them for ranks and periodic handouts from the court, but also, more importantly, incorporated them in the Watarai or Arakida priests’ offices and enabled them to join in the ‘garden estate’ business as middlemen, overseers and so on. The Saigūryō, too,

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employed tato in various functions in its bureaucracy, but the rewards must have been meagre. In 1041, a decade after the oracle scandal, the Ōnakatomi accused the Saigūryō head of causing great suffering because of his meddling in the administration of fields in the shrine districts, which, he claimed, ‘was the task of the saishu and the head of the Daijingūji’.14 Apparently, the Saigūryō was joining the struggle for control over local resources, and meeting strong opposition. The private Ise cult that Sukemichi pioneered in the years before 1031 as head of the Saigūryō may well have been intended to secure the services and loyalty of tato who, in purely economical terms, had more reason to seek a connection with one of the Saigūryō’s rivals.

Redefining Ise for a New Era All this political and economic wrangling would be of little interest if its impact on the signification of Ise had not been so great. Classical Ise had been run by the Jingikan, the Saigūryō and the Ōnakatomi lineage of court priests. This Ise did not suddenly disappear. The shrines continued to receive lavish court funding; the court even levied a new special tax (daijingū yakubukumai) on both public and private lands across the country to pay for the sengū.15 However, this imperial Ise now had a rival. The Arakida and the Watarai priests began to create a new Ise, designed to appeal to a new audience of actual and potential sponsors. In the course of the Kamakura period, the classical, imperial Ise lost out. By the end of that period, the Saigūryō had ceased to exist and the Ōnakatomi were struggling to retain some degree of control. Ise underwent a dramatic transformation: from a closed-​off lineage shrine of the imperial house to an object of non-​imperial worship and a hotspot of doctrinal innovation. Amaterasu’s ‘escape’ from her Ise confinement in the oracle crisis of 1031 was a sign of things to come. It was in the mid-​eleventh century that Ise’s priestly communities first acquired the strength to build up an organizational structure of their own. The decisive leap came with the spread of commended garden estates in the twelfth century. This new economic system allowed Ise priests to extend their portfolio of garden estates beyond the provinces where the shrines’ old kanbe had been located (Iga, Owari, Mikawa, Tōtōmi) into the Kantō Plain further east. With this, the Ise priests entered a different world. The donors of lands in the Kantō were not relatives or neighbours of ancient kanbe, but warriors who sought to secure often newly cultivated lands in an area on the margins of court control. For a landowner, turning his lands into Ise garden estates was but one option among many. If Kantō warriors were to be persuaded to commend their lands to Ise rather than some other guarantor, the shrines needed to offer them more than just a good rate. One indication that donation to Ise was more than an economic transaction is the fact that Ise representatives were also known as ‘norito masters’ (nottoshi), a term that first occurs in 1039.16 How could imperial Ise be made relevant to this new audience? The shrines’ changed circumstances inspired a wave of experimentation involving many

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participants, who produced a variety of answers to this question. Perhaps one of the earliest, and certainly the most spectacular, result of that experimentation is Tenshō Daijin giki, ‘A ritual manual for [the worship of] Amaterasu’.17 This text stands at the beginning of a flood of writings that offered a broad array of new interpretations of the site of Ise, its shrines and its kami. Collectively, I call this genre ‘Ise literature’. This is not an easy body of texts to get to grips with. Few of these texts can be dated with any certainty. In fact, many have been handed down in different versions, with each copyist adding new passages or phrases to older writings while discarding ‘outdated’ information. The Ise literature, then, forms a fluid body of cross-​referencing texts. Most saw their final redactions in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century; when they were first conceived, and what their earliest versions may have looked like, is harder to tell. When it comes to Tenshō Daijin giki, it appears reasonable to accept evidence that this text was first copied in 1164.18 Such a dating would imply that the initial compilation of this text coincided with the boom in garden estate commendation. What guises do Ise and Amaterasu assume in Tenshō Daijin giki? In an oracle-​like sequence, Amaterasu reveals to the reader that ‘he’ is the World Buddha Mahāvairocana, who appears in the Realm of Form (the world of gods and humans) as Brahmā, the deva who rules over our world and protects its Great Kings.19 In Japan, we read, Mahāvairocana takes on the guise of ‘Amateru Subeōngami’ (i.e. Amaterasu); in the 105,000 years that Amateru will live, he will protect 1,000 kings. When our kalpa ends he will lift the pious to the first heaven of the Realm of Form, where they will be able to hear the preaching of Maitreya, the next buddha of our Sahā world. Ise’s lesser kami halls accommodate eleven ‘princes’ (ōji), led by an emanation of King Yama (Jap. Enma) in the Aramatsuri Shrine, and his chief minister, the Lord of China’s Mount Taishan (Taizan Fukun), in Taka Shrine. Together they rule the realm of the dead; the princes are their assistants. Tenshō Daijin giki offers a particular method that allows worshippers to gain the protection of Amaterasu, his princes and their respective hosts of millions of devas. He who practises this method must ‘offer rites in the first fifteen days, and valuables in the last fifteen days of each month’. He must keep his distance from all kinds of impurity, including birth and menstruation. He must avoid terms like Buddha, Dharma, monk and stupa because ‘the Dharma teachings do not shun impurity’ and are therefore incompatible with ‘kami matters’. He who succeeds in ‘releasing the powers of his faith’ will ‘win the love of the king, his ministers, [their?] wives, and the hundred officials’; he will enjoy the constant protection of the deities and ‘flourish like a vibrant tree’. Tenshō Daijin giki shows that the ‘old’ Ise had remarkably little hold on the imagination of those who created the ‘new’ Ise. In this text, Ise remains the dwelling of Amaterasu, protector of the imperial line, and a site of fastidious purity where Buddhist words are tabooed. At the same time, Amaterasu is fitted into a Buddhist world view as the Deva King of Japan. As a part of the larger Sahā world, Japan is ruled by the highest Deva King, Brahmā, from his palace above the summit of Mount Sumeru. Brahmā, in turn, is a manifestation of the

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World Buddha Mahāvairocana. Amaterasu is a local subordinate of Brahmā; but at the same time, this hierarchy is undercut by the logic of emanation (honji suijaku): Mahāvairocana appears in the Sahā world in the guise of Brahmā and in Japan as Amaterasu, and therefore Amaterasu ‘is’ Mahāvairocana. The taboo against Buddhist terms has also been furnished with a new explanation: because Buddhist practice does not shun impurity, explicit reference to the Dharma upsets the kami in the same way as blood pollution does. This does not, of course, imply that there is anything wrong with Buddhism; it merely brands it as inappropriate in a setting where kami are propitiated, and underlines the special status of Amaterasu as a deity of absolute purity. In terms of practice, however, Tenshō Daijin giki is less about Amaterasu than about his princes. These princes give a new identity to Ise as a complex that accommodates the assembled magistrates of the realm of the dead. In effect, Ise is transformed into the place where the dead assemble to be judged, and where they learn about their destination after death. The list of princes suggests a close connection with rituals such as Enma-​ten ku and Taizan Fukun sai (propitiations of King Yama and Taizan Fukun), which had also become popular in circles beyond the court in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this period, an earlier understanding of karmic retribution as immediate and unmediated was challenged by visions of an elaborate bureaucracy of judges and clerks who decide each individual’s fate. Rituals like Enma-​ten ku and Taizan Fukun sai sought to mollify these magistrates before death with gifts and supplications. They were performed for lay patrons by Buddhist priests and Yin-​Yang ritualists as a way to heal disease, avert misfortune or secure a safe birth.20 It is not easy to determine who produced Tenshō Daijin giki. An attached sheet, dated to 1278, identifies its secrets as a transmission of the Ōnakatomi saishu, but this may merely be a reflection of Ōnakatomi manoeuvring at that time.21 Another early Ise text that appears to draw on Tenshō Daijin giki, Nakatomi harae kunge (Reading and commentary on the Nakatomi purification formula), offers some clues.22 Nakatomi harae kunge provides an esoteric interpretation of a classical purification formula that was now part of the ritual repertoire of Yin-​Yang ritualists, among others. This formula describes how a number of kami remove all impurity from the land; Nakatomi harae kunge then identifies these kami with Ise’s main shrine halls, and further with King Yama and his retinue. According to the colophon of this text, its contents were divinely revealed to Kūkai at an Ise garden estate in Shima Province (Yoshizu), which housed a small temple called Sengūin. Kūkai’s transmission, we are told, then passed through the hands of Watarai priests and gonnegi. Nakatomi harae kunge, then, seems to have originated in a milieu where Ise priests mingled with Buddhist practitioners in the shrines’ hinterland, at some time in the late twelfth century. When we rise above all this detail, we can make out an image of Ise ‘norito masters’ who doubled as agents of the Ise land guarantee scheme of commended garden estates, and at the same time performed a wide range of ritual services for new patrons. They found these patrons far beyond the shrine districts, in an area stretching to the edges of the Kantō Plain. Sources like Tenshō Daijin giki

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and Nakatomi harae kunge can give us some idea of the repertoire of these norito masters:  they appear to have specialized in rites such as Enma-​ten ku, Taizan Fukun sai and purification using the Nakatomi formula. At the same time, they drew on Amaterasu’s ancient status as the kami of the sun and the imperial line to link their shrine to the most popular cults of their time. In particular, they found a place for Amaterasu in the Buddhist cosmology that formed the dominant outlook of medieval Japan:  as a Japanese manifestation of Brahmā, the Deva King of the Realm of Form, and, beyond that, of the World Buddha Mahāvairocana.

Kamakura The twelfth century was a watershed in Japan’s political history. The court’s long-​standing reliance on the military muscle of private warriors backfired in the 1150s, allowing the warrior leader Taira no Kiyomori to assume a position of unprecedented power at the heart of the court. In the 1180s, Minamoto no Yoritomo, the son of one of Kiyomori’s victims, rebelled against the Taira regime and built up an autonomous base in the Kantō, with headquarters in Kamakura; he then took up arms against rival warrior leaders, including the Taira. As Yoritomo fought his way into central and western Japan, his warrior regime became a national institution, acknowledged by the court as its military protector. The Kamakura bakufu was born. To Ise’s priests, this political settlement brought both opportunities and uncertainties. The bakufu offered a new avenue of patronage and made it possible to reduce Ise’s dependency on the court still further. The court institutions of classical Ise –​the Saigūryō and the Ōnakatomi –​lost their grip on the shrines, while the Arakida and Watarai solidified their positions. At the same time, Ise’s emergence from its classical isolation attracted new groups of agents, who built new institutions in the shrines’ immediate vicinity. Taken together, these developments expanded Ise’s reach greatly. With the imperial monopoly broken, Ise was now open for use by others and served many more agendas than before. With the benefit of hindsight, we can conclude that Ise fared reasonably well in the Kamakura period. At the outset, however, things did not look so promising. Ise Province was a Taira stronghold and could not expect much sympathy from the new regime. When Yoritomo took control over the Kantō, the system of commending garden estates to Ise could easily have become meaningless. Neither Ise itself nor the court was in any position to act as guarantors of land rights in the Kantō, which, for all practical purposes, had now become an autonomous territory. Nor was there any mechanism for enforcing garden estate payments to the shrines and their priests. What saved Ise was the fact that Yoritomo actively chose to support the shrines. There were sound strategic reasons for this, as we shall see; but even beyond these, it would appear that Ise was of personal concern to the new military hegemon. The bakufu’s official annals, Azuma kagami (Kantō mirror, c. 1300), even go so far

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as to attribute Yoritomo’s rise to power to the beneficence of the Ise deities. In the eighth month of 1180, Yoritomo suffered a major defeat and fled to the outmost tip of the Bōsō Peninsula. Azuma kagami has him reminiscing about his youth while he was inspecting an Ise garden estate there, called Maru no Mikuriya. This estate comprised the first lands ever granted to Yoritomo’s ancestors by the court (in the 1050s). It had been donated to Ise in 1159 by Yoritomo’s father, Yoshitomo, to sponsor prayers for his son’s future. Within weeks, Yoritomo, then only twelve years old, had received his first appointment. In gratitude, and perhaps to renew his bond with a kami who had served him so well, Yoritomo now vowed to make a new donation of garden estates in the area.23 A year later (1181), when Yoritomo had won control over the Kantō, he was visited in his new Kamakura headquarters by Watarai Mitsutomo, an Outer Shrine gonnegi. Mitsutomo told Yoritomo that Taira no Kiyomori’s son had attempted to donate a golden harness to the shrines, with a prayer that he may retake the Kantō. However, a string of strange events had disrupted this plan: first the sudden death on the road of the imperial envoy who was to present the harness to Ise, then the appearance of a wasps’ nest in the roof of the Inner Shrine’s main hall and finally a small snake emerging from a sparrow egg in the shrine’s inner compound. Yoritomo responded to this news by telling Mitsutomo that he had felt a special reverence for Ise ever since he had experienced a dream vision of the shrines in 1160.24 In that year, Yoritomo’s father had been executed on Kiyomori’s orders; the young Yoritomo himself narrowly escaped death and spent the next two decades in exile. It is quite possible that the dramatic events of 1159–​60 inspired a positive awareness of Ise in Yoritomo’s mind. He did, in fact, follow up on his vow, and donated four estates to the Ise Shrines in 1184 and 1186. Whatever Yoritomo’s personal feelings about Ise may have been, supporting the shrines was wise for political reasons as well. There was still a possibility that the court might yet condemn Yoritomo as a rebel, at least while his brother Yoshitsune (fl. 1189) was in play as an alternative. It was important to complement military action with a policy that legitimized Yoritomo’s Kamakura headquarters as the protector of the realm, rather than a nest of self-​serving bandits. The role of Ise in this regard comes out clearly in a remarkable petition from 1182, written in Yoritomo’s name and accompanying an offering of silk, gold dust and horses to the Ise Shrines.25 In this document Yoritomo introduced himself to the fane (byō) of Amaterasu as its new protector. He stated that his ancestors had always served the court by protecting the state (kokka), and that Taira no Kiyomori’s accusations against him were false. The burning of the national temple of Tōdaiji by Kiyomori’s son in 1180 proved that he was a rebel; Kiyomori’s death in 1181 was due to the displeasure of the gods. Of special concern, Yoritomo wrote, were recent attacks on Ise by brigands calling themselves Kumano monks. They had plundered the Ise auxiliary shrine of Izawa and moved on to the vicinity of the shrines themselves, where they were pillaging and burning houses. In a panic, shrine priests had sped to the capital to ask for protection. Yoritomo promised to ensure the proper performance of rites according to ancient precedent, to donate new lands to the shrines, and to restore Izawa Shrine and its treasures. He closed his petition with the words: ‘Imperial Great Deity, please accept this letter. Grant peace to the ruling

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king, his officials and the people, and always give your protection to me, Yoritomo, and my followers.’ Yoritomo’s support of Ise against Kumano, a large hub of temples and shrines south of Ise, was all the more heartening for Ise’s priests because it occurred at a time when the court appeared to be partial to Kumano. From the tenth century onwards, retired emperors and other influential members of the court had made more frequent pilgrimages to Kumano than to any other religious complex. While Ise lands were typically commended by warriors, the donors of land rights to Kumano were mostly courtiers.26 In 1163–​64 some leading court scholars even argued that Kumano was ‘identical’ and even superior to Ise.27 Moreover, the Kumano ‘brigands’ were in fact Minamoto allies, attacking Taira strongholds in Ise, so Yoritomo was prioritizing the Ise Shrines even when it meant castigating his own associates in war.28 These circumstances enhanced the symbolic impact of Yoritomo’s dedication to Ise; also, they remind us that a different strategy on Yoritomo’s part could easily have spelled disaster for the shrines at this crucial juncture. Yoritomo’s 1182 petition highlights the symbolic value of warrior leaders’ policies towards ‘national’ temples and shrines, represented by Tōdaiji and Ise. Their treatment of these divine powers determined whether they were rebels or protectors of the state and had a direct influence on their fate, which was perceived to depend on other-​worldly protection. Also, after Yoritomo’s death, the Kamakura bakufu (now dominated by Yoritomo’s widow, Hōjō Masako, and her relatives) continued to go out of its way to sponsor and protect temples and shrines. Ise was among the beneficiaries of this policy. The shrines found that Kamakura was more attentive to their needs than the court. Ise priests had countless direct connections with Kamakura warriors through Kantō garden estates; at times, these connections were strengthened through marriages between Ise gonnegi and warrior daughters. As a result, the priests’ loyalty came to rest as much with Kamakura as with the imperial court. This became apparent in 1221, when the retired emperor Go-​Toba assembled troops to challenge Kamakura on the battlefield. Azuma kagami reports that in the third month of that year, the shrines appeared to Masako in a dream. A mirror rose from the waves of Yui Bay at Kamakura, and the voice of the Great Shrines predicted that Hōjō Yasutoki, the upcoming leader of the bakufu, would restore peace. Kamakura then sent an envoy to the Ise Shrines, chosen because he was both a prominent Kamakura vassal and the grandson of an Ise priest. Fighting in the sixth month ended in instant defeat for Go-​Toba; in the eighth month, some of Go-​Toba’s confiscated lands were donated to the Ise Shrines.29 The details of this tale may sound like a ‘good story’ designed to place Kamakura in a positive light, but the donation was real enough, and must have reflected a positive act of support for the bakufu on the part of the Ise priests.

New Court Interpretations The autonomy of the shrine priests, backed up by new Kantō connections, may have challenged court control over Ise, but that does not mean that the court was no longer interested in the shrines. Quite to the contrary, the court’s loss of

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political and military power inspired a rediscovery and reassessment of the jingi, Amaterasu, and Ise, which now served as reminders of the court’s prerogative to rule. The burning of Tōdaiji in 1180, especially, symbolized the demise of the old order, and its reconstruction had the highest priority. Yoritomo was not alone in associating this event with Ise. The burning of this temple soon brought new agents to the shrines. After the fire, the court charged the prelate Chōgen (1121–​1206) with the task of restoring Tōdaiji’s massive Mahāvairocana image. In 1185, the eyes of the new image were ceremoniously opened in the presence of, among others, Emperor Go-​ Toba and Yoritomo. However, the work was far from finished. The next task was to resurrect a Buddha hall around the large statue. This hall required huge timbers, and it appears that Chōgen cast his eyes on the forests of the Ise Shrines as the most easily accessible source.30 In 1186 Chōgen made a pilgrimage to Ise, where (according to a Tōdaiji document) Amaterasu appeared to him as he spent the night in prayer by the innermost mizugaki fence.31 However, rather than offering assistance in the Tōdaiji project, the ‘Great Deity’ complained of lean times and asked for Chōgen’s help. Two months later, a new Tōdaiji party of some 700 people, including sixty monks, proceeded to Ise. Chōgen was probably not among them; he had left for Suō Province where he had been granted an alternative source of timber.32 It would appear, then, that Ise’s other-​worldly backing was as important to Tōdaiji as any immediate material assistance. In 1186 Tōdaiji monks performed Buddhist rites for the ‘Dharma-​enjoyment’ (hōraku) of the two Ise Shrines: recitation of the Daihannya-​kyō, of which they presented copies to the kami; debates on the Dharma; and a lecture on rebirth in Amida’s paradise. Also, a delegation of monks proceeded to the mizugaki fences of both shrines, under the cover of night so as not to offend the kami. The hōraku rites were held not in the shrine precincts but in lineage temples that had been founded by the Watarai and Arakida in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, following the example of the Ōnakatomi, who may have initiated this practice in the late tenth century.33 Such temples served to consolidate the Ōnakatomi, Watarai and Arakida lineages as strong collectives and as holders of land rights. Their presence must have made it much easier to accommodate the activities of Buddhist monks in the early Kamakura period. Tōdaiji monks revisited Ise for grand-​scale hōraku performances in 1193 and 1195. Their presence sparked the creation of a range of new theories and practices around the shrines, sometimes inspired by Ise priests and sometimes by visiting monks, and often spun into more extended narratives that, over the following decades, spread in ever widening circles. One such tale claimed that in 741, when Tōdaiji was first built, Emperor Shōmu had sent the famous monk Gyōki to Ise to ascertain that the construction of this temple was in accordance with Amaterasu’s wishes. Gyōki had long since developed into a divine figure, revered as the founder of many sites of practice across Japan; especially, he was a model of fundraising monks (kanjin hijiri) like Chōgen. In Ise, he already featured as the founder of the above-​mentioned Sengūin, the temple of the Yoshizu garden estate where Kūkai had passed on his revelation to Watarai priests.34 Gyōki’s Ise pilgrimage later

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became a ubiquitous topos within the expansive body of new Ise mythology. It was read to mean that, through Gyōki, Amaterasu had revealed his true identity as an emanation of Mahāvairocana and given his seal of approval to the establishment of Buddhism in Japan. Also, Gyōki was said to have received a particularly powerful wish-​fulfilling jewel from Amaterasu when he visited Ise, with orders to bury it in the nearby Iitaka District of Ise Province.35 The motif of Amaterasu relaying both messages and giving wish-​fulfilling jewels to monks echoed Chōgen’s advances to the Ise Shrines. Chōgen, too, was said to have received jewels from the Ise deities. In 1195, the preaching of the monk Jōkei of Tōdaiji was so impressive that the kami of an Inner Shrine sub-​shrine (Kaze no Yashiro) visited him that same night in the guise of a ‘noble lady’. She gave him two jewels, which Jōkei passed on to Chōgen.36 Finding and distributing such objects of power was Chōgen’s main strategy in his mission to rebuild Tōdaiji as the heart of Japanese Buddhism. Such jewels, often identified as Buddha relics, had been vital to the Buddhist authentication of imperial authority from the eleventh century onwards. Annual rituals to activate or produce such jewels were performed in the second week of the New Year (goshichinichi no mishiho), and both emperors and retired emperors demonstrated the propitious nature of their rule by distributing the jewels that had miraculously ‘materialised’ due to their virtuous government to retainers and deities in the realm. Chōgen’s most prominent companion, Shōken (1138–​96), whom we shall encounter again below, was a specialist in the manufacture and ritual activation of such jewels. It is doubtful whether Chōgen would have focused his efforts on the Ise Shrines had it not been for the renewed interest in Ise that had emerged at court a century earlier. This interest was expressed most poignantly in new Amaterasu-​related rituals that were performed in the emperor’s private quarters by the highest prelates of Tendai (Mount Hiei, Onjōji) and Shingon (Tōji). Every night, such prelates performed recitations (nenju) in front of a Kannon image enshrined within the imperial quarters. This Kannon was now regarded as the Buddhist ‘original ground’ (honji) of Amaterasu’s naishidokoro mirror in the palace. The other two regalia, the sword and jewel, rested in the emperor’s bedroom, separated from the imperial Kannon only by a thin wall. The goshichinichi rituals were regarded as part of the same body of imperial ceremonial. Taken together, this set-​up had fostered much speculation about the relationship between the regalia, Kannon and wish-​fulfilling jewels.37 The Tōdaiji pilgrimages of the 1180s and 1190s took this speculation out of the palace and brought it directly to Ise, triggering a new wave of doctrinal innovation. Many agendas intersected in the new Ise narratives that emerged in these decades. Monks like Chōgen and Shōken associated themselves with Ise to promote their own projects, and the same can be said of the bakufu. In the process, the shrines rose to prominence as a new symbol of much-​desired national stability and sacralized order. For Ise’s priests, this opened up new opportunities. The new tales about Ise, Gyōki and Amaterasu’s wish-​fulfilling jewels exemplify the way criss-​crossing interests inspired new legends. The Gyōki connection appeared first in Ise sources like Nakatomi harae kunge, but was also supremely useful to Chōgen;

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this inspired a narrative that tied together Ise, Gyōki, Tōdaiji and the jewels in a new constellation. Chōgen and his Tōdaiji party were not alone in drawing up this narrative. The tale that Gyōki buried Amaterasu’s jewel in Iitaka reveals the hand of Ise priests. Iitaka was the last shrine district to be donated to the shrines, in 1185. Gyōki’s jewel now identified it as ancient, hallowed shrine land, and the fact that an institution like Tōdaiji endorsed its significance made it less likely that Iitaka would be lost again.

Esoteric Readings of Ise The involvement of experts from the realm’s top temples added sophistication to the reinvention of Ise. In the late twelfth century, Ise was fitted into an esoteric (mikkyō) framework. This implied two things: the application of esoteric mantras, mudras and mandalas to the shrines and their kami in religious practice; and the creation of secret transmissions that explained particular traits of Ise as manifestations of a deeper, cosmic truth. Both these phenomena were already present, to a certain degree, in texts like Tenshō Daijin giki and Nakatomi harae kunge, but it was first in the Kamakura period that they generated a systematic and expansive discourse. The Tōdaiji pilgrimages were, again, a decisive moment. A group of temple documents that reveals the extent of this new discourse is Yaketsu (Transmissions of the Ono branch [of Shingon]). Abe Yasurō describes Yaketsu as ‘a collection of secret teachings that takes the form of dialogues on esoteric rituals’.38 The dialogues are between Shūkaku (1150–​1203), the prince-​abbot of the imperial temple of Ninnaji in Kyoto, and Shōken, Chōgen’s partner in reconstructing Tōdaiji. In this collection, Ise is a prominent topic of esoteric ritualization and exegesis. To understand the significance of Yaketsu, it is necessary to take a closer look at the context in which it was produced. The development of Ise into a sizeable holder of land rights followed a pattern that had been set elsewhere, in the world of Japan’s largest temple complexes. Such temples, which dwarfed Ise in size and wealth, had in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries come to depend on two forms of capital: lands and sponsored rituals. Both were founded on the temples’ possession of shōgyō, a term that literally means ‘sacred teachings’ but that denoted both objects of great potency and transmissions of secret procedures and doctrines. Amaterasu’s jewels are a good example of the former, Yaketsu of the latter. Such objects and transmissions added substance to the authority of temple complexes:  they gave concrete form to temples’ ability to manipulate the world of buddhas, gods and demons. Both land rights and shōgyō were handed down in so-​called Dharma lineages of initiator and initiand, clustered within sprawling temple complexes.39 Shūkaku’s position as imperial prince-​abbot enabled him to collect initiations and initiation documents from the two overarching branches of the Shingon school, known as Ono and Hirosawa; later he came to be revered as the founding

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figure of Ninnaji’s own ‘imperial lineage’, Goryū. Yaketsu is the collective title of the Ono transmissions that Shūkaku received from Shōken. The collection contains a few texts that deal with kami, notably Ise and Hachiman. Most relevant for our purposes is a text titled ‘Contemplation on the two kami halls of the Imperial Great Deity Amaterasu’ (Amaterashimasu nisho kōdaijin shōden kan, hereafter Shōden kan). I will discuss this text in some detail as a sample of the esoteric Ise literature that was produced in the thirteenth century. Shōden kan begins with an exercise that instructs the practitioner to visualize Amaterasu’s kami hall. It is full of technical jargon, but the gist of the imagery is not so difficult to grasp: Contemplation In the hall of the pure Dharma realm is the diamond post of the Land of Origin of Mahāvairocana (Dainihonkoku), the seal of the land, heaven’s pillar of measurement. [In your visualization,] you must set up a great fane (daibyō) of heaven and earth, a hall of many treasures. Underneath, you must open up the lotus of the wish-​fulfilling jewel of the original, wondrous treasury that is the syllable a, and be seated on the originally-​existing, non-​born (honnu fushō) pearl of perfect enlightenment that is the syllable vaṃ. Here you will find the three and the ten treasures.40 They are the divine valuables and tools of war with which the two Imperial Great Shrines have ruled the realm [ever since] the divine treasure of the Sun arose. In short, the two Imperial Great Deities [of Ise] are the seed from which all karmic fruits spring forth, the all-​encompassing body of the myriad things.41

This passage presents an innovative contemplation practice (kansō) that focuses on Ise as a Buddhist divinity. It follows the standard model of such contemplations as they were transmitted in esoteric lineages. Ise is identified as the realm of Mahāvairocana, the World Buddha:  a place of non-​dual enlightenment where things do not arise and die, but are ‘originally-​existent’ and ‘non-​born’. It is from this non-​dual realm that the ‘myriad things’ in our karmic world arise; hence, Ise is the Land of Origin from where all existence springs forth. Ise stands at the border between the realm of Mahāvairocana’s perfect, non-​dual enlightenment on one hand, and, on the other, our own karmic world, where ‘the myriad things’ keep arising and perishing. It is a piece of the ‘pure Dharma realm’ (the domain of absolute, non-​dual purity) that is physically present within our world of impure multiplicity. This sounds very grand, but it is worth noting that the same kind of rhetoric was applied to ritual sites, buildings and objects of all kinds. Contemplations of this kind, performed together with mantras and mudras, had the explicit aim of embodying the realm of Mahāvairocana’s pure enlightenment within the practitioner himself, both as a means to realize instantaneous enlightenment and to produce thaumaturgic effects and fulfil the wishes of a patron. Any practitioner, therefore, could actualize his true nature of non-​dual purity by

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means of a ritual procedure. What is striking about Shōden kan is not the high-​ flying rhetoric, but rather its choice of objects for esoteric sacralization:  Ise’s pivot post, and the treasures of the imperial throne, currently held by Shūkaku’s father. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the pivot post had already emerged as the most prominent focus of ritual in the 804 Protocols. In Shōden kan, this post marks the centre not only of the two kami halls of Ise but also of Japan as a whole, or even of ‘heaven and earth’. As indicated by its name, Japan is Mahāvairocana’s Original Land, the place where the Dharma realm of the World Buddha touches our karmic domain.42 The imagery of this conception derives from the main conceptual tool of esoteric Buddhism: the mandala. In fact, Shōden kan goes on to describe how the syllables a and vaṃ transform into wish-​fulfilling jewels, which convert further into the twin mandalas that map Mahāvairocana’s essence and transformations: the ‘heavenly’ mandala of the Diamond Realm (kongōkai) and the ‘earthly’ mandala of the Womb Realm (taizōkai). Both these mandalas show the layout of the cosmos as a range of concentric spaces. The centre represents the realm of perfect enlightenment, personified as the World Buddha Mahāvairocana. Outward from the centre are arranged the myriad lesser buddhas, bodhisattvas, devas, demons, humans, animals, buildings, objects and syllables that emanate downwards from, or lead upwards to, the World Buddha.43 From one perspective (‘downwards’), the figures and objects in the outer margins of the mandala are identical to the World Buddha as forms that arise from his enlightenment. From the opposite point of view (‘upwards’), they represent a differentiated realm of increasing distance from the World Buddha, implying an increasing need for salvation. In a similar way, Ise’s ‘diamond post’ forms the centre of an expanse of concentric circles: from the shrine precincts to ‘Japan’ and, even further beyond, to ‘heaven and earth’. The spaces in this expanse are, from a ‘downwards’ perspective, identical to the Dharma essence that Ise’s pivot post embodies. From an ‘upwards’ perspective, however, this identity can be realized only through the intervention of pure Dharma essence that is concentrated in Ise, and through manipulation of the ‘treasures’ that originate from Ise’s two kami. The aim of the contemplation exercise transmitted in Shōden kan is to allow the initiand to embody Ise’s pure Dharma essence and activate it beyond Ise through the manipulation of those treasures. The treasures implied were the regalia and wish-​ fulfilling jewels  –​like those that were acquired by Chōgen, or like the jewels activated in the annual goshichinichi ritual in the imperial quarters. Shōden kan closes its description of the Ise contemplation by stating that this procedure is ‘identical with the goshichinichi ritual’.44 Shōden kan ends with a series of questions and answers, presumably exchanged by Shūkaku and his initiator, Shōken. Here Shōken wraps up his explanation by authenticating the equation between the Ise contemplation and that most secret of esoteric court rites. He does this in the form of a spurious quote from the deified founder of Shingon in Japan, Kūkai: Kōbō Daishi [Kūkai] has said:  The two Imperial Great Shrines are the two mandalas of Mahāvairocana. They are of one essence (funi) with the two

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wish-​fulfilling jewels of the goshichinichi ritual, and in ritual practice they must be treated accordingly.45

Here Shōken has Kūkai reveal a shocking new insight:  that Ise is the mandalic essence behind the highest ritual that his Shingon school performed for the imperial line, namely, the activation of wish-​fulfilling jewels for the protection of emperor and realm in the second week of the year. In raising the profile of Ise to such stunning heights, Shōken was transferring already existing ideas from the palace to Ise. Kūkai had first been identified with both Mahāvairocana and Amaterasu by Seison in the eleventh century, in the context of explaining the meaning of the nightly rituals performed within the imperial quarters.46 Seison’s ideas had arisen from his daily practice as imperial monk (gojisō). Such monks performed rites every night for the health and well-​ being of the emperor, the capital and the land, in a room adjacent to the imperial bedchamber. These rituals identified Mahāvairocana with Amaterasu’s mirror within the palace, and also with the wish-​fulfilling jewels of the goshichinichi ritual, which in turn were identical to the very body of the emperor. During their practice, imperial monks like Seison visualized how Mahāvairocana/​ Amaterasu/​ the emperor caused new wish-​fulfilling jewels to fall from heaven, bringing prosperity to the people throughout the realm. The idea that Japan is Mahāvairocana’s Land of Origin, ruled by an emperor who embodies Mahāvairocana/​Amaterasu and who activates their powers in the form of wish-​fulfilling jewels, was first developed in the eleventh century, within a narrow circle of imperial prelates, and its original focus had been Amaterasu’s mirror in the palace, not Ise. Shōken took these ideas out of their original court setting and applied them to Ise itself. Shōden kan is but one text of a new genre that began to take shape in the transition from Heian to Kamakura. Like most texts in this genre, it is difficult to date. In fact, the oldest extant manuscript of the Yaketsu collection refers to initiations that took place in 1312 and 1353.47 Copying texts was part of the initiation process, and it is more than likely that new elements of the evolving esoteric discourse on Ise were added to Shōden kan as the transmission passed from one generation to the next. We can no longer reconstruct in detail how this discourse evolved, and Abe Yasurō is perhaps too categorical in his claim that the fourteenth-​century manuscript of Yaketsu represents the undiluted legacy of Prince Shūkaku himself. Still, there is little doubt that the direction that this discourse would take was firmly established already in the late twelfth century, and that figures like Shōken played a leading role in its early development. To appreciate the novelty of the new esoteric Ise, it is instructive to think back to another, more home-​made Ise reconfiguration:  as Yama’s realm of the dead, ritualized in Tenshō Daijin giki. Although extant versions of that text share some elements of the esoteric discourse we encountered in Yaketsu, its frame of reference was clearly very different. While Shōden kan integrated Ise in the esoteric rituals of the inner quarters of the emperor, Tenshō Daijin giki adapted Ise to the ritual repertoire of Yin-​Yang ritualists and travelling performers of esoteric rites who were catering to the needs of Kantō warriors. Taken together, they represent two dominant strands in the complicated tangle that is medieval Ise discourse.

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Ise’s New Agents and their New Clientele This chapter has covered the period between, roughly, 1000 and 1200. In the course of these two centuries, Ise became a much more complicated place than it had been during Kanmu’s reign. Kanmu’s system of strict court control, backed up by lavish court funding, had broken down. So had the classical hierarchy of local shrine priests, controlled by Ōnakatomi administrators, under the command of the Saigūryō and the abstinence princess. Ise’s shrine districts had become contested territory, criss-​crossed by intersecting claims of land and income rights. Under this new regime, the Watarai and Arakida priests emerged as Ise’s dominant force. By 1200, priestly positions had grown exponentially in number, and the priests had developed new institutional forms that allowed them to manage and defend their expanding possessions against incursion by competitors. Crucially, Ise priests had created a network of new sponsors among local landowners along Ise Bay and the Pacific coast, all the way to the Kantō. Many of these were warriors; almost none were part of the imperial elite in Kyoto. That elite appeared to have shifted its attention from Ise to Kumano, but at the same time, Amaterasu had also acquired a new presence in the palace, and the court devised new policies to ensure Ise’s survival (notably, the nationwide yakubukumai tax). These developments helped to engage the warriors who created the Kamakura bakufu in the cult of Ise. The first shogun, Minamoto no Yoritomo, was among those who had well-​established ties with Ise priests; arguably, this circumstance saved the shrines from disaster in the last decades of the twelfth century. As Ise passed into the hands of a different set of agents, they refashioned the shrines’ identity in order to meet the needs of a new clientele. The imperial monopoly on Ise was broken, and the shrines’ deities were put to new uses. Ise priests presented themselves to their new sponsors in much the same way as itinerant Yin Yang ritualists, and performed rites that focused on success in this life, longevity and salvation after death. As we have seen, this resulted in the most radical reinvention of the Ise Shrines since the days of Empress Jitō. The success of these new agents laid the basis for further transformations as Japan descended into the Genpei war of 1180–​85. Together with Tōdaiji, Ise now acquired a new status as a national, rather than merely an imperial, shrine. Both court and bakufu flagged their dedication to the realm by showing their support for these central fanes. Ise’s involvement in the rebuilding of Tōdaiji after its destruction in 1180 further strengthened its national standing. As monks involved in this undertaking zoomed in on Ise, they brought the shrines into a new discourse: that of esoteric Buddhism. In this discourse, Ise was given new meaning as the mandalic centre of Japan, where the Dharma realm of Mahāvairocana (identified with Amaterasu and Kūkai) appeared in physical form, right in the middle of the realm of karmic birth and death. Through material objects such as the pivot post, wish-​fulfilling jewels and the imperial regalia, Amaterasu’s sanctuary transformed the whole of Japan into a Dharma realm that was pure, eternal and indestructible.

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At first, this new image of Ise circulated only within the limited circles of court prelates. However, the esoteric discourse on Ise would soon spread from one Dharma lineage to the next, and by the mid-​Kamakura period, it formed the dominant discourse not only on Ise, but also on other shrines that followed Ise’s lead. In the next chapter, we find that the esoterization of shrines that began with Ise was a defining moment in the transformation of the jingi cult into Shinto. Yet even then, it remained a subject of highly technical, initiatory expertise. The redefinition of Ise from an imperial into a national shrine, on the other hand, was much more accessible for those who were neither knowledgeable about nor interested in esoteric metaphysics. It is worth remembering that few were. Yet Ise took on a new significance also to non-​specialists. The most eloquent sign of this is perhaps the fact that references to Ise quite abruptly became commonplace in Kamakura-​period oaths (kishōmon), especially from the 1260s onwards.48 These oaths included a more or less standard formula in which the oath-​taker called down divine punishment upon himself should he break his promises. In the lists of invoked deities, Ise’s Amaterasu often figured as the leader of the kami of Japan, or even as the divine ‘lord of the land’ (kokushu). The image of Amaterasu as a dispenser of punishment within the boundaries of Japan was closely related to that of Ise as King Yama’s realm of the dead, where the Ise deities stood in judgement over all sinners. Whether as the palace of King Yama or as Japan’s mandalic centre, medieval Ise attained a much broader significance than it had ever had in classical times. This had the effect of making imperial lore more relevant to a larger audience, while at the same time rendering Ise less exclusively imperial. Ise was far away from the centre, and yet closely associated with it. It was not controlled by one of the country’s leading temple-​shrine complexes, and its symbolic value far exceeded the political muscle of the shrine priests who managed it. All this made Ise the object of attempts at appropriation from all sides. Ise had shaken off its imperial shackles and entered a new era of stunning diversification, in which it meant many different things to many people, but left few indifferent.

Chapter 4 I SE IN TH E K AM AKUR A P E RIOD : L ANDS AND S E CRET S

In the thirteenth century, Ise became the object of Buddhist fascination on an unprecedented scale, and some of the largest temples in the land made a concerted effort to associate themselves with the shrines both physically and theologically. Yet the taboo on Buddhism remained a hallmark of Ise’s identity, albeit in a radically reimagined form. This taboo, combined with Ise’s increasingly exotic-​looking kami rituals, marked the site as unique. It was in the late thirteenth century that this uniqueness first acquired a name: Shinto. The emergence of Ise’s Shinto transmissions occurred in the aftermath of the most dramatic events of the Kamakura period: two invasions of Mongol armies in 1274 and 1281. This raises the question of how the invention of Shinto may have been related to this crisis. Classical studies have argued that Japan’s spectacular success in holding Kublai Khan’s forces at bay inspired a new pride in the country’s own heritage, reinvigorating Shinto scholarship and creating a new national consciousness. Kubota Osamu was central in fleshing out this thesis, but already before the Second World War, 1 it was enshrined as state dogma in texts of national ideology such as Kokutai no hongi (Fundamentals of our national polity, 1937). The degree to which such a reading reflects events on the ground in thirteenth-​ century Ise depends on one’s understanding of terms like ‘national consciousness’ and, indeed, ‘Shinto’. This chapter argues that the emergence of Shinto transmissions in the late Kamakura period was in no way compatible with the notion of a Shinto revival. First, these transmissions did not mark a reaction against ‘foreign’ Buddhism on the part of ‘native’ Shinto. Quite to the contrary, they sought to give new significance to Ise as the centre of a Buddhist universe. Second, Ise’s Shinto transmissions were not part of a propaganda effort to enhance popular loyalty to a rediscovered Japanese nation. Rather, they constituted esoteric knowledge and know-​how, transmitted within closed lineages of religious specialists who guarded their secrets against competitors. Finally, the naming of such transmissions as ‘Shinto’ did not mark the birth of a new religion, or the revival of an old one, but was an attempt to create a new label for this closed Ise lineage. Stripping away the

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layers of modern ideological reinterpretation, the following four developments stand out: 1. The esoterization of Ise, which had begun with the pilgrimages of Tōdaiji monks to the shrines, expanded rapidly, both in the breadth of its contents and in its proliferation to different milieus. 2. Large Buddhist temple complexes founded branch temples in Ise and transformed the shrines’ local setting. 3. Ise priests embraced Ise’s esoteric identity and created their own secret transmissions. 4. The term Shinto came to be applied to these transmissions both by Ise priests and by a range of Buddhist ritualists beyond Ise. Like the wars that led to the emergence of the first bakufu a century or so earlier, the Mongol crisis did indeed have a profound impact on the country’s religious history, and on Ise in particular. Kubota was quite right when he pointed at this seismic shock to explain the expansion of Ise transmissions both at the shrines and beyond. This makes it all the more important to re-​examine its effects with a keen eye to the local contexts and the crossing interests of the agents who created and transmitted the Kamakura-​period’s Ise literature.

The Mongols The Mongol threat dominated the agenda of bakufu and court alike for a very long time. Kublai Khan’s messengers began arriving in Kyushu in 1268. The threat of invasion did not dissipate until Kublai Khan’s death in 1294; Kublai’s grandson Temür (Emperor Chengzong) sent an envoy to demand Japan’s submission as late as 1299. This crisis was, of course, met with military means, but religious activity was just as frantic. As soon as Kublai’s 1268 letter reached Kamakura, offerings were sent to a list of twenty-​two shrines that were regularly sponsored by the court, and within months an imperial envoy had crossed the Miyagawa River to ask the Ise deities for protection and guidance. When the crisis was over some three decades later, Ise had become a very different place. The impact of the Mongol crisis on the Ise shrine districts first became tangible in 1275. In this year the Daigoji monk Tsūkai (1234–​1305), who was the son and brother of multiple Ise saishu, turned the Ōnakatomi lineage temple of Rengeji into a centre of Buddhist ‘Dharma-​enjoyment’ (hōraku) rites. This temple was located on the western bank of the Miyagawa, a few kilometres upriver from the main ford to the shrines. Rengeji had served as Ise’s Ōnakatomi lineage temple since the late tenth century, and lay within walking distance of the headquarters of the Ōnakatomi saishu. Tsūkai gave this temple the new name of Daijingū Hōrakuji or ‘Dharma-​enjoyment temple for the Ise Shrines’. At the same time, he established two branch temples for the performance of Dharma-​enjoyment services (known as Hōrakusha) in the immediate vicinity of the Inner and Outer Shrines. Retired

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Emperor Kameyama allowed the appointment of well over 200 resident monks to these Hōrakusha in the same year.2 Through these branch temples, Ise entered the sphere of influence of the temple complex of Daigoji, the headquarters of a range of lineages within the Ono branch of Shingon located not far from Kyoto. As a result, Ise lands ended up in Daigoji hands, and Ise was developed further as a topic of Ono transmissions. Hōrakuji and its two Hōrakusha branches grew into major players within Ise’s shrine districts. They were large enough to dominate the landscape physically, economically and intellectually. The Hōrakusha were at least in part staffed by monks of Watarai and Arakida kin, and they were among a number of sites where knowledge from different milieus blended to produce new rituals, texts and interpretations. Hōrakuji and its Inner and Outer Shrine branches were places where Ōnakatomi nobles mixed with both Daigoji monks and Watarai and Arakida priests.3 Daigoji was not the only Buddhist institution to show an active interest in Ise. Tōdaiji abbots, for example, continued to make grand pilgrimages to Ise (1277, 1279, 1281). A new and innovative player, worthy of more detailed attention here, was the Ritsu monk Eison (1201–​90). Eison, who spent his early days at Daigoji and Tōdaiji, is famous for his restoration of the precepts, his work with nuns and outcasts, and his effectiveness in fundraising (kanjin). By the time of the Mongol crisis, the aged Eison was managing a growing temple network from the revived classical temple of Saidaiji in Nara. Over the previous decades Eison had won a reputation as a powerful ritualist, and he maintained good relations with the highest circles of both Kamakura and Kyoto. Eison’s connection with Ise came about at the initiative of Inner Shrine priests. In 1271 an Arakida gonnegi visited Eison repeatedly to invite him to Ise. When Eison arrived in 1273, Arakida priests acted as assistants during the Dharma-​enjoyment rites that Eison staged for the Ise deities. After Eison’s departure, the Inner Shrine’s first negi, Arakida Nobutsune, sent him a letter, answering Eison’s questions about Ise and offering secret comments on an oracle that a ‘mysterious voice’ had communicated to Eison during his Ise pilgrimage.4 In 1275, a year after the first Mongol invasion, Eison made a second pilgrimage. To both shrines he offered copies of the Daihannya-​ kyō sutra, shipped from Kamakura in twenty-​four crates. Eison’s last and largest pilgrimage took place in 1280. This time each of the shrines received a copy of the entire Buddhist canon. Both copies were procured from the court; one was offered by Kameyama himself. More than a hundred crates were needed to transport just one copy of this canon, and the procession of monks and horses ambling towards Ise with this heavy load must have been quite a sight. According to Eison’s diary, Arakida Nobutsune met him and a few companions under the torii gate of the Kaze no Miya Shrine within the Inner Shrine precinct.5 There, Nobutsune introduced the Saidaiji monks to a shrine maiden, who answered Eison’s questions by ‘taking on an extraordinary appearance [of possession], waving her sleeves, and singing out in a clear voice’. Using this maiden as a medium, an obscure Ise kami called ‘Muyama’ expressed the gratitude of his ‘lord’ (presumably, Amaterasu) and guaranteed that owing to Ise’s protection, no foreign barbarians would be harassing the land.6

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The alliance between the Inner Shrine and Eison’s Saidaiji was to prove greatly beneficial to both institutions. Eison invested not only in Ise but also in the country’s other imperial fane, Iwashimizu Hachimangū.7 Eison’s ability to gain oracles from both Amaterasu and Hachiman added to Saidaiji’s reputation. Within Saidaiji Eison even installed an exquisitely crafted cabinet containing copies of the mirrors of the two Ise Shrines, as well as a range of documents that he acquired in the course of his interactions with Ise. These shōgyō objects formed the basis for the Ise rituals of his lineage. In Eison’s cabinet, the mirrors of the Inner and Outer Shrines were slotted into the reverse side of the panels that depict Buddhist mandalas:  the Taizōkai or Womb Realm mandala for the Inner Shrine and the Kongōkai or Diamond Realm mandala for the Outer Shrine. The Inner Shrine mirror was about twice the size of the Outer Shrine one, reflecting Eison’s close connection with the former. When one took the mirrors out of the panels, two more mandalas became visible in the circular spaces behind them: the Butsugen-​butsumo (Skt. Buddhalocana) mandala for the Inner Shrine and the Aizen Myōō (Skt. Rāgarāja) mandala for the Outer Shrine. These mandalas belonged to a category of mandalas dedicated to ‘individual divinities’ (besson). Such mandalas formed the focus of so-​called besson rituals, performed by ritual specialists for patrons with aims such as preventing calamities, attracting wealth, subjugating demons or winning love. There is neither space nor need for an explanation of the doctrinal backgrounds of these mandalas here, but it is worth noting that Eison performed a spectacular Aizen ritual at Iwashimizu Hachimangū in the midst of the 1281 invasion. Eison’s biography claims that it was this ceremony that unleashed the ‘great storm’ that scattered the Mongol troops some 600 kilometres further west.8 The Saidaiji lineage, then, specialized in the esoteric activation of Hachiman and Ise by Buddhist means, primarily by way of the Deva King Aizen.9 Eison’s lineage had a lasting presence in Ise. On land donated by the Inner Shrine, Eison founded a Saidaiji branch temple called Kōshōji, where he enshrined the Diamond and Womb Realm mandalas as the ‘original essence’ (honji) of the two Ise Shrines.10 Many of Kōshōji’s monks were of Arakida stock, and this temple also served as the main centre of Inner Shrine learning. Kōshōji offered the Arakida priests an alternative source of intellectual and ritual capital and helped to balance the influence in Ise of more established temple complexes, such as Daigoji and Tōdaiji. Even more boldly, Eison’s lineage went on to create its own Ise at a site that had recently come under Saidaiji control. In 1285 Eison restored a dilapidated temple at the ancient cultic site of Mount Miwa and developed it as a Saidaiji branch temple, called Daigorinji. Saidaiji monks then sought to redefine Miwa, which had long since fallen into obscurity, as equal to Ise, if not superior. One of the means they employed to achieve this was writing a new account of the origins and identity of Miwa as a sacred site. Miwa Daimyōjin engi (The karmic origins of the Great Deity of Miwa) begins by recounting an unnamed monk’s seven-​day pilgrimage to Ise.11 A ‘voice from the sky’ revealed to this monk that Mahāvairocana appears in heaven as Amaterasu, on Mount Miwa as the Great Deity of Miwa, and in Ise as the

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Great Imperial Deity. Pointedly, the engi states that Amaterasu came to Miwa first and moved to Ise only later; Miwa, therefore, is the ‘origin’ and Ise a later ‘trace’ of this supreme divinity. Miwa is described as the dwelling place of Mahāvairocana’s non-​dual enlightenment within the karmic realm that is our world. This rhetoric will be familiar from the previous chapter. What is new is the Saidaiji strategy of defining Miwa as the centre of Japan, or indeed the world, by identifying it with Ise. Here, we encounter a new phase in the proliferation of Ise as an idea:  Ise was being ‘cloned’ and replicated in places far removed from its original location. This tactic was all the more important because the Saidaiji lineage was not alone in employing it. Around the same time, a similar argument was made by monks of the Tendai headquarters of Enryakuji about the Hie Shrines, which had been integrated within the temple-​shrine complex since classical times. Here, monastic ‘chroniclers’ (kike) claimed that the Hie deity, called Sannō or the Mountain King, was identical to the imperial kami of Ise; like Amaterasu, Sannō was Mahāvairocana, manifested directly on Japanese soil.12 In fact, Miwa Daimyōjin engi completed the triangle by pointing out that Sannō had been invited to Hie from Miwa. As the Mongol crisis came to a head, Ise attracted the attention of the largest Buddhist institutions of the land. This interest was founded on the idea that the imperial deities, Ise and Hachiman, protected the land from foreign invasion. Ise now entered the competition between Dharma lineages in a booming market for esoteric rituals. Successful ritual performances brought in land donations where branch temples could be built, expanding both the holdings and the patronage base of a Dharma lineage. At the basis of such growth was the possession, and successful marketing, of striking shōgyō –​secret teachings, rituals and objects that were the exclusive property of a particular lineage. Amaterasu had been a topic of secret lineage transmissions since at least the twelfth century, but it was not until the thirteenth century that the hunt for Ise shōgyō attracted large temples to Ise. The Watarai and Arakida priests were by no means detached from this hunt; in fact, they often took the initiative by inviting new agents to Ise, or by creating new secrets that they passed on piecemeal to favoured contacts. The emergence of Ise Dharma lineages, or ‘Ise Shinto’, occurred within this heated atmosphere.

Economic Woes What effect did the Mongol crisis have on Ise’s economic situation? One might expect the shrines to find new prosperity as a result of all the attention they were attracting. In reality, however, the rewards appear to have been meagre, and the problems many. Tsūkai, the founder of the two Ise Hōrakusha, gives an example of the problems that the shrines were facing in his 1287 pilgrimage record. When he writes about the two Takihara Shrines, located some forty kilometres up the Miyagawa River, Tsūkai notes that they can only be worshipped from afar:  ‘Recently, a certain gonnegi claimed to have inherited the land rights (myōshu-​shiki) of this shrine site

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and commended it to a powerful house; with this, the land became the property of Kyoto people and is no longer controlled by the Ise Shrines.’13 The new proprietors (ryōke) did not allow access even to imperial envoys, and the Takihara Shrines had, for all practical purposes, disappeared. Even worse, bandits had settled in this hilly area, and when the Kyoto proprietors proved unable to subdue them, the local representative of the Kamakura-​appointed military governor (shugo) had intervened. As a result, Takihara had been turned into this governor’s private estate. Tsūkai condemns the intrusion of warriors onto ancient shrine lands, and concludes: To avoid paying shrine dues, district offices, village offices, and land-​holding farmers commend [shrine land] to powerful houses. In breach of imperial orders, many shrine lands and shrine officials, among them even some of long standing, have recently broken away from the shrines. Not only have shrine lands decreased; the decay of the shrines themselves is so shocking that one can only weep.14

Tsūkai’s account shows that the system of garden estates, which had compensated for the loss of more direct allocations of taxes by the court since the late Heian period, was being undermined. The changes he describes were, of course, not unique to Ise. Throughout the land, guarantors and proprietors of estates were finding that warriors were eating into their lands. In 1185 Kamakura had won the right to appoint military land stewards (jitō) to selected estates, notably lands that had once belonged to their former enemies, the Taira. These stewards, who answered to the province’s military governor, kept order and assisted in the estate’s management; for this they were rewarded with a set share of the estate’s proceeds. Stewards tended to overstep the bounds of their authority, and an ambitious steward could cause no end of trouble for the estate’s guarantors, proprietors, and, not least, local managers and farmers. By the late thirteenth century, many proprietors resorted to new measures to keep stewards at bay. Some split an estate in two, preferring to lose half rather than share all of it with a steward. Others gave the steward a free hand in managing the estate against a fixed annual payment. Many, however, simply lost their estates to stewards or military governors, as happened in Takihara. As a former Taira stronghold, Ise had been vulnerable to the encroachment of stewards in the early days of Kamakura rule. Already in 1185, Kamakura threatened to impose a steward on the very estate that housed the saishu headquarters: the Ōhashi estate, which included Rengeji/​Hōrakuji. In an appeal to Yoritomo, the Ōnakatomi had argued successfully that the Watarai District, including Ōhashi, had been ‘primordial shrine land since the Age of the Gods’. This appeal established a precedent that saved Ise estates from further incursions.15 The example of Takihara shows, however, that by the mid-​thirteenth century, Yoritomo’s special protection was dissipating. The second Mongol invasion of 1281, however, convinced both the bakufu and the court that action should be taken to prevent any further fragmentation

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of shrine lands. The larger framework of this policy was the notion of tokusei, ‘virtuous government’. Tokusei referred to the practice of restoring matters to their ‘original state’ at periodical intervals, notably when one ruler replaced another. To underscore the new ruler’s virtuous power, land rights were reviewed, courts of law reformed, debts cancelled, and drinking and killing banned. To secure and propagate divine support for the ruler, measures were taken to ensure that temples and shrines were well funded and able to perform their established rituals in full. In Japan, the great changes of the late Heian and Kamakura periods inspired a series of so-​called tokusei reforms, initiated by both the court and, later, the bakufu. The court used tokusei to reassert its judicial powers, while the bakufu concentrated on strengthening the financial position of its housemen through debt cancellations. In addition, both agreed that the restoration of temple and shrine lands was a matter of the highest priority. As we saw in Chapter  3, Yoritomo promised in 1181 to ensure the proper performance of Ise rituals by repairing war damage and donating new garden estates. These measures were clearly in line with the tokusei idiom of restoring an ‘original state’. When the Ōnakatomi saishu protested against the installation of a steward on ‘primordial shrine land’ in 1185, this marked another early step in the dissemination of this new rhetoric to Ise. Already at this time, the ideal of a ‘return to primordial origins’ was among Ise’s most effective weapons against the threat of economic catastrophe. The Ōhashi estate may have been saved from the imposition of a steward, but such incidental victories remained exceptions to a creeping trend. More and more shrine lands were taken off the shrines’ books, not only by warriors but also by Ise’s various lineages of priests, who turned shrine land allocated to them as holders of particular appointments into hereditary property. The estate of Tsubura to the west of Ōhashi offers a good example of this development.16 In 1278, this estate had a guarantor (the Outer Shrine), a proprietor (the temple Senjuji, owned by a member of the Ōnakatomi saishu lineage) and a steward, who all extracted revenue from it. In the summer of 1278, the Outer Shrine appealed to Kyoto to expel the proprietor from the estate. Both sides made strong claims: the Outer Shrine representative was (falsely) accused of being a local commoner who had ‘stolen’ Outer Shrine papers to lend legitimacy to his case, while the Ōnakatomi proprietor was charged with attempted murder. The Outer Shrine explicitly adduced its performance of rituals against the Mongols as a reason why the temple rights of the Ōnakatomi proprietor should be annulled. In the end, the Outer Shrine emerged victorious. Cases like Takihara and Tsubura shed light on the changing power relations among Ise’s main political agents: the Ōnakatomi saishu and the two priests’ offices (negichō) of the Outer and Inner Shrines. In the latter half of the Kamakura period, the Ōnakatomi saishu retained nominal control over Ise’s communications with the court, but the Daijingūji Office was relegated to the sidelines.17 The Saigūryō had entered a period of terminal decline. The last abstinence princess to occupy the Saigūryō was Yasuko (1249–​84). Arriving in 1264, she served until 1272, when the death of her father (Emperor Go-​Saga) rendered her impure due to mourning. New princesses were appointed in 1306, 1330 and 1333, but none of them ever

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travelled to Ise. The disappearance of the Saigūryō reduced the responsibilities of the saishu and diminished the importance of his office. The saishu now exerted what remained of his administrative and judicial control over the nine shrine districts through so-​called shrine district offices (shingun mandokoro).18 Only one such office, that overseeing the three southernmost shrine districts of Watarai, Taki and Iino, was actually functioning; the others existed only in name. This office, called the Southern Office (Dōgo mandokoro), was staffed almost exclusively by persons of the Inner Shrine’s Arakida lineage. The Southern Office had judicial powers over ‘miscellaneous people’ (zōnin) in the shrine districts, while the shrines’ service people (jinin), whose taxes and corvée duties were reserved for shrine use, fell under the jurisdiction of the two priests’ offices. The Southern Office employed a small number of law-​enforcing guards (kebiishi), but whenever more manpower was required it depended on the collaboration of local jinin. Major incidents were to be handled by the military governor and the Kamakura housemen under his command. The Ōnakatomi sought to counter their loss of influence in two ways: by turning shrine land into private estates, often held by local Ōnakatomi temples as in Tsubura, and by allying themselves with the Inner Shrine. The Outer Shrine opposed this alliance by drawing on its superior connections with Kamakura. The situation was further complicated by conflicts within each of the involved camps, between different branches of the Ōnakatomi, Watarai and Arakida. The spat over Tsubura was just one of many between the Outer Shrine and its Ōnakatomi rivals. This conflict escalated in 1284–​ 85, when the bakufu implemented major tokusei reforms in the wake of the second Mongol invasion. Restoring shrine land was one of Kamakura’s aims, and to this end the bakufu issued an order that outlawed all private holdings of housemen and commoners (bonge) on shrine lands. The court had advocated the same principle already in the 1260s, but its ineffective system of handling lawsuits had prevented it from making much of an impact; it now followed up on the bakufu’s initiative by declaring its own tokusei reform of shrine land restoration, with a special focus on Ise. The Outer Shrine reacted immediately by suing not only Kamakura housemen, but also members of the Ōnakatomi lineage who held shrine lands as their private holdings.19 In 1286 the priests’ offices (negichō) instigated a storm of lawsuits that quite overwhelmed the Kyoto court. Soon, however, it became evident that a drastic restoration of shrine lands was not possible. First, the court decided that the shogunal ban on private holdings on shrine land did not apply to Kyoto nobles and officials. Then, in late 1286, the bakufu allowed private holdings on shrine land on the condition that ‘shrine duties’ (jin’yaku) were paid. These compromises deflated the priests’ hopes of regaining complete control over shrine land rights. Even so, the watered-​down ban still recognized the special status of shrine lands by underlining those lands’ ‘original’ purpose of funding the shrines, their staff and their rituals. The order to restore shrine lands was reissued in 1301, but once again it triggered such upheaval that Kamakura had to step in and stop attacks on non-​priestly holders of shrine lands.20 To what degree did these tokusei policies restore the economic basis of the shrines? Kyoto nobles proved much more resistant to litigation than warrior

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landholders, and Kyoto-​owned private lands, often managed through private temples, continued to occupy a considerable portion of shrine lands also in the fourteenth century. This was all the more damaging because other sources of income, notably the nationwide tax that the court had levied on all lands to pay for the sengū (yakubukumai) since the late eleventh century, were also drying up.21 There is little to suggest that the shrines were in significantly better shape after the Mongol crisis had put their economic situation on the agenda. A possible indicator of the shrines’ state of repair is the frequency of so-​called interim (karidono) sengū. These occurred when the main hall was in such a state of disrepair that it had to be evacuated and the kami temporarily moved to another building. Interim sengū first became frequent in the mid-​eleventh century; in the years 1040–​1160, there was an average of 0.75 interim sengū per decade at the Inner Shrine and 0.67 at the Outer Shrine. After this, the frequency increased dramatically. Between 1161 and 1300, interim sengū averaged 1.78 per decade at the Inner Shrine and 2.57 at the Outer Shrine; that is, one every four years. Some have interpreted this as a sign of increasing care for the state of the shrine buildings; even minor defects, they argue, now triggered court-​sponsored action.22 Even if there was such an increased ‘sensibility’, the speed at which shrine halls deteriorated, taken together with a shortage of timber, can safely be taken as proof of declining standards.23 In the Kamakura period, even the shrines’ main halls rarely lasted very long. The Outer Shrine main hall that was finished in 1249 stood only for three years, as did its successor, finished in 1268; the hall built in 1287 endured only one year.24 Statistics for the Inner Shrine are not much better.25 It had become quite normal to have between two and seven (!) interim sengū within the nineteen-​year period that separated regular sengū. The shrines must have looked rather shabby already before the Mongol invasions. The sengū of 1285/​1287, which occurred during a spate of tokusei restoration, was grossly underfunded. Materials were hard to come by and established funding systems were failing. In the end, this first regular sengū after the Mongol attacks were left incomplete. Non-​essential halls were not renewed, and not all kami treasures could be procured. The halls that were rebuilt were of such bad quality that they soon came apart. The concerted efforts of bakufu and court to restore Ise proved ineffective in the face of the chaotic power relations, changing landholding patterns and escalating lineage struggles of the later Kamakura period.

Watarai Yukitada and the Origin Ise’s economic problems and the tokusei initiatives of court and bakufu provided the shrines’ priests with a strong incentive to experiment. In particular, the rush among many influential Dharma lineages to acquire or invent Ise-​related shōgyō must have inspired Ise’s priests. It was in this environment that Ise priests produced a range of new texts, theories and rituals, and finally began to conceive of this body of knowledge as transmissions of ‘Shinto’. A key person in this development was the Outer Shrine negi Watarai Yukitada (1236–​1305). Although the extent

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of his exact role is disputed, there is no doubt that Yukitada lifted the ongoing process of reinventing the Ise Shrines to a new level. Yukitada and his hand-​ picked successors, Tsuneyoshi (1263–​1339) and Ieyuki (1256–​1351?), developed a body of sophisticated doctrines about Ise that extended far beyond conventional origination narratives, such as had been written by enterprising monks and priests across the land since the mid-​Heian period. It is no exaggeration to say that the ‘Shinto’ template developed by these Watarai priests was a first step towards the invention of Shinto as an autonomous Japanese tradition in subsequent centuries. How did this come about? A logical point from which to embark on this story is the year 1283, two years after the second Mongol invasion. As we have already seen, the Inner Shrine was in a bad state. Built in 1266, the roof of the main hall had begun to show signs of rot within a decade. The kami were moved to a temporary hall in 1279, but by 1283, this building too was so leaky that it was deemed necessary to replace it. The responsibility for securing timber for this second temporary hall fell to Yukitada, who held the position of ‘third negi’ of the Outer Shrine.26 Yukitada found that the shrine mountain of Kamijiyama had been stripped of good timber, no doubt in preparation for the regular sengū of the Inner Shrine, due in 1285. He therefore made arrangements to use timber from another site. Others, however, found fault with this. The use of timber from sites other than Kamijiyama for the construction of a hall intended to accommodate Amaterasu was denounced as an unprecedented breach of protocol. Yukitada paid dearly for his mistake: he was fired.27 It would appear, however, that this calamity only spurred Yukitada on to greater things. In the year of the Inner Shrine sengū, 1285, Yukitada was ordered by none other than the imperial regent Takatsukasa Kanehira to compile and submit a compendium of up-​to-​date Ise information. It is no coincidence that this request came at a time when the court was stepping up its tokusei-​inspired efforts to restore Ise’s shrine lands. The result, Ise nisho daijingū shinmei hisho (Secret book of the names of the gods of the two Ise Shrines; henceforth Shinmei hisho), was finished in the twelfth month of that same year.28 If we are to believe the colophon attached to some manuscripts of this work, it won the unprecedented honour of being shown, albeit unofficially, to Retired Emperor Kameyama himself. Why would the regent make such a request of a fired Outer Shrine priest, rather than the Ōnakatomi saishu or, at the very least, a priest with his papers in order? Only close connections between Yukitada and that most elevated of all court aristocrats can explain this turn of events. Yukitada’s 1283 dismissal freed him from the ban on negi priests crossing the Miyagawa and leaving the shrine perimeter. He made good use of his freedom by travelling to Kyoto, where he must have pulled strings with great success. In the summer of 1287 Yukitada was reinstated as Outer Shrine negi, and he returned to Ise in time for the Outer Shrine sengū in the tenth month of that year.29 His position at the Outer Shrine was now unassailable, and he would go on to reach the post of first negi. Yet there are signs that Yukitada’s 1285 draft was not met with undivided enthusiasm at court, for after he had been reinstated, Yukitada submitted a rewritten version. All surviving manuscripts of Shinmei hisho are copies of the

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post-​1287, rewritten version, so we cannot be sure what the first draft was like. This later version is an admixture of information from Ise with new knowledge that Yukitada must have gained at the court. Yukitada’s ability to revolutionize the development of local Ise literature at the Outer Shrine owed much to his success in accessing court scholarship during his brief stay in Kyoto. There, Yukitada not only gained new knowledge but also learned of current ways to manage such knowledge in a closed lineage. This allowed him to experiment with the creation of his own lineage, transmitted among elite Watarai priests. For these reasons, Shinmei hisho has been described as the ‘first milestone’ in the development of medieval Shinto.30 What, then, does this work reveal? Shinmei hisho takes the form of a detailed overview of the Inner and Outer Shrines, vaguely similar to the 804 Protocols discussed in Chapter 2. Yet this is a very different document. The protocols began with a brief section on Ise’s origins, but only by way of an introduction. Shinmei hisho, in contrast, makes clarifying ‘the origin of the gods’ its main objective. The protocols offered a brief history; Yukitada presents the shrines as the very seat of ‘the Origin’ in an absolute, cosmological sense. In the preface of Shinmei hisho, Yukitada praises the court for its interest in the secret of the gods’ origin, not for historical reasons but because ‘the Divine’ is none other than ‘the inner essence of the ruler’, and the ruler nothing but ‘the outer function of the Divine’.31 In these first lines we can recognize a sleight of hand that underlies most of the Ise literature that would be produced in the coming decades: the word shinmei (or just shin/​kami) refers not only to particular ‘gods’, notably those of Ise, but also to an abstract notion that is best translated as ‘the Divine’, closely linked to ‘the Origin’. The Divine is the main focus of speculation both in Shinmei hisho and in later works by Yukitada and his successors. In this preface, Yukitada states that the ruler maintains and balances the Divine by means of Ise worship. No ruler can expect to project his ‘virtuous power’ (toku) without the backing of the ‘might of the gods’ (shin’i). If a ruler pays reverence to the gods, his power will ‘penetrate Heaven, Earth, and Man’, and divine protection will ensure that ‘the transformations of the Bright One (meiichi –​that is, the Divine) will be tranquil’. Yukitada’s terminology in this Shinmei hisho preface, with its focus on the Divine and the Origin, is clearly different from the esoteric Buddhist narrative that we encountered in Shōden kan or in the writings of Tsūkai and Eison. Rather than Buddhism, Yukitada appears to draw on works of Yin-​Yang cosmology. More of this terminology appears in the first entry of Shinmei hisho, where Yukitada discusses Amaterasu. Yukitada starts his exegesis by quoting the Nihon shoki account of the emergence of Yin and Yang, Heaven and Earth from an original state of Chaos (konton), ‘similar to an egg’. Referring to an ‘ancient record’, he writes: When we consider the Origin, [we may explain it as follows:] Of old, Heaven and Earth were not yet separated and the Divine did not yet have form. This state of quiescence, like water in a container filled to the brim, is the origin of the myriad transformations. This is the original essence (honji) of the gods.32

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Yukitada goes on to explain how this undivided Origin (also called the Way) relates to the differentiated cosmos in which we live: Therefore [a source] says: The Way gives rise to Yin and Yang; Yin and Yang give rise to harmonious, pure and turbid [qi]; these three kinds of qi become Heaven, Earth, and Man; Heaven, Earth, and Man give birth to the myriad things. When the Way is shattered, it becomes gods (shinmei); when it flows, it becomes sun and moon; when it differentiates, it becomes the Five Phases [of wood, fire, earth, metal and water].33

Yukitada turns to more familiar kami history only after a barrage of citations on the topic of the unfolding of the world from the undifferentiated Origin/​Way. Where did this discourse about the Origin and the Way come from? Its ultimate source is Laozi’s Daodejing. Yukitada, however, did not quote directly from that great classic. His immediate source was a work with the title Tenchi reikaku hisho (Secret book of the spirit-​enlightenment of Heaven and Earth). An early manuscript of that text carries a colophon that reveals much about the setting in which Yukitada acquired his new knowledge: On 5.9.1286, I  [Yukitada] met an excellent teacher and gained knowledge [of Tenchi reikaku hisho] in the Jingikan. On 8.4.1287 I performed the ritual. On 7.7, I completed the initiation. I acquired the mudra of Mahāvairocana, as well as the mudras and mantras of the gods and the beings of the Other Realm and the twenty-​eight lunar mansions. I received oral transmissions [about their proper employment].34

This colophon reveals that after Yukitada had submitted the first draft of Shinmei hisho to the court, he was allowed access to secret teachings transmitted by initiation at the Jingikan. Perhaps Yukitada’s sponsors found his 1285 submission too bland. Yukitada obliged by expanding Shinmei hisho and resubmitting it. What he added was the theoretical framework of the Origin, taught to him in the Jingikan in 1286. We do not know who Yukitada’s ‘excellent teacher’ was, or what that teacher’s connection with the Jingikan may have been. Murei Hitoshi assumes that he must have been of the Ōnakatomi or Urabe lineages that staffed the Jingikan.35 Ogawa Toyoo, on the other hand, points at Zen masters who enjoyed court patronage in the mid-​thirteenth century.36 Something can be said for and against both these hypotheses. We do not need to identify Yukitada’s teacher, though, to recognize the pioneering nature of what he was taught. Tenchi reikaku hisho’s combination of Buddhist theories about Ise with non-​Buddhist cosmology was a new departure. This work not only identified the two Ise Shrines with the Womb and Diamond Realm mandalas, as earlier texts had done already, but also drew on non-​canonical sources such as Laozi and Zhuangzi to develop the shrines’ esoteric reinvention in new directions.

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What was this non-​canonical, ‘Daoist’ narrative about the Origin? Ultimately, it was derived from an ancient creation myth, reflected in a third-​century text titled Sanwu liji (Historical records of the three sovereign divinities and the five gods). Sanwu liji, which had been the main source for the section on the origin of Heaven and Earth in Nihon shoki, describes how the world began with Chaos, comparable to an egg. From this egg was born the first human, the giant Pangu. After thousands of years, the light and pure substances rose up to form Heaven, while the heavy and turbid drifted downwards to form the Earth. Laozi and Zhuangzi offer a more abstract version of this tale about the Origin. They do not mention Chaos, egg or Pangu, but use adjectives and phrases from the same discourse to describe what they call ‘the Way’.37 The Way is described as an original state of chaotic wholeness that is ‘one’, ‘dark’, ‘empty’ and ‘great’. The Way is without forms; it is the yet unrealized potential from which all forms come forth, and the source of all life and all creation. In this sense, it is like ‘water in a container filled to the brim’. It consists of ‘original qi’:  as yet undifferentiated ‘breath’ that at times condenses into differentiated matter. The ‘one’ Way divides into two, three and finally the myriad things, yet it always retains its fundamental oneness. This differentiation is not only a process that has occurred at the time of creation in a distant past, but also a permanent state of creative harmony that is inherent in all things at all times. To follow the Way is to return to and dwell in the original oneness of primeval Chaos. Indeed, as stressed especially by Confucian readings of this cosmogonic scheme, it is the task of ‘Man’ (primarily, the ruler) to harmonize Heaven and Earth, Yang and Yin. As the ‘third’ entity after Heaven/​ Yang and Earth/​Yin, Man must ensure that these ‘two’ are always balanced in a state of productive harmony, and that their transformations into the myriad things are, as Yukitada put it in his preface, ‘tranquil’. This is essential both to preserve harmony within one’s own body and to maintain peace and prosperity in the realm as a whole. In Shinmei hisho, Yukitada assembled a collage of quotations from Tenchi reikaku hisho that covers most corners of this cosmology, but with special emphasis on the Divine or ‘the gods’. As Tenchi reikaku hisho revealed, the ‘Origin of the myriad transformations’ is the ‘original essence’ of the gods. The gods, or the Divine, are none other than the fundamental oneness inherent in all things, the creative force that allows the Way to differentiate into life. To worship the gods or the Divine, therefore, is the ultimate task of Man, or, more specifically, the ruler. Worship is not merely a practice that woos particular other-​worldly beings; it is a way to harmonize the transformations of matter that determine both one’s own health and the state of the realm. The unity of Man (the ruler) with the Origin (the gods) is the foundation of peace and harmony in the world. Can we characterize this cosmological discourse as ‘non-​Buddhist’? In the limited sense that it was based on texts that were not formally part of the Buddhist canon, we can. However, this does not imply that Buddhists regarded this cosmology as incompatible with their Dharma. Ogawa shows beyond doubt that Tenchi reikaku hisho emerged in Zen circles; incorporating Laozi cosmology in Buddhism was a feature of Zen treatises that were imported to Japan in the mid-​twelfth century.38

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Every bit as Buddhist was the context in which Yukitada acquired his knowledge of Laozi:  an esoteric Buddhist initiation. When Yukitada looked to Laozi to give Ise new meaning, he was not distancing himself from Buddhism, as some have argued;39 he was following the example of the Buddhist (Zen) lineage that produced Tenchi reikaku hisho. Yukitada’s teacher saw no contradiction between Laozi’s concept of the non-​dual Way and mandala thought, which feature side by side in Tenchi reikaku hisho. Laozi holds that the undifferentiated Way gives rise to and continues to form the inner essence of all existence. Esoteric Buddhism argues that the non-​dual enlightenment of Mahāvairocana gives rise to and continues to form the inner essence of the differentiated world of karma. The obvious parallels between these two discourses inspired experiments in Daoist–​Buddhist amalgamation in both China and Japan. Why, though, did the court go out of its way to give Yukitada the opportunity to learn about these experimental doctrines of the Origin? The answer to that question lies in the political context of the years 1285–​87, when Shinmei hisho was written and rewritten. As we have seen, that context was dominated by the aftermath of the 1281 Mongol invasion and, relevant to Ise, the tokusei restoration of shrine lands that followed it. Yukitada submitted the first version of Shinmei hisho at a time when the court was preparing to implement the 1285 tokusei. In 1286, while Yukitada received instruction at the Jingikan, Kyoto was inundated with Outer Shrine lawsuits against ‘inappropriate’ owners of land rights on shrine lands. When Yukitada returned to Ise and incorporated his new knowledge into the final version of Shinmei hisho, the restoration of Ise shrine lands had already stalled. The rationale behind the tokusei reforms was similar to that of ritual purification:  to remove accumulated corruption and restore an original state of purity and harmony. This urgent undertaking inspired court intellectuals to reflect on the ‘Origin’ in new ways, and their reflections convinced them that Yukitada should refer to the Origin in the Ise manual he was writing in preparation for the reforms. The collapse of the effort to restore Ise shrine lands in late 1286 was all the more ironic. Yukitada’s discourse on the Origin in his resubmitted Shinmei hisho of 1287 no longer served to legitimize court policy, since the court had already abandoned it. It had now turned into an appeal, or even a thinly disguised threat. The question of who first introduced Laozi-​inspired cosmology into kami discourse at Ise remains difficult to answer. Yukitada expanded on an idea that had been conceived by people who were more centrally placed and more likely to have access to new intellectual trends. His trip to Kyoto must have been particularly inspiring in this regard. Some scholars see Yukitada as a collector and promoter of already extant texts, others as a mass producer of ‘forged’ (i.e. antedated) texts with genuinely new contents. Isolated phrases of Laozi-​derived cosmology can be found in works that are demonstrably pre-​Yukitada.40 The problem is that all these texts passed through the hands of Yukitada, who may well have updated them post 1286, or merely added notes to them that became part of the main text in later copies. The non-​existence of pre-​Yukitada manuscripts renders it unlikely that the extent of Yukitada’s innovative intervention can be determined with certainty.

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There is little doubt, however, that Yukitada put the notion of the Origin to new uses, and transformed the identity of Ise in the process.

Reinventing the Outer Shrine’s Kami What did Yukitada use Laozi’s cosmology for? Perhaps most importantly, he reconfigured the identity of the Outer Shrine’s kami Toyuke and its relationship to Amaterasu at the Inner Shrine. The identity of the Outer Shrine’s kami had been problematic ever since the shrines became dependent on donations of commended estates in the late Heian period. As we have seen earlier, the 804 Protocols characterized Toyuke as a ‘kami of divine food’ who had moved to Ise from Tanba at Amaterasu’s request. The daily ritual of serving food to both Amaterasu and Toyuke at the mike hall underlined the subservient function of the Outer Shrine. If this was all there was to Toyuke, any landowner would naturally be more tempted to entrust his lands to the Inner Shrine’s Amaterasu. Post-​classical accounts of Ise tended to retain a focus on the Inner Shrine, while raising the Outer Shrine to semi-​equal status. Tenshō Daijin giki presented the Inner Shrine as the palace of King Yama and the Outer Shrine as the seat of his chief minister, Taizan Fukun. In the same text, the Inner and Outer Shrines were identified with the sun and the moon, and the assembled kami halls of both shrine complexes together formed the ‘Heavenly Realm’ that decides our fate. Esoteric interpretations of Ise, for example, in Shōden kan, largely ignored the difference in status between the shrines by applying various binary schemes to them, notably by associating them with the Womb and Diamond Realm mandalas that together constitute Mahāvairocana. Yet another strategy was pioneered in the shrines’ correspondence with Kamakura. When a certain Ōnakatomi Yoshichika complained to Kamakura about Kumano raids in 1181, he implied in his letter that the kami of the Outer Shrine was Ninigi, Amaterasu’s grandson and first ruler over the Japanese islands.41 All these rebrandings gave the Outer Shrine a status that was perhaps junior, but at least comparable to that of the Inner Shrine. Such alternative identities could not change the fact that the official court records –​the 804 Protocols –​described Toyuke as a servant of Amaterasu, brought in from rural Tanba to prepare her food. In the twelfth century, however, new shrine chronicles introduced subtle changes to the protocols’ account.42 An early example is Daidō hongi (Record from the Daidō period), a work that was allegedly presented to the court by the Daijingūji and the assembled negi in 807 (Daidō 2).43 Here, a partial rewrite of the passage about Toyuke in the Protocols identifies the three kami in the Outer Shrine’s main hall as three daughters of Amaterasu who, according to Nihon shoki, ‘served Ninigi’. This notion clearly echoes Yoshichika’s letter to Kamakura. Next was a two-​volume work called Daijingū hongi (Records of the Great Shrines). The first volume was a genealogy of the gods, while the second, also known as Yamato-​hime no mikoto seiki (Record of the life of Yamato-​hime),

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offered an elaborate version of the founding of the Ise Shrines. Striking here is that Amaterasu’s journey from the imperial capital to Ise was radically extended. Many of the sites where she was said to have rested on her trek were Heian-​period garden estates. This record also gave new identities to Toyuke’s three companions, now listed as Ninigi, Ame no Koyane and Futodama, the ancestors of the imperial line and of the main lineages of court priests (Ōnakatomi and Inbe). Toyuke herself was identified with Uka no Mitama, a deity who features in Nihon shoki as the origin of all food, rather than just Amaterasu’s food. In Shinmei hisho, Yukitada built further on Yamato-​hime no mikoto seiki, which he quotes multiple times. Yet his account of Toyuke is very different in tone from the chronological, list-​like narrative in that earlier text. He draws on cosmological themes to a much larger degree: A certain [record] says:  Izanagi and Izanami first gave birth to the great islands, then to the deities of sea, wind, mountains, plants and trees. More than 10,000 years later, a famine struck the realm. Izanagi and Izanami then offered the curved jewel (yasakani no magatama) to Heaven, where it transformed into a deity with the name Mike-​tsu-​Kami Toyuke. Of bright and attractive character, this deity illuminates Heaven and Earth and sheds beneficence on the myriad beings. The signs of Heaven and the patterns of Earth appeared at this time, and the countless changes and transformations [of the Way] made themselves known. According to its pure vow, [Mike-​tsu-​Kami Toyuke] manifests its loving compassion by taking on the form of a protector. Mingling with the dust of the world, this deity works the loom of Heaven everywhere. Its power (toku) is as enduring as Heaven and Earth. [Thanks to Toyuke,] original qi runs like a stream, mingling as Yin and Yang to create light. [Manifesting itself] in the form of the gods, it determines good and bad fortune. It takes the form of the three Shining Devas [of sun, moon and stars], whose light spreads the working of its powers in all directions, and of the eight Dragon Kings, who extend beneficence across the four oceans. [Mike-​tsu-​Kami Toyuke] will hear the prayers of all, and respond to them without fail.44

While echoes of older identifications remain, Yukitada here enlarges Toyuke to a cosmic force. Ultimately, Toyuke is the benevolent Way that steers the movements of qi in Heaven and Earth. At the same time, Laozi’s cosmology is seamlessly combined with Buddhist themes. Toyuke has sworn a vow of loving compassion and appears in our world of karmic dust in the form of Dharma-​protectors such as the three Shining Devas (usually identified as the bodhisattvas Kannon of the sun, Daiseishi of the moon and Kokūzō of the stars), or as the eight Dragon Kings who guard the Lotus sutra. Yukitada further extended this line of reasoning in a series of texts on the origins of the Ise Shrines, each more radical than the next:  Ise nisho kōdaijin gochinza denki, Toyuke kōdaijin gochinza hongi and Amaterashimasu Ise nisho kōdaijingū gochinza shidaiki (all meaning, roughly, Record of the origins of the

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Outer Shrine, or of the two Ise Shrines). Gochinza shidaiki, the last of these three records, describes Toyuke as follows: The Great Imperial Deity Amaterasu Toyuke: In ancient times the power of Water (suitoku) had not yet appeared and Heaven and Earth had yet to arise. As [Izanagi and Izanami] offered the curved jewel to the nine halls [of Heaven], Water changed into Heaven and Earth. As Heaven and Earth took form, they fostered the people. The name of this deity [of the jewel] is Ame no Minakanushi, the Lord of the Centre of Heaven. Thanks to this deity, the thousand changes and the myriad transformations receive the power of Water and gave rise to the capacity to maintain life. Therefore it is also called Mike-​tsu-​Kami. Ancient words say: In the great ocean, there was One Thing, floating like a reed shoot. In it, a deity arose; it is called Ame no Minakanushi, or Kunitokotachi, or the Deity of the Great Origin. This is why [Japan] is called the Central Land of Abundant Reed Plains. This is why this deity is also known as the Great Imperial Deity Amaterasu Toyuke. It concluded a hidden pact with the Great Deity Ōhirumemuchi Amaterasu, and together these two deities will rule over Heaven and Earth for all eternity.45

Toyuke is here squarely identified as the first kami of creation, named as Ame no Minakanushi in the classical histories Kojiki and Sendai kuji hongi, and as Kunitokotachi in Nihon shoki. As such, Toyuke is the kami of primordial Water, the stuff of undifferentiated qi from which all things arise. As moon and sun, Ame no Minakanushi/​Toyuke and Amaterasu both carry the title ‘Heaven-​Shining’ (Amaterasu); both are direct ancestors of Ninigi and the imperial line;46 and both rule over Heaven and Earth as equal partners. Further finesses were to be added to this scheme in the remainder of the Kamakura period, but these need not detain us here. The reinvention of Ise and ‘Amaterasu Toyuke’ on the basis of the Origin discourse culminated eventually in the encyclopaedic Ruijū jingi hongen (The origins of the gods, rubricized), completed by Watarai Ieyuki in 1320. This hugely influential work continued to define the official position of the Outer Shrine until the Meiji Revolution.

Creating Secrets Gochinza shidaiki ends with instructions specifying that this text, together with Gochinza denki and Gochinza hongi, was to be treated as secret and stored in a ‘separate chest’. Likewise, Gochinza denki lists ‘twelve fascicles’ that needed special storage, many of which could not be shown to persons under the age of sixty.47 The same prescription is attached to manuscripts of Shinmei hisho: ‘This is a secret record that may not be seen by persons under sixty; therefore it must be hidden.’48

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In medieval Japan, ‘secret’ had a rather specific meaning. When a text was kept secret, this did not necessarily mean that its contents were never to be divulged. Rather, it marked particular knowledge as subject to transmission within a lineage, and thus as private property.49 From the late eleventh century onwards, holders of leading posts within imperial temples, and even within the court bureaucracy, were increasingly expected to have exclusive access to secret transmissions of this kind; this trend escalated further in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Paradoxically, this put pressure on noble, monastic and priestly lineages to advertise the fact that they possessed secrets worth having. Conflicts over the ownership of ‘famous secrets’ were inextricably linked to battles for positions within temple and court hierarchies, and, not least, for control over land and other sources of income. This culture (and economy) of secrecy washed over Ise with full force during the Mongol crisis, when a range of Buddhist institutions established themselves in the shrine districts. Yukitada’s Kyoto experience offered him a peek into the innermost circles of this culture, and inspired him to build up a store of Watarai secrets. This strategy was followed up by his successors, Watarai Tsuneyoshi and Ieyuki. Of course, ‘secrets’ (shōgyō) included not only texts and information, but also, and perhaps more importantly, sacred objects such as, for example, the jewels given by Amaterasu to Jōkei and Chōgen, or the Ise mirrors and mandalas in Eison’s Saidaiji cabinet. A  good example of a Watarai attempt to acquire and advertise similar sacred objects is told about Tsuneyoshi in a 1324 work with the strange title of Bikisho (meaning, perhaps, ‘Book of returning to the Origin’). When Tsuneyoshi was in the capital in 1321, Bikisho relates, he received many ‘imperial enquiries’ about the Ise Shrines, and he impressed the emperor with his detailed replies. The emperor then showed Tsuneyoshi two handscrolls from the court archives, one with diagrams and one with annotations. Having investigated them, Tsuneyoshi recalled that he had seen similar diagrams inscribed on gold and silver plates, stored in his shrine’s two treasure halls. Nobody at the Outer Shrine had known what they were. Tsuneyoshi was granted permission to borrow the scrolls overnight and hastily copied them. Now he understood that ‘the architecture of the main hall represents the five elements (gorin)’ and embodies the will of the gods through ‘the essence of tree, earth and stone’. Not much later, a set of sixteen diagrams turned up in a three-​fascicle text called Ryōgū honzei rishu makaen (The original vow of the two [Ise] Shrines, according to the Mahāyāna teaching of the Rishukyō; hereafter Rishu makaen; Figure 4.1).50 Rishukyō is a Tantric sutra on the topic of ‘sexual bliss’.51 The speaker of this sutra is Mahāvairocana, who embodies the wisdom and powers of all buddhas. Mahāvairocana, we read, dwells in the palace of the Sixth Heaven of Desire, where he preaches to an assembly of bodhisattvas. The core of the sutra is a sermon by Mahāvairocana on ‘the purity of all dharmas’. In seventeen ‘verses of purity’ (shōjō-​ge), Mahāvairocana identifies a range of sensual and sexual pleasures with the stage of the bodhisattva, stressing the pure, enlightened nature of the realm of the senses. Rishu makaen draws on this sutra to identify the two Ise Shrines with Mahāvairocana’s palace.

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Figure 4.1  Esoteric diagrams attached to Rishu makaen.

Source: Sofū Sen’yōkai, ed. 1923, Kōbō Daishi zenshū (vol. 5), Yoshikawa Kōbunkan: 232–​9.

Although Tsuneyoshi’s diagrams fill the second fascicle of Rishu makaen, the first and third fascicles make no reference to them, so it appears obvious that the diagrams were inserted into Rishu makaen after the text’s original composition. In a detailed analysis of this text, Kadoya Atsushi argues that it was Tsuneyoshi himself who did the inserting, soon after his return from Kyoto.52 By doing so he not only created physical secrets (the gold and silver plates, which may or may not have existed before 1321), but also linked them to a doctrinal framework, identifying Ise as Mahāvairocana’s palace of pure bliss. At the same time, he strategically leaked information about these secrets. The diagrams appeared again in Tenshō Daijin kuketsu (Oral transmissions on Amaterasu, 1327), authored by a Saidaiji monk who was also closely involved with the creation of Miwa as Ise’s ‘original’.53

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The plot thickens even further when we consider the circumstances around Tsuneyoshi’s trip to Kyoto in 1321. Tsuneyoshi was in the capital as head of a delegation of four negi, including Ieyuki, sent to report directly to the court on an alarming incident. Thieves had broken into Taka Shrine and stolen some of its treasures. To escape the thieves, that shrine’s mirror of Toyuke’s ‘violent spirit’ had fled from its container and remained lost. In his report on the incident, Tsuneyoshi referred to many previously unknown (more likely, non-​existent) treasures and texts, and it is clear that this inauspicious occurrence was used to create new secrets.54 It appears that on the occasion of his Kyoto visit, Tsuneyoshi also presented information about Ise purification practices to Retired Emperor Go-​Uda, his son Go-​Daigo and a selection of nobles, including the head of the Jingikan.55 This brings us to another type of shōgyō secrets: transmissions of procedures that enhance otherwise well-​known ritual procedures. Together with the recitation of norito prayers, purification was the most common ritual that Ise priests performed for patrons. The influx of Buddhist agents into Ise must have put pressure on priests to develop their own array of ritual services, complete with accompanying transmissions. There are clear signs that Tsuneyoshi was involved in this endeavour. Decades earlier, Yukitada had unearthed an older work on purification:  the twelfth-​century Nakatomi harae kunge, already mentioned above. Yukitada copied this work, updated it and passed it on to selected outsiders. Extant copies of Kunge contain passages that reflect Yukitada’s ideas: Amaterasu and Toyuke are described as ‘the Two Heaven-​Shining Imperial Great Deities’ and as ‘Honoured Gods of the Great Origin’, and Toyuke is identified with Ame no Minakanushi. Tsuneyoshi further transformed Kunge into a shōgyō by creating a new, secret version of the text. This version, titled Nakatomi harae kige, displays only minor differences from Yukitada’s updated Kunge. Most significant is a note added to the colophon, reading:  ‘This work belongs to the highest category of esoteric texts. Copied, Watarai Tsuneyoshi.’56 The inner core of Kunge (and Kige) is a spell that is presented as the secret essence of the Nakatomi purification formula: All dharmas are like reflecting images. They are pure and without a speck of dust. They are beyond words. They are all produced by karmic causes. This is an oracle of the gods, a norito. When you recite these words, your mind will be pure and you will benefit from eternal and perfect brightness . . . When you contemplate them, you will see the wondrous presence [of Mahāvairocana] (myōri) that is beyond comprehension and explanation.57

The text of this ‘oracle’ was in fact so well-​known as to be commonplace: it is the closing verse recited in the penances (reisan) of the Womb and Diamond Realm, which are part of most esoteric rituals. This verse originates from the Kongōchōgyō (Skt. Vajraśekhara-​sūtra), the sutra underlying the Diamond Realm mandala; in Kunge/​Kige, it is quoted by way of a work by Kūkai.58 Kige, in fact, claims that

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Kūkai himself once presented ‘a volume of notes on purification’ to an Ise priest during a Dharma-​enjoyment ritual, presumably revealing this innermost secret of the Nakatomi purification formula.59 The same verse also features in Shinmei hisho and Rishu makaen. Later collections of purification practices consistently highlight this same verse as a ‘verse of purity’ (shōjō-​ge), often accompanied by mantras, while referring to Tsuneyoshi as the source.60 Whatever the exact role of Tsuneyoshi may have been in all this, we can easily recognize a concerted effort among the Outer Shrine priesthood to develop a secret Ise transmission about purification, which was the priests’ most valuable ritual. The essence of Ise purification proved to be very well-​known verse, familiar to all who had participated in basic esoteric rites. The Ise transmission concerned a ‘famous secret’: a secret about a matter (purification) of interest to many. Moreover, it made a clear claim of ownership by transmission: the secret had first been transmitted to a Watarai priest, who had passed it on in his lineage. Tsuneyoshi (if indeed it was him) surrounded the ‘verse of purity’ with a thicket of Ise lore. The diagrams, the gold and silver tablets, architectural details of the shrines’ main halls, the Rishukyō, and Kūkai’s ‘notes on purification’ offered physical evidence of a deeper truth that was ultimately based on Ise’s true identity as Mahāvairocana’s palace. This image was at once clear and exciting, familiar and exotic, convincing and shocking. As such, it was perfect as Ise’s very own shōgyō.

Shinto The most enduring legacy of the reimagining of Ise in the late Kamakura period was the voluminous Ruijū jingi hongen, compiled by Watarai Ieyuki in 1320. As noted above, Ieyuki had accompanied Tsuneyoshi as a member of the 1321 delegation to Kyoto. On this occasion, Ruijū jingi hongen was presented to Retired Emperor Go-​Uda, Emperor Go-​Daigo and senior court nobles –​except for one chapter, which was held back as a secret shrine transmission. Ruijū jingi hongen marked a transition in the development of the Ise literature, from an early stage of creative experimentation to a more settled phase of systemization and consolidation. This work is a collection of quotations from an astonishingly large range of texts, ordered under a progression of headings that knead the mass of often contradictory information into a structured image of Ise and its place in the world. In its overall conception, Ruijū jingi hongen is remarkably similar to Yukitada’s Shinmei hisho. Like Yukitada, Ieyuki conceptualized Ise as the origin and centre of the cosmos: Ise was the site of Origin within the Land of Origin. Ruijū jingi hongen sets out with a section on the Great Beginning, the reed-​ like ‘sprouting’ of original qi, qi’s differentiation into Heaven and Earth and the five phases of matter, and the birth of man and woman. This section differentiates between Chinese sources (giving a prominent place to Laozi) and Japanese sources, which in turn are divided into the three categories of ‘official houses’ (including Nihon shoki and Sendai kuji hongi, but also some Kamakura-​period texts), ‘shrine

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houses’ (Gochinza hongi and a text about Tsuneyoshi’s diagrams) and ‘Buddhist houses’ (among others, Yamato Katsuragi hōzanki, a text about Mount Katsuragi that had been much treasured also by Yukitada, and the Longer Āgama-​sūtra). Similar categorizations figure in other chapters as well. They testify to the breadth of Ieyuki’s source base and the extent of his contacts, and add authority to his conclusions. Not least, this set-​up lifts local sources like Yukitada’s Gochinza hongi to the same level as court chronicles such as Nihon shoki; both are presented as equally dependable sources of knowledge. By means of juxtaposition, the accounts of the court chronicles are cloaked in the cosmological theories of the later Ise literature in such a manner that they reinforce each other. From the Great Beginning, Ieyuki’s narrative leads us via the ‘transformations of the Heavenly Deities’ to the birth of the Japanese islands. This sets the scene for a chapter about the ‘Heavenly Palace’, the cosmic model of the Ise Shrines on earth. Different quotations place this palace in the realms of desire, form and non-​form, and name its occupant either as Mahāvairocana or as Mahābrahmā, the divine king of the Sahā world that includes Japan. The story of the ‘descent’ of this palace to earth is told in two chapters that give details of the founding of the Inner and the Outer Shrines. Another chapter explains how ‘the precious foundation (hōki) that is the Small Palace in Heaven was moved [to earth] and rebuilt as the two halls of Ise’.61 The shrines’ architectural features are interpreted as physical proof of their identity with Mahāvairocana’s palace. Separate chapters are dedicated to the cosmological meanings of the patterns that decorate the gables of the main halls, and of the pivot post. This post, we learn, marks the centre within the centre, the Origin within the Origin. Ieyuki presents passages that describe the pivot post as the foundation of the transformations of Yin and Yang, the mind-​platform from which all gods are born, the origin of undifferentiated qi, the wondrous Dharma of the One Mind and the one-​pronged vajra of Mahāvairocana.62 Ieyuki dedicates subsequent chapters to auxiliary shrines, oracles, rules of purity and mirrors. That final chapter is of particular interest because it was set apart as a ‘secret among secrets’ and kept separate from the rest of the Ruijū jingi hongen. It gives precedence to the Outer Shrine’s mirror, which it describes as a manifestation of the ‘five wisdoms’ of Mahāvairocana/​Ame no Minakanushi. Numerous other kami bodies of other Ise kami halls are named and described; associations with King Yama and his entourage stand out. Although Ruijū jingi hongen takes the form of a mosaic of disjointed fragments, Ieyuki manages to structure this treasure chest of citations in such a way that the work as a whole conveys a clear plot. At the core of its narrative is the founding of Ise as a clone of the Heavenly Palace on earth. The lord of this palace is ‘the Divine that neither comes nor goes, the God of Origin of original enlightenment, the compassionate father of all sentient beings, the wondrous principle that is eternally constant and without change’.63 The purpose of this God of Origin in establishing Ise is to save the sentient beings from delusion and lift the dark clouds of birth and death. The shrines are interpreted as mandalas, consisting of concentric circles that are increasingly ‘thick’ with the stuff of the Origin; from sub-​shrines, shrine gables and roof billets inwards to the pivot post and the kami mirrors. This

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mandala extends further outwards to the islands of Japan, the ‘original land of Mahāvairocana’ that is ‘the territory of the world of Mahāvairocana’s palace’.64 Ise, in short, emerges as the centre of a mandalized Japan. Ruijū jingi hongen closes with a chapter titled Shintō gengihen (On the profound meaning of Shinto).65 This chapter takes the form of a fictional dialogue and serves as a summary of the text as a whole. The sequence of questions roughly follows the general structure of the work and stresses the same themes: the Origin and Ise’s identity with the Heavenly Palace. It is here that the body of Ise knowledge is, for the first time, referred to as ‘Shinto’. This usage marks a significant step in the conceptualization of that word, which was more commonly used in Buddhist contexts as a term for the kami as local deities in need of Buddhist conversion, or as manifestations of Buddhist divinities. Ieyuki was the first to employ this word in titles, as in this concluding chapter of Ruijū jingi hongen.66 In the first lines of this chapter, he describes his own tradition as a ‘Shinto lineage’ (shintō monpū) that guards the secret knowledge about the Divine.67 Ieyuki, then, was a pioneer in selecting the term Shinto as an identity tag. Ieyuki’s usage of the term ‘Shinto’ was a first step towards the later development of the notion of a Japanese tradition with that name. It is worth stressing, however, that there are many fundamental differences between later understandings of Shinto and Ieyuki’s ‘Shinto lineage’. Ieyuki did not conceive of Shinto as an alternative to Buddhism, but rather as the inner essence of Mahāvairocana’s wisdom and compassion. Ieyuki never refers to the imperial jingi rituals that would later define Shinto. Ruijū jingi hongen makes no mention of kanname, or even of the sengū, nor does Ieyuki waste a single word on the abstinence princess or her absence from the shrines. His theology grew almost exclusively from Buddhist speculation on the cosmological status of Ise, and was utterly disconnected from Ise ritual. The only ritual practice that features in his account is the recitation of purification formulas, performed by Ise priests for patrons.68 Finally, Ieyuki’s Shinto lineage was strictly limited to the Ise Shrines alone. In this sense, ‘Shinto’ began with Ise, and the later ‘Shintoization’ of other shrines signified their inclusion in a discourse that had initially grown around Ise.

Ise’s Medieval Capital: Secrets and Land Rights The decisive difference between classical and medieval Ise lies in the degree to which the shrines were opened up to the world. Classical Ise was a sequestered backwater, guarded against outside contact by the imperial court through its agents, the Ōnakatomi. This changed from the middle of the eleventh century onwards, when the priests of the Inner and Outer Shrines developed independent means of income and extended networks of influence into new territory, including the Kantō Plain. The wars of the 1180s that led to the founding of the Kamakura bakufu drew Tōdaiji monks to Ise. They brought older theories about Amaterasu’s place within Buddhist cosmology to the shrines themselves, garnered new interest for the shrines and inspired new developments in the emerging Ise literature. All

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these changes had already resulted in a diverse Ise scene that was very different from the isolated Ise of classical times. The Mongol crisis that began in 1268 and lasted until the end of the thirteenth century took this process of diversification to an entirely new level. Tōdaiji monks were joined by delegations from many other major temple complexes, Daigoji and Saidaiji the most prominent among them. Intensive temple building, symbolized by the two Hōrakusha attached to Inner and Outer Shrines, transformed the Ise shrine districts. Many of these temples were linked not only to distant temple complexes, but also to (factions of) the Ōnakatomi, Arakida and Watarai lineages of Ise. This created a complicated web of crossing interests, rivalries and alliances. It was this fertile but volatile network that generated the rapidly expanding Ise literature of the latter half of the Kamakura period. There has been a tendency to oversimplify the political map of thirteenth-​ century Ise and explain aspects of the Ise literature as an expression of conflicts that were perhaps not as compelling as they have been made out to be. One such conflict line is that between the Inner and the Outer Shrine. There is no doubt that Watarai priests such as Yukitada, Tsuneyoshi and Ieyuki sought to raise the status of the Outer Shrine; a lawsuit filed by the Inner Shrine in 1296 shows that this was seen as a threat by the Arakida priesthood.69 However, the shrines simultaneously continued to cooperate on many levels, even while this conflict was running its course. The 1297 interim sengū of the Inner Shrine, for example, was coordinated by a Watarai priest. It remains unclear to what extent Yukitada built on preexisting ideas in redesigning the identity of the Outer Shrine, and also to what degree he drew on Inner Shrine scholarship. To be sure, the Inner Shrine’s reaction in 1296 would suggest that at least the Inner Shrine leadership of that time resisted some of his innovations. Still, the Watarai were clearly part of a closely interlocking network of innovation. Both Yukitada and Ieyuki drew heavily on texts and ideas that originated at the imperial court, and at least in some instances, they gained access to such texts via the Ōnakatomi saishu lineage, or via temples associated with that lineage such as the Hōrakusha. In the Muromachi period, the textual legacy of the Outer Shrine was preserved by Arakida monks based at Kōshōji, a temple founded by Eison. These facts show that the Ise scene should not be imagined as multiple isolated, competing blocks. While the Ise literature does indeed reflect the interests of different groups of agents, these groups were open-​ended, ridden with internal divisions and always ready to enter into alliances. Another categorization that has been imposed on the Ise literature is that of Buddhism versus Shinto, or, to be precise, ‘Ryōbu Shinto’ (named after the Kongōkai and Taizōkai mandalas) versus ‘Ise Shinto’ (or ‘Watarai Shinto’). However, none of these terms were in use in the Kamakura period. They reflect Edo-​period attempts to construe a non-​Buddhist theological tradition at Ise. This chapter argues that the Ise literature as a whole, even where it ventured into ‘Daoist’ territory, remained within a solidly Buddhist framework. Even as abstractions, these categorizations are misleading. Watarai Ieyuki may have pioneered the conceptualization of the term ‘Shinto’, but his understanding of

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that term fell squarely within what later authors have termed a ‘Ryōbu’ Buddhist discourse. More helpful towards an understanding of the explosive growth of the Ise literature in the thirteenth century are two very different keywords: shōgyō and tokusei. Shōgyō, the secret transmissions of Dharma lineages, constituted the currency of the ritual economy of medieval Japan. As we have seen, shōgyō (‘sacred teachings’) referred not primarily to doctrines but more typically to objects, spells and ritual procedures of more direct efficacy and potency. Doctrines created to substantiate this potency were often labelled as secret, but in practice they were designed to be leaked, either to rival lineages in trade for other secrets or to patrons and power holders, who liked their information to be exclusive. Strategic leaking (‘secretism’) served to enhance the value of a lineage’s shōgyō. Competition between lineages fuelled innovation and caused the Ise literature to proliferate explosively. Shōgyō typically offered new variations on well-​known themes, concretized in spells and objects in the exclusive possession of a transmission lineage. In the case of Ise, the main theme was the Origin. This was in line with a widespread fascination with the idea of the roots of enlightenment in an original state that precedes practice. This state was described both as ‘original ignorance’ and as ‘original enlightenment’; its main attraction was its ontological non-​duality, identified with Mahāvairocana’s unmediated wisdom.70 A  great proportion of shōgyō concerns various concretizations of this pre-​ dual, pre-​ practice and pre-​karmic non-​duality. Typical manifestations of such primordial non-​ duality were demon-​like Tantric figures such as dakini and snakes, associated with ignorance, violence and sensual pleasure. While it is useful to reflect on doctrinal reasons for the sudden interest in the primordial,71 I  argue that it is equally important to understand the more practical concerns that inspired lineages to create ever more ‘spectacular’ secrets. The reinvention of Ise as the primordial deity of sexual bliss, as in Tsuneyoshi’s shōgyō, was a product of this dynamic. Manipulation by ritual means of such a primordial force, which combined violent potency with the very essence of enlightenment, was the most exciting and, presumably, most efficacious procedure any lineage could offer. It certainly inspired a wide range of sexually explicit speculation on the meaning of Ise in subsequent centuries.72 Another practical concern that provided a pull in the same direction was the notion of tokusei, namely, the restoration of an original, perfect state of harmony with the aim of overcoming present turmoil. The Mongol crisis inaugurated a period dominated by tokusei ideals, and Ise agents of various kinds were seeking to put the notion of ‘returning to the Origin’ to good use. Ise’s first ‘Shinto’ literature was produced during a period when different groups of Ise agents were engaged in an increasingly desperate battle over land rights. It is hardly a coincidence that all agents competed in identifying their shrines, temples, gods and lands as closely as possible with the abstract notion of an original cosmic harmony. Here, lands and secrets converged in a shared obsession with a return to the Origin.

Chapter 5 I SE IN TH E M UROM ACHI P E RIOD : W AR AND P ILGRI M S

In the course of the Muromachi period, the shrines’ economic foundation shifted from land rights to pilgrimage. In connection with that transition, the position of the shrines’ two priestly communities came under pressure from a new group of agents who derived their income from providing services to these pilgrims. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Kamakura-​period Ise was a hub with many agents, including the Ōnakatomi, the priests of the Outer and Inner Shrines, a growing number of temples, and local warriors. Although none of these groups ruled the ground alone, the Watarai and Arakida priests had, at first, an edge over all others because of the land rights that they administered through the shrines’ two negichō priests’ offices. By the late Kamakura period, however, it had become difficult to retain control over distant shrine estates, and even land rights within the shrine districts were slipping away. In the Muromachi period the priests’ control over lands continued to erode, while at the same time pilgrimage gathered pace. Gradually, this also changed the physical setting of the shrines. In 1300, the shrines stood in a rural landscape dotted with priests’ compounds and temples. Two centuries later, the area in front of the Outer Shrine, especially, had grown into a veritable town known as Yamada or Yōda, dominated not by priests or even temples but by a new class of pilgrimage entrepreneurs. This development proved irreversible: at no time in early modern (or indeed modern) times did the priests succeed in regaining the initiative. The new pilgrimage-​driven Ise addressed a new clientele, and in the process acquired a radically new identity. The foundations for that process were laid in the Muromachi period.

A New Political Environment The Kamakura bakufu fell in 1333 to a coalition of Emperor Go-​Daigo and the Kamakura general Ashikaga Takauji in a political earthquake known as the Kenmu Restoration. Takauji broke with Go-​Daigo in 1336, and put a rival emperor on the Kyoto throne. Go-​Daigo fled from Kyoto and established a new court in Yoshino, located in the mountains west of Ise. Go-​Daigo died in 1339, but his descendants continued to resist Kyoto rule for three generations, until a political settlement

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was finally reached in 1392. Fighting between the so-​called Northern (Kyoto) and Southern (Yoshino) Courts threw the country into turmoil for almost six decades. Ise was in the thick of this war. The Ise shrine districts were in a very strategic position, close to the Yoshino mountains, and offering access to the shores of Ise Bay. The shrines also had great symbolic importance. Months before Go-​Daigo escaped from Kyoto, his close retainer and counsellor Kitabatake Chikafusa (1293–​ 1354) had accompanied one of Go-​Daigo’s sons, Prince Muneyoshi, to Ise. Here Chikafusa’s party was received by Watarai Ieyuki, now an octogenarian and third negi of the Outer Shrine. Ieyuki recruited fighters for the Southern cause, installed Chikafusa in the fortification of Tamaru on the western bank of the Miyagawa River and succeeded in capturing Daijingū Hōrakuji in nearby Tanabashi, the headquarters of the Ōnakatomi saishu who supported the Northern Court. Ieyuki and his allies faced stiff opposition and came close to losing Daijingū Hōrakuji to Northern forces as early as the summer of 1337. Another year later, in the ninth month of 1338, Chikafusa sailed from Ise to the east, accompanying Princes Muneyoshi and Noriyoshi. Chikafusa’s young son Akiyoshi stayed behind to secure Ise for the Southern Court. This proved an uphill struggle. In 1339 Ashikaga forces raided Uji, the settlement at the gates of the Inner Shrine; Southern negi there (i.e. negi appointed by the Southern Court) reported that the Northerners had been assisted by locals and called for a ‘general assembly of high and low’ to deal with such treason.1 Clearly, both shrines remained divided, while Northern forces were never far away. At the Outer Shrine, Ieyuki was initially successful in strengthening the Southern camp. Between 1339 and 1341 the Southern Court replaced a number of Northern negi with Southern ones (including a son and a grandson of Ieyuki), and Ieyuki himself rose to the position of first negi in 1342, at the age of 87. Later that same year, however, the tide turned. Northern forces took both Daijingū Hōrakuji and Tamaru, driving Akiyoshi back to Tage Castle, in the hills halfway between Yoshino and Ise; at the same time, the Outer Shrine negi who had been newly appointed by the Southern Court were fired and replaced. With this, Southern control over Ise faltered. In 1347–​48 Ieyuki and his supporters staged a final attempt to expel the Northern saishu from Daijingū Hōrakuji. In a legal indictment against Ieyuki filed by Northern negi at the Outer Shrine, his forces are described as the Yamada ikkishū, a ‘defence league’ of the kind that were formed by locals to protect their interests against intruders.2 The Yamada league set out on raids to Toba in the south and Atsuta in the north, but suffered defeats in both places. This allowed Northern supporters within the Outer Shrine to move against Ieyuki, who was stripped of his position as negi in 1349 and exiled from Ise in 1350. He is believed to have died in Kyoto at the venerable age of 96 in the following year, while still fighting to have his dismissal repealed. These chaotic events had important consequences for the further history of the Ise Shrines in a number of ways. In political terms, they marked the rise of new powers in the region. Kitabatake Chikafusa’s son Akiyoshi continued to fight for the Southern Court from Tage as the provincial governor (kokushi) of Ise Province. His son and successor Akiyasu made peace with the Northern Court in 1392,

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and the Kitabatake governors continued to rule the central part of Ise Province as increasingly autonomous warlords until they were ousted by Oda Nobunaga in 1569. As direct neighbours of the Ise Shrines, the Kitabatake had a defining influence on their affairs. Just as important was the further development of the Yamada league that first appeared in 1347. At that time, this league was an ad hoc response to a particular crisis, a temporary fighting force recruited by Yamada spies disguised as mendicant monks (rokujūrokubu). In hindsight, however, it was a harbinger of the rise of a new political and military power at the shrines.

Kitabatake Chikafusa and Ise Thought Chikafusa’s Ise mission also had a great impact on the status of the Ise literature. Chikafusa acted not only as a military general, but also as the main ideologue of the Southern Court. He showed an interest in Ieyuki’s theology, with which he had familiarized himself before his departure to Ise.3 During his stay there Ieyuki allowed him to copy even the secret chapter on the shrines’ mirrors in his Ruijū jingi hongen. Chikafusa compiled his own résumé of Ieyuki’s teachings, which he titled Gengenshū (Compilation of keeping to the Origin; 1338–​9); or perhaps, as some scholars argue, he had this compiled for him and merely added some notes.4 This collection of quotations later served as a source for his famous Jinnō shōtōki (Record of the correct lineage of gods and emperors; 1339, revised 1343).5 In this and other works, Chikafusa remained sceptical about theories that appeared to diminish the supreme status of Amaterasu and her mirror in the Inner Shrine, but he accepted that the Outer Shrine enshrined the god of primordial matter, Ame no Minakanushi or Kunitokotachi.6 The outcome of Chikafusa’s use of Ise texts was twofold. First, it was through works like Gengenshū and Jinnō shōtōki that Ise texts and doctrines became known to a wider (though still very limited) audience. In contrast to the original texts of the Ise literature, many of which were subjected to a regime of secrecy, Chikafusa’s works were available to a broader range of authors in the Muromachi and Edo periods. Equally important, especially in early modern and modern times, was the legitimacy that Chikafusa gave to central tenets of the Kamakura-​period Ise texts. In the Edo period, Chikafusa’s status as a champion of the Southern Court was ambivalent. On one hand, the Southern line had lost on the battlefield and the succession followed the Northern line from 1458. On the other, the Tokugawa shoguns claimed descent from one of Go-​Daigo’s generals, Nitta Yoshisada. This left open to discussion the question of which of the two courts was legitimate.7 Towards the end of the Edo period, most writers found it distasteful to side with the Northern Ashikaga against the likes of Yoshisada and the equally famous hero Kusunoki Masashige, Southern generals who epitomized warrior values. In the end, the question of legitimacy was settled in favour of the Southern line by imperial decree in 1911. In line with Chikafusa, historians came to see the Northern Court as a warrior outfit, dominated by the ‘turncoat’ Ashikaga Takauji, while depicting the Southern Court as an imperial institution, headed by Go-​Daigo, his princes

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and stalwart loyalists. In this context, Chikafusa’s interest in the Ise texts enhanced their status. To rally the support of wavering warriors in his own time, Chikafusa sought to establish that Japan was a unique ‘divine land’ ruled by an unbroken imperial dynasty of great virtue. Only when the correct imperial line was returned to power, he argued, could Japan be restored as a realm of divine harmony, which was its original nature. It was not easy, however, to find conclusive proof of the ‘correctness’ of the Southern line over and above the Northern. Chikafusa solved this problem by ‘attribut[ing] the enduring ethics of imperial rule to the regalia’.8 Chikafusa, who was an ordained Shingon monk, regarded the regalia not as mere symbols but as esoteric objects, the very sources of the virtues of the imperial line. While some argued that the mirror had burnt to ashes in the palace in the eleventh century and the sword vanished into the waves at Dannoura in 1185, Chikafusa insisted that this could not be so; if they had indeed been lost, how could ‘the sun and the moon continue to traverse the heavens’?9 Chikafusa believed that the originals of the mirror and the sword remained in the shrines of Ise and Atsuta, where they had been installed since the Age of the Gods. Even the ancient copy of the mirror kept at court (in the naishidokoro) had emerged unscathed from all fires until it was evacuated to Yoshino by Go-​Daigo in 1336, together with the last of the regalia, the jewel.10 Go-​Daigo’s physical possession of these potent objects both proved and guaranteed his mandate to rule. Thomas D.  Conlan argues that this Southern understanding of legitimacy inspired a military drive to control Ise and Atsuta.11 If that was the case, the raid on Atsuta by Ieyuki’s Yamada league in 1348 takes on a new significance. The emphasis on the regalia as tokens of imperial legitimacy must have raised the stakes in the two courts’ struggle over Ise. In the long run, however, Chikafusa’s argument had the more important effect of drawing Ise into a new discourse that would come into focus again centuries later. In Jinnō shōtōki, Chikafusa placed Ise at the heart of Japan as a ‘divine land’ –​not in the earlier sense of a land under the special protection of the kami, or as the Original Land of Mahāvairocana, but as a country ruled by a divine dynasty whose absolute virtue arises from the sacred regalia, among which Ise’s mirror is the foremost. The fact that Chikafusa shored up this argument with references to the Ise literature would eventually raise the status of the new Ise theories to a semi-​official doctrine of imperial importance. In war-​torn Ise, it would take many centuries before this change in status would make itself felt. More immediately, the demise of the Southern faction had a marked adverse effect on the transmission and development of the Ise shōgyō. At the Outer Shrine, central texts such as the Three Books (Gochinza denki, hongi and shidaiki) were last copied in the 1350s by Ieyuki’s chosen disciple, Watarai Sanemasa. It is telling that Sanemasa signed his copies with the lowly title gonnegi; his connection with Ieyuki may not have helped his career. Sanemasa’s copies of the Three Books, as well as Zō Ise nisho daijingū hōki hongi, survived in their secret ‘separate chest’, where they mouldered until they were rediscovered by Deguchi Nobuyoshi in 1645. At the Inner Shrine, in contrast, Arakida priests copied a much wider variety of Ise literature throughout the

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Muromachi period.12 It appears that at least at the Outer Shrine, the upheaval of the 1340s and 1350s broke the transmission line and caused the Ise texts of the Kamakura period to be almost completely forgotten. As the Ise shōgyō created by Yukitada, Tsuneyoshi and Ieyuki lost their relevance, so did the notion that the priests kept a ‘Shinto lineage’. Ieyuki’s tentative conceptualization of Shinto made sense only in the context of the culture of secret transmissions and shōgyō-​based Dharma lineages. In Ise itself, the agents who had engaged in shōgyō-​keeping were marginalized by others who did not share in this culture. Shinto, then, proved a dead end in the place where this concept was first conceived, and it would not return to Ise until the mid-​seventeenth century. Ieyuki’s pioneering impulse was passed on to others. Chikafusa used the word Shinto in Jinnō shōtōki to refer to knowledge about the kami that is ‘not readily revealed’.13 More important, however, was Jihen, a Tendai monk of Urabe (Yoshida) stock who lectured to Go-​Daigo about Buddhism and ‘Shinto’ in the 1330s. While drawing heavily on Ieyuki’s works, Jihen explicitly set Shinto apart from Buddhism and claimed priority for the former over the latter.14 His legacy would later be taken up by his descendent Yoshida Kanetomo in the fifteenth century, and have an impact on Ise in early modern times through the medium of Kanetomo’s ‘One and Only Shinto’.

Pilgrimage and the Rise of a New Group of Ise Actors In the fifth month of 1332, the Inner Shrine priests sent a complaint to the Jingikan. According to their spokesman, Uratatarō Dayū Masasada, their colleagues at the Outer Shrine were confiscating all offerings made by pilgrims to both shrines and dividing the proceeds among themselves. The Inner Shrine demanded that this unprecedented ‘abuse [by Outer Shrine agents] of ministering at both shrines’ be stopped, that the right to serve as ‘norito masters’ (nottoshi) of the Inner and the Outer Shrines be kept separate, and that care be taken so that both shrines benefit equally from pilgrims’ devotion. At the Outer Shrine, Ieyuki drafted a retort (under Tsuneyoshi’s supervision), arguing that ministering at both shrines was neither abuse nor unprecedented: the Watarai ancestors had done so for many generations, until the appointment of the first Arakida negi by Empress Jitō. At the same time, Ieyuki challenged the Arakida priests to name norito masters who had stolen Inner Shrine offerings or patrons (danna) whose offerings had gone astray, in effect denying that anything of the kind was actually occurring. Finally, he came close to refuting the very legitimacy of soliciting offerings from pilgrims at all, by accusing the Inner Shrine norito masters of corruption: Rumour has it that at the Inner Shrine, [norito masters] roam around along the mizugaki fence, grovel to pilgrims, offer to act as guides, and then demand offerings; or even worse, that they lie in wait for [pilgrims] in an alleyway and rob them of their offerings. At our shrine, this is unheard of.15

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After this riposte, the document concludes, ‘the people of the Inner Shrine fell silent’. Perhaps Go-​Daigo’s exile in the same year (1332) led them to abandon the case. The documents relating to this conflict, collected under the title Nottoshi satabumi (Documents on the conflict over norito masters), first came to light in 1667–​68, when this text was submitted by the Outer Shrine as evidence in a very similar conflict.16 At that time, the bakufu’s Yamada magistrate rejected Nottoshi satabumi as a forgery. The question whether Outer Shrine priests may serve both shrines or not was at the core of this conflict. Nottoshi satabumi raises the same issue in such similar terms that the magistrate may be forgiven for doubting its authenticity. Telling details, such as the traceable names of its drafters, arguably suggest that it was not a fraud; but on the other hand, they may simply prove that the forgery was done with sophistication. If it is real, Nottoshi satabumi is our first witness to the rise of pilgrimage and the new business that it was generating. A most telling sign of the rise of a new class of pilgrimage entrepreneurs is the name of its Inner Shrine author, Uratatarō Dayū Masasada. He appears in other shrine documents as a gonnegi involved in interim and regular sengū, indicating that he was a junior member of the priesthood. However, his chosen title, Uratatarō Dayū, suggests that his real occupation was receiving and entertaining pilgrims. Urata, a place name still in use, is located immediately across the Isuzu River from the Inner Shrine, in the vicinity of the Uji Bridge. The title Dayū came with the fifth court rank and indicated gonnegi status. The same title was used by two Arakida gonnegi who were Ieyuki’s main allies in his fight for the Southern cause: Ippuku Dayū and his son Zenpuku Dayū, meaning, literally, ‘Master Singular Fortune’ and ‘Master Total Fortune’. Such names and titles were clearly designed to appeal to pilgrims and worshippers. In the fourteenth century ‘Dayū’ came to be widely used by professional entertainers, such as leaders of kagura dance companies or sarugaku theatre groups. Over time, norito masters developed into owners of sprawling mansions, where they performed kagura for groups of patrons (danna) and collected offerings from them. The mention of danna in Nottoshi satabumi (if this text is authentic) makes one wonder how far this evolution had progressed already in the 1330s. If this development was still in its initial phases at this stage, it must have received a massive boost when the conflict between the Northern and Southern Courts finally ended in 1392. Starting in 1393, shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu embarked on a relentless programme of annual pilgrimages to the Ise Shrines, each time accompanied by thousands of retainers and staff. This broke with all precedent; no Kamakura shogun had ever visited Ise in person. We can only speculate about Yoshimitsu’s motives. During his reign, the already well-​established pattern of warriors assuming control over court ceremonial became even more intense. Yoshimitsu appears to have been pursuing a conscious strategy of appropriating imperial prerogatives, and was perhaps even planning to start a new imperial dynasty.17 Co-​opting the Ise Shrines matched that policy, even though there was no precedent for imperial pilgrimages to Ise, either. Most of Yoshimitsu’s reforms in this direction were reversed under his son and successor, Yoshimochi

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(1386–​1428), but the practice of shogunal pilgrimages to Ise continued. This suggests that Yoshimochi, at least, did not necessarily see the Ise pilgrimages as an integral part of Yoshimitsu’s stategy to merge imperial and shogunal authority into one. In addition to political considerations, Yoshimitsu and Yoshimochi also had good military reasons to put their stamp on the Ise region. Ise had been among Yoshino’s most stubborn and strategic strongholds, and even after the fall of the Southern Court, Ise Governor Kitabatake Mitsumasa plunged Ise into rebellion twice, in 1414 and 1428, allegedly in attempts to prevent the Northern line from monopolizing the succession. The Ashikaga policy of annual shogunal pilgrimages continued with few breaks for most of the fifteenth century, and must have been a decisive factor in disseminating the practice of making pilgrimages to Ise among warriors. The example set by the Ashikaga was emulated by many of their most powerful retainers and allies, including the Yamana, Isshiki, Takeda, Hosokawa and Hatakeyama warrior houses. Their pilgrimages, too, were on a scale that was clearly designed to impress. In 1443, for example, warlord Yamana Mochitoyo was reported to have travelled to Ise with 300 retainers and more than a thousand staff.18 Even though donations from pilgrims may have been a contested source of income already in the 1330s, it was the frequent large-​scale pilgrimages of elite warriors that transformed Ise into the largest pilgrimage centre in the country. Their pilgrimages enhanced the fame of the shrines and created a market for professional mediators between the shrines and worshippers. Warriors interacted with the shrines through designated priests, now increasingly known as ‘masters of prayer rites’ (kitōshi, or simply oshi, ‘masters’). Such personalized relations became institutionalized as sons of warriors inherited the oshi of their fathers, with oshi names being passed on through generations of Ise mediators. A  new hierarchy emerged, with the Ōnakatomi saishu serving as oshi of the Ashikaga shoguns, while the negi and the most prominent gonnegi served the warrior elite, and a second tier of gonnegi catered to local warriors.19 Warrior visitors would stay in the compounds (tachi) of their oshi, who performed rituals and presented offerings at an in-house altar before guiding their danna on a brief visit to one or both shrines. Oshi would also visit their danna in the provinces, reciting prayers, performing purification and delivering purification amulets known as oharai taima, as well as various other goods from Ise. In particular, oshi distributed hundreds or even thousands of strings of peeled and dried abalone (noshi), a shellfish that figured prominently among the food offerings at both shrines. Since noshi are too tough and tasteless to consume in such numbers, it is thought that warlords handed these down to their retainers as proof of Ise’s protection in battle.20 The budding relationships between warriors and oshi were an important factor in the expansion of the pilgrimage, but not all pilgrims were warriors. As we have already seen, the religious landscape of Ise had been enriched with numerous temples in the course of the Kamakura period, many of which were closely connected to some of the most active temple networks of the country (Saidaiji, Daigoji, Tōdaiji and others). There was a long tradition of monastic pilgrimages to Ise, going back to the days of Chōgen and beyond. As we saw in Chapter 3, Chōgen

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initiated a series of large-​scale Ise pilgrimages in the 1180s and 1190s as part of his efforts to restore Tōdaiji. In the process, he brought the increasingly popular practice of Buddhist ‘fundraising’ (kanjin) to Ise. Kanjin campaigning was an important part of temples’ answer to the same problem that dogged the Ise Shrines:  the loss of income from taxes and land. Forced to raise funds in new ways, temples sent out preachers and mendicants to solicit donations from all layers of the populace. This strategy was not new, but was now taken to another level. Kanjin monks and nuns collected contributions for a wide range of Buddhist projects:  building temples, dispensing charity to lepers and beggars, constructing bridges, digging wells and improving roads. As shown by Janet R.  Goodman, itinerant kanjin mendicants transformed the way Buddhist institutions interacted with lay believers and communities, all the way down to peasants in rural villages.21 By creating communities of patrons, kanjin mendicants made distant religious sites relevant to local, non-​elite believers. Villagers welcomed itinerant begging monks and nuns, and constructed simple shelters in their villages where monastic visitors could stay and conduct simple services. As such interactions became more organized, some villagers would even travel with their preachers to the sacred site that they had heard so much about, hoping that it might bring them collective prosperity and individual benefits. The popularity of kanjin also created a new option for outcasts and dropouts of various kinds, who increasingly cast their lives of wandering and begging in a religious mould. When Ise became a topic of kanjin preaching, the shrines entered popular consciousness and practice in an entirely new way. The bulk of such kanjin activity is no longer traceable, and the sources offer no more than a few glimpses. A reference work on Ise rules and procedures compiled by Watarai Yukitada in 1299 or 1300 specifies that ‘loud nenbutsu chanting and the clanging of hand cymbals’ were forbidden in the immediate vicinity of the shrine precincts –​implying that such kanjin techniques were common.22 A late-​ Kamakura list of purity rules (Bunpō ki, 1318)  outlaws ‘female mediums’ (fujo) who called themselves ‘guides’ (sendatsu), and performed ‘novel rites’ along the roads to Ise.23 Ise-​related kanjin increased further in the Muromachi period, and ‘novel rites’ proliferated even within the shrine precincts. Two striking examples of this were the ‘Heavenly Rock-​Cave’ at the Outer Shrine (Figure 5.1) and the Kokuya Dainichibō at the Inner Shrine. The rock-​cave was, in fact, the grave chamber of the Takakurayama kofun, the ancient grave mound on a hill south of the Outer Shrine precincts discussed in Chapter 1. The large chamber was reimagined as the cave where Amaterasu had sought shelter in the Age of the Gods,24 and it developed into a site where mediums delivered oracles. A document from 1448 makes the connection between this new site and kanjin practices clear. In that year, the Ise temple Sesonji allowed a certain Kagefusa, a lay pilgrim from Tajima, to raise funds in its name. Kagefusa proposed to ‘solicit the support of ten myriad patrons, realise their wishes for this life and the next, offer reverence to the Buddha-​Dharma, obey the oracles of the gods, and beautify the Rock-​Cave of Heaven by erecting a stupa there’.25 Sesonji was one of many temples in Ise that accommodated pilgrims and,

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Figure 5.1  The Rock-​Cave of Heaven.

Source: Ise sankei mandara (Kimiko and John Powers Collection of Japanese Arts, USA).

it would appear, also initiated kanjin, or took a cut from the kanjin of pilgrims like Kagefusa in return for its official seal of approval. At the Inner Shrine, a temple that would later become known as Kokuya Dainichibō brought kanjin right into the shrine precincts. Here monks performed fasts (the name Kokuya or ‘House of Grains’ refers, paradoxically, to the austerity practice of abstaining from eating grains), and staged both Lotus recitations and goma fire rituals to raise funds for the building and maintenance of shrine bridges. They were commissioned by the Arakida priests to do this, and collected the resources to rebuild both the Uji Bridge (1477) and the smaller Kazahinomi Bridge (1498), which was located right next to this small temple.26 There is no record of the Kokuya accommodating pilgrims, but it was the most prominent kanjin presence within the Inner Shrine precincts and served as an eye-​catching site of novel rituals sponsored by pilgrims (Figure 5.2). As the pilgrimage diversified and danna numbers increased, so did the number of oshi. By the mid-​fifteenth century, people of many different backgrounds were entering this business. In 1443, the Inner Shrine negi Arakida Ujitsune noted in his diary that the ‘crowds of worshippers’ who ‘received purification’ in compounds run by ‘locals’ (jigenin) were a cause of impurity, notably through the pollution of fire. In 1457 he complained that there were so many compounds that it was ‘hardly possible to pass between them and reach the shrine precincts’. Another decade later (in 1467), Ujitsune mused that in ancient times, only negi and high-​ranking shrine officials had been allowed to build compounds, so that the purity of fire had been maintained; but ‘in recent years the [ancient] laws have broken down

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Figure 5.2  Uji Bridge with kanjin mendicants. Source: Ise sankei mandara (Jingū Chōkokan, Ise).

as all kinds of people set up compounds, allowing pilgrims, both high and low, from this province and from elsewhere, to eat there and use fire’.27 As the practice of Ise pilgrimage spread down the social ladder, a large portion of the pilgrimage business slipped out of the hands of priests like Ujitsune to oshi ‘without position

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Map 3  Yamada, Uji and Furuichi in the Edo period

or rank’ (hishoku mui). At the Outer Shrine, this development was even more radical.

The Development of Yamada By the fifteenth century, the settlement in front of the Outer Shrine gates had grown into a sizeable town called Yamada or Yōda. Scattered hints in shrine records show that already in the twelfth century, a village by that name existed along the road that passed to the north of the Outer Shrine, inhabited by shrine personnel and temple monks as well as farmers, artisans and merchants.28 Houses clustered into a continuous settlement, stretching from the northwest of the shrine’s main gate towards the Setagawa River about a kilometre further east. The area closest to the shrine entrance was known as Tachimachi, the ‘street of (priests’) compounds’. At first Yamada had two markets, held at times when shrine dues were collected for the rituals of kanname and tsukinami. One market sat on the Setagawa bank, where goods were offloaded from boats, and the other near the shrine’s main entrance. In the fourteenth century these (bi-) annual markets were joined by more regular ones, the eastern ‘lower market’ held on the 3rd, 13th and 23rd of each month and the western ‘upper market’ held on the 8th, 18th and 28th. This was a clear sign that the town was growing and diversifying.29 Yamada was no longer merely a depot for shrine tribute; year-​round pilgrimage was now boosting the local economy.

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In the early fourteenth century, the areas around the lower market, the upper market and the now thrice-​yearly shrine market (Iwabuchi, Saka and Suhara) became nodes of close-​knit communities. Taken together, these three communities referred to themselves as the ‘three neighbourhoods’ (sanbō) of Yamada. At their core was a class variously described in the sources as ‘locals’ (jigenin) or ‘people who perform shrine duties’ (jin’yakunin). Ujitsune’s 1443 diary entry quoted above shows that the priests regarded these people as outsiders, despite the fact that many provided services of some kind to the shrines. The house of Kita may serve as a typical example of this class. The Kita ancestors had been overseers of fishermen who delivered ayu sweetfish from the Miyagawa to the shrines, and in that capacity the leader of the Kita house led the annual ‘river ritual’ (onkawa shinji) at a small shrine west of Yamada. At this stage, they were both ‘locals’ and performers of ‘shrine duties’. In due course the Kita branched out into the pilgrimage business and set up a large compound on the western outskirts of town, becoming oshi as well.30 Other prominent jigenin combined the running of pilgrims’ compounds with a market-​related trade; examples are the Kubokura and Enokikura oshi houses, both named after the storehouses (kura) from which they conducted their business. As far as we know, the jigenin of Yamada first combined their forces in 1429. In that year a ‘league of Yamada’s three neighbourhoods’ (sanbō tsuchi ikki) took up arms against ‘the shrine people’ (jinin)  –​here referring to the Watarai and Arakida priestly communities.31 The violence was triggered by a large tokusei, a term that figured prominently in the previous chapter. In the fifteenth century, leagues of ‘locals’ repeatedly took to arms in appeals for ‘virtuous government’ (the literal meaning of tokusei). In concrete terms, they sought the cancellation of accumulated debts and the return of confiscated lands. In the year 1428 the accession of both a new emperor and a new shogun coincided with bad harvests and widespread famine, triggering a wave of tokusei rioting that fanned out across the country. Starting from the Kyoto region, the fighting reached Yamada in the following year. In Yamada, the uprising cemented a new divide that split the town. According to a much later source, the jigenin had risen in anger at a ban, imposed by the rank-​holding jinin, against marking the gables of jigenin houses with shrine-​like gable boards (hafu).32 If this is true, the 1429 riots were a protest by non-​priestly entrepreneurs against a particular privilege of oshi with priestly ranks. More likely, however, the issue was larger than that. Watarai priests ran Yamada’s affairs as hereditary administrators (tone), imposing all kinds of restrictions on non-​ranked locals and skimming off their profits. The outcome of the 1429 fighting changed the power balance dramatically. The league easily defeated its priestly opponents and pursued some 300 jinin right into the Outer Shrine’s innermost compound, wounding and killing many. When it was all over, hundreds of arrows bristled on the walls of the Outer Shrine’s main hall, and blood had been spilt even inside the mizugaki fence.33 From this time onwards, a new pattern emerged where the priests depended on the favours of jigenin, rather than on the authority of the court, to defend even

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their few remaining land rights. A blatant example of this occurred two years after the 1429 riot. In 1431, the neighbouring warlord, Kitabatake Noritomo, assumed the authority to grant shrine holdings within the three shrine districts (Watarai, Taki and Iino) to his warrior retainers; some of the owners of these holdings had been killed in the Yamada riot. The saishu office that was supposed to manage these districts, the Southern Office (Dōgo mandokoro), did not have the resources to stand up against Noritomo. When the shrines succeeded in preventing the loss of these lands,34 they achieved this only by relying on the intervention of jigenin, many of whom maintained close relations to Kitabatake warriors as their oshi, trading partners or even retainers. As a reward for their intervention, the first negi relinquished to these jigenin ‘a third of the duties and taxes’ from the affected holdings. It must have been extremely humiliating for the priests to acknowledge their dependence on the jigenin who had shed priestly blood within the very precincts of the Outer Shrine only two years earlier. As this pattern repeated itself over the succeeding decades, the shrines’ reliance on jigenin interventions had the effect of reversing the balance of power between shrine priests and local oshi. This process took another leap forward when such oshi found new ways to evade the problems inherent in relying on dues from specified lands. Since the eleventh century, low-​ranking priests known as norito masters had served as middlemen between the shrines and landowners. As we have seen, these norito masters facilitated the donation of estates to the shrines and were rewarded for this with rights to a portion of the revenue from those estates, known as ‘mediation dues’ (kunyūryō). Their position as mediators had been premised on their continued involvement with the commended estates as performers of ritual services for the original donors, who typically continued to act as local managers. When in the fifteenth century jigenin-​cum-​oshi pleaded with warriors not to confiscate Ise lands, this was an extension of the mediating role of earlier norito masters. Their hold on warrior patrons as oshi empowered jigenin in their struggle with the shrines’ priests over the proceeds from shrine land. By the end of the century, however, even such ‘enhanced mediation dues’ were becoming less relevant. Instead, oshi increasingly derived their income from ‘prayer fees’ (kitōryō), cutting out the shrine priests altogether. Oshi performed rituals for their clients quite independently from the shrines, either within their own compounds or in the residences of their patrons. Typically, the stated aims of these rituals were victory in battle, maintenance of peace or recovery from illness. Prayer fees also covered religious goods from Ise, both for personal use by the main patron and for distribution among his retainers. The shrine priests still expected oshi to collect land taxes from shrine lands under the control of their patrons (shrine lands that often survived only because of oshi’s efforts); from the priests’ point of view, it was this duty that entitled oshi to their mediation dues. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, this strategy had ceased to work. Oshi claimed the right to retain a set amount of prayer fees, whether the tax on any remaining shrine lands was being paid in full or not. Payments from landowners now went to oshi as prayer fees, and the amount of land tax that actually reached the shrines dwindled rapidly. In a striking case from 1482, the

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Outer Shrine priests found that an oshi, who had induced a Kitabatake landowner to donate some land, was confiscating all the revenue as prayer fees. When the priests protested, the oshi made it clear that land tax would be passed on to the priests only when his takings exceeded the prayer fees that were due to him. In frustration, the priests then chose to return the donated land to its original Kitabatake owner. They preferred this solution to lending their authority to an oshi who merely lined his own pockets.35

Trade, War and the Yamada Council The Yamada league of 1429 evolved into a ‘council of Yamada’s three neighbourhoods’ (Yamada sanbō) with formalized procedures and powers in the last decades of the fifteenth century. Two factors drove this development forward: the rapid expansion of the oshi business and frequent clashes with shared enemies. Both created the need for a regulated body with the authority to make binding decisions, to deal with conflicts between oshi, to protect their collective position against outsiders and, not least, to organize Yamada’s war band. The growth of the oshi business is reflected in surviving contracts between oshi and (groups of) danna. Oshi offered loans to warriors and village leaders, who in return granted the oshi a monopoly on Ise-​related services, notably accommodation. While details vary, most contracts contain a clause in which the debtors pledge that all members of their household or community will ‘for all eternity’ be obliged to take lodging in their oshi’s compound whenever they visit Ise, even after the original loan has been repaid.36 This kind of arrangement was not exclusive to Ise; in fact, it was a variant on a well-​established system that had been developed in the Kamakura period at Kumano.37 Kumano rose to prominence as the country’s most prosperous pilgrimage destination in the late Heian period, when it received almost annual visits of retired emperors. As happened in Ise in the wake of the pilgrimages of the Muromachi shoguns, this triggered the development of a pilgrimage infrastructure. In Kumano, pilgrims signed contracts with oshi on their first pilgrimage. Kumano oshi were typically priests or monks connected to one of the three Kumano sites. Such contracts obliged pilgrims and their associates to take lodgings in the compound of their contracted oshi and make exclusive use of that oshi’s ritual services. The oshi system spread to many religious complexes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, notably to hubs of yamabushi activity such as Mounts Ontake, Fuji, Hakusan, Hiko and Dewa Sanzan. While drawing on this model, Ise displayed a few characteristics of its own. Ise oshi did not cooperate with yamabushi guides (sendatsu) on a basis of equality, as was the case in Kumano, but visited their danna in the provinces in person, or sent assistants. Much of the work of advertising the Ise pilgrimage was done by the kanjin-​type practitioners we encountered above, independent of the oshi. Moreover, the contracts danna concluded with Ise oshi invariably mention an initial loan. This explains why the leading oshi were merchants and financiers connected to Yamada’s three markets, rather than priests.

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In both Kumano and Ise, contracts with danna were traded between oshi already in the mid-​fifteenth century. The first documented sale of an Ise danna contract, dated 1451, reveals much about the way merchants were able to buy their way into the pilgrimage business. Fukōji, a temple near Yamada’s upper market (Yōkaichiba), had been rebuilt after a fire thanks to a contribution from a certain Yōkaichiba Tarōemon. The name suggests that he was a merchant who traded on this market. In return, the temple agreed to sell Tarōemon the ‘lodging rights’ (shukushiki) of a Yoshino warlord, all inhabitants of that warlord’s territory and the yamabushi of two temple quarters nearby. This first sale deed shows how the contractual right to serve designated pilgrims passed from a temple to a merchant. It notes that Fukōji’s danna had originally been recruited by a monk of that temple; after this monk’s death, the lodging rights for these danna had for a while been deposited with the ‘alderman’ (oyakata) Ryūfuku Dayū, who had returned them to Fukōji after the fire with permission from all ‘aldermen of the locality’ (jige oyakata).38 Clearly, lodging rights were already regulated and supervised by some form of jigenin council at this time. By the 1480s, a council with authority over all of Yamada’s three neighbourhoods was issuing official documents, signed with a characteristic triple seal, that recorded decisions made by ‘aldermen and youngsters’ in formal ‘meetings’ (egō). A decade later, from 1490 onwards, council documents changed format from informal letters to legal orders, showing that the Yamada council had now acquired the stature of a regular body with legislative powers. The prime cause of this development was not business but war. The trade in danna contracts was still relatively modest at this time; it boomed first in the early sixteenth century. Fifteenth-​ century Japan was in a state of constant low-​ intensity warfare, punctuated with bursts of full-​blown violence. Matters worsened dramatically with the beginning of the Ōnin war in 1467, which caused centralized authority to collapse almost completely. Ise was profoundly affected by this collapse and saw more than its fair share of bloodshed. Particularly violent was the escalating conflict between the jigenin of Yamada and the ‘six villages’ of Uji, located around the Inner Shrine. Since both pilgrims and provisions had to pass through Yamada en route to Uji, Yamada aldermen had the option of choking Uji by closing the road, or by letting only selected persons and goods pass through. This happened, for example, in 1447, when Inner Shrine guards killed two Yamada guides in front of their danna, claiming that it was illegal for Outer Shrine oshi and their assistants to enter the Inner Shrine precincts. Yamada’s jigenin leaders agreed to reopen the road only under heavy pressure from saishu and shogunal emissaries, but they closed it once again within months of attending a solemn reconciliation ceremony in front of the Outer Shrine gate. Uji militants reacted with occasional raids, killing Yamada adversaries and torching their compounds (e.g. in 1479). Uji repeatedly appealed to the Kitabatake for aid. This was willingly offered, because the Yamada jigenin formed the main obstacle to Kitabatake expansion into the shrine districts. Matters came to a head in 1485. Months after Yamada had set up a new guard post on the road to Uji, the Uji militia attacked Yamada in force. A  new provocation in 1486 (the confiscation of two koku of rice destined for the Inner

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Shrine) triggered an even larger raid. This time Kitabatake forces joined the fray, and Yamada was attacked on two fronts. All three neighbourhoods of Yamada were reduced to ashes. Yamada’s strongman, the merchant and oshi Enokikura Takenori, fled with a small party of followers into the Outer Shrine precincts. Hiding under the floor of the main hall, he threatened to defile the shrine by committing seppuku on the spot. After a two-​day stand-​off and a failed sally, Takenori set fire to the main hall and killed himself. The backlash came two years later. The arrogance of the Uji militants, who now thought themselves invulnerable due to the support of the mighty Kitabatake, made it easy for Yamada to find allies in nearby village communities, including two of Uji’s six constituent villages (Asama and Kanomi). In the first month of 1489, a Yamada-​led alliance overran Uji and burned it to the ground. This time the main hall was spared, although many were cut down on the steps leading up to the inner compound.39 A striking aspect of this descent into violence was the impotence of the priests. The trouble in Yamada was caused not by the jinin priests but by the rising class of jigenin. It was they who controlled and manned the barrier on the road to Uji. These jigenin had been remarkably slow to respond to pressure from the priests and the saishu in 1447, bowing only to military threats from the bakufu itself. Arakida Ujitsune, the ageing first negi of the Inner Shrine, was so upset at the defilement and destruction of the Outer Shrine in 1486 that he stopped eating and drinking; he died three weeks after the incident.40 It was clear for all to see that Ise had now passed into the hands of a different set of agents.

The Shrines Go to Ruin The immediate losers of the jigenin infighting were the shrines. Arakida Ujitsune’s record of his service as Inner Shrine negi, which runs from 1432 to 1486, is full of entries about rituals that were simplified, postponed or cancelled, offerings that could not be procured, and shrine buildings that might collapse at any moment. It also demonstrates Ujitsune’s dogged determination to keep the rituals going, and his frustration at the countless lapses that could not be avoided. Most dramatic was the decline of the regular sengū. Ujitsune experienced two: in 1431, just before his appointment as negi, and in 1462. The 1431 sengū was cut to the bone: only the Inner Shrine’s main hall and the main auxiliary shrine (Aramatsuri) were rebuilt. The record of this rebuilding (Eikyō shikinen sengū ki) made a point of listing all that was left undone: ‘Beyond these two halls, not a single new brushwood fence was put up  –​not to mention the treasure halls, the gates, the torii, the priests’ quarters, or the storehouses.’ Usually, such laxity would cause the negi to clamour for dismissal of the saishu, who in this period was held responsible for organizing the regular sengū. In 1431, however, the saishu was from the Tsuchimikado branch of the Ōnakatomi, who served as the personal oshi of the shogun, and was thus untouchable.41 It is telling that despite the fact that shogun Yoshinori made frequent pilgrimages to Ise (seven times between 1430 and 1441), he did not appear to share Ujitsune’s distress at the state of the

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shrine buildings. Even for the shogun, the rituals that his oshi performed in the Tsuchimikado compound in Kyoto were more important than ancient rites such as kanname and tsukinami in Ise. The shrines’ dilapidation is evident from Ujitsune’s diary. After a sengū, the gilt fittings of old buildings were customarily taken down and distributed among the priests; after 1431, therefore, the buildings that were not renewed lacked such fittings. This meant, for example, that the doors of the two treasure halls could no longer be opened, and no offerings could be deposited there.42 Matters were not improved by the fact that the next sengū was delayed by more than a decade. The sengū of 1462 was much more comprehensive. In this year it was not so much the buildings as their contents that inflamed Ujitsune, who wrote:  ‘Never have there been such serious deficiencies and flaws in the furnishings, divine treasures, and gilt fittings . . . Even if the world is entering an age of degeneration, how can it be that our shrine suffers such neglect?’43 The nationwide yakubukumai tax, which had funded all sengū since the 1070s, could no longer be collected after the 1430s, and as an alternative the Muromachi bakufu allowed ships from Ise’s two Hōrakusha to join the official trading fleet to Ming China in 1451.44 In the end, however, trading proved poor and the bakufu ended up having to underwrite the 1462 sengū from its own coffers. More than a century would pass before another regular sengū (rather than an interim one) could take place. The aftermath of the burning of the Outer Shrine in 1486 was equally disturbing. In some ways, the court’s response was gratifyingly serious. The era name was changed, and the emperor abstained from all official business for five days (haichō). In other ways, however, the court’s reaction gave cause for trepidation. No funding was forthcoming for the reconstruction of the shrine and its treasures. Although the priests reported to the court that the Outer Shrine’s mirror had been saved, an inspector was sent to Ise to confirm the state of this kami body. The priests’ stubborn refusal to admit such an inspector did nothing to reassure the emperor. The Outer Shrine priests claimed that two days after the fire, they had moved the kami body to the old main hall, built in 1419 and left standing after the last sengū of 1434. Since this hall was in an advanced state of decay, a new temporary hall was set up on the site of the main hall that had burnt down. The kami body was finally moved there nine months after the 1486 fire. This temporary hall remained without treasures or furnishings. It was funded not by the court or the bakufu, but by the Kitabatake governor, Masakatsu, who had been personally implicated in the escalation that had resulted in this crisis. Months later, the bakufu called in Masakatsu for questioning. Perhaps his donation had been intended to create some goodwill; it certainly was not a demonstration of unconditional piety. While the temporary hall was still being built, Masakatsu installed a barrier on the road to Ise and stopped all pilgrims, so as to deprive his Yamada foes from their main source of income. Even with this, the Outer Shrine’s troubles were not over. The old main hall burnt down in 1489, and, even worse, the new temporary hall was also destroyed by fire in 1490. Now the priests were reduced to keeping the mirror in a storehouse (tsuki no mikura). A new temporary hall was built only in 1501, this time with funds ‘not from Kyoto, but from members of the Yamada council’.45

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In the meantime, the court continued worrying about the safety of the Ise mirrors. This understandable concern was exploited by the brilliant strategist Yoshida Kanetomo (1435–​1511), descendant of the Urabe diviners of the Jingikan and priest of Yoshida shrine in Kyoto. At this shrine, Kanetomo had just built a new sanctuary that accommodated, according to Kanetomo himself, the original kami bodies of all kami in the realm. Kanetomo’s sanctuary, called the Saijōsho or ‘site of kami ritual’, was an attempt to resurrect the classical Jingikan, which had failed to survive the Ōnin war that gutted Kyoto in the 1460s and 1470s. The Saijōsho gave concrete form to what Kanetomo called ‘One-​and-​Only Shinto’, a unique transmission that allegedly originated with the first kami of creation, Kunitokotachi, and that had been passed to him via Amaterasu and Ame no Koyane, the divine ancestor of Kanetomo’s own Urabe/​Yoshida lineage. Kanetomo had already succeeded in winning support for this new Shinto teaching among courtiers. He had even initiated the emperor himself in its secrets in 1480.46 The events of 1486–​87 presented Kanetomo with an opportunity to complete his national ‘site of kami ritual’. Ise was arguably the only shrine complex that could muster the authority to challenge the supremacy of Kanetomo’s Saijōsho. The Yoshida were already serving as priests of an Ise clone at the Awata entrance to Kyoto, founded by kanjin-​type mendicants (shōmonji) at some time before 1452.47 Now, Kanetomo must have felt that it was time to incorporate the Ise deities officially in his new imperial centre of kami worship. In 1489 he sent a secret report to the court, claiming that a ‘spirit-​body’ had fallen from dark thunderclouds and landed in the inner yard of the Saijōsho in the third month of that year; seven months later, a ‘circular light’ had descended to the same yard and deposited ‘countless kami bodies’.48 Kanetomo took these objects to the palace, where officials verified that they were the ‘true kami bodies of the [Ise] Shrines’ and ordered them to be enshrined in the Saijōsho. The assembled negi of the Inner Shrine protested, arguing that Amaterasu had chosen the ‘spirit-​site of purity’ on the bank of Isuzu River as her dwelling place in the Age of the Gods; how then could she have ‘flown down’ to the Yoshida Shrine?49 However, the damage was already done. In principle, the Ise Shrines were now empty: the emperor himself had recognized the fact that the kami bodies of Ise now resided in the Saijōsho. Of course, these developments were equally galling for the traditional heads of both the Jingikan and the Ise Shrines –​the Ōnakatomi. After these events, it was only inertia that kept the Ise Shrines on the court’s ritual agenda. After the burning of the Outer Shrine’s temporary hall in 1490, a court enquiry questioned the ritual implications of the loss of the kami bodies. The less-​than-​inspired conclusion was that even if the kami bodies had been lost, court envoys should still bring offerings to Ise rather than to the Saijōsho because Ise was an ancient and venerable ‘spirit-​ruin’ (reiseki). The term ‘ruin’ 跡 rather than ‘site’ implied that the shrines no longer accommodated the actual ‘spirits’ of the imperial kami.50 This choice of words sums up the grave loss of status caused by the shrines’ frequent conflagrations. The lack of urgency in rebuilding the shrines may well have reflected not only impotence, but also a genuine loss of awe and interest on the part of both the court and the bakufu.

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Ise Worship Dispersed Seen from a larger perspective, the priests’ complete loss of control over the shrines and their locale was Ise’s own variant on the process that defined fifteenth-​ century Japan:  gekokujō, or ‘the displacement of the high by the low’. Pierre François Souyri has pointed out that this period (Sengoku) was characterized by two contradicting tendencies. On one hand, the economically advanced regions of central Japan entered an age of political anarchy, with commoners challenging the old elites and gaining a degree of emancipation. In more peripheral regions, however, warlords managed to establish ‘embryonic but strong regional states’ that would later become the building blocks of a new national political order.51 Ise experienced the social upheaval characteristic of an economically advanced region when jigenin locals eclipsed the priests through a combination of financial and mob power. The formation of local administrative structures that challenged traditional authority was in tune with developments elsewhere in central Japan. At the same time, the militarily superior Kitabatake interfered in the affairs of Yamada and Uji by means of a strategy of divide and rule, so as to undermine jigenin power and expand the Kitabatake ‘embryonic state’ eastwards into the shrine districts. In the long run, the Yamada council and its less distinct Uji counterpart could hardly be expected to survive; yet, as we shall see, they did, although in a much reduced form. The same process led to a radical transformation of the shrines’ clientele: from the Kyoto elite to warlords, lesser warriors, religious figures and, increasingly, also commoner pilgrims. This had a profound effect on the signification of the Ise Shrines and their deities. Ise worship had long since ceased to be an imperial prerogative; yet it can be argued that Ise had remained ‘primarily’ an imperial site, even though its priests were actively seeking additional, ‘secondary’ support from other sources. By the end of the fifteenth century, the ties between Ise and the imperial court were so attenuated that they had become irrelevant. Not only had the Saigūryō ceased to exist; the court had now lost interest in paying for the upkeep of even the most crucial shrine halls. The funding of a temporary hall at the Outer Shrine by the jigenin of the Yamada council in 1501 symbolized the shrines’ dramatic change of status. They were no longer imperial shrines, run by court-​appointed priests and funded by the court, but a semi-​private pilgrimage site, dominated by local oshi and hardly funded at all. Compared with the great importance that the Southern Court had attached to Ise and its mirror, this outcome was a complete about-​face. To the Ise priests, it must have felt like a betrayal. Although the oshi of Yamada cared enough about the shrine to underwrite the 1501 temporary hall, it can be argued that by this time, Ise ritual had been dispersed to other sites. Pilgrims still paid their respects to the ‘actual’ shrines (or, more often, one of them), but the Ise rituals that mattered were performed elsewhere. Oshi staged ceremonies for their danna within their compounds, which featured large halls and sometimes also temples for that purpose.52 Centring on kagura dances and recitations of norito prayers, these ceremonies were more

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immediately recognizable to the shrines’ new audience than the rituals the priests performed at the shrines. Yet other ritual sites were pioneered by kanjin-​ type practitioners; the Heavenly Rock-​Cave behind the Outer Shrine was one example, and so were the many temples in Yamada and Uji that received pilgrims. Within the shrine precincts, minor jigenin called ‘shrine keepers’ (miyamori) had begun to set up their own booth-​like mini-​shrines (massha) in honour of various deities of national fame.53 These massha featured moneyboxes, and pilgrims were encouraged to offer coins by, at times, forceful means. In contrast, the ‘official’ shrine halls did not have moneyboxes, and pilgrims there deposited their coins into boxes carried around by oshi assistants, or gave money to shrine keepers who sat along the shrine fence.54 New ‘Ise Shrines’ proliferated even further afield; the Ise Shrine at the Awata entrance to Kyoto was far from unique. This was an issue of great concern to the priests. In 1438, a year of severe epidemics, Ujitsune complained that ‘time and again’, Ise mirrors were stolen to serve as kami bodies of Ise clones in other places, often called Ima Ise (‘new Ise’), Ima Shinmei (‘new Amaterasu’) or Tobi Shinmei (‘flying Amaterasu’).55 In the same year, high-​ranking members of the court and the bakufu, including the imperial regent and the shogun, attended the ‘regular sengū’ of the ‘Outer Shrine’ of such an Ise clone in Kyoto.56 The Ise deities were being dispersed long before Yoshida Kanetomo’s coup of 1489. We know little about the actual practices that took place at all these new sites of Ise worship, other than that they displayed great variety. The oshi recited norito for their patrons in prayer for victory or healing. Kanjin practitioners of various kinds performed dances, recited sutras and mantras, pronounced oracles, collected donations for monuments and building projects, prayed for good fortune ‘in this life and the next’, and much more. In 1438, Prince Fushimi-​no-​Miya Sadafusa noted in his diary, with obvious approval, that unidentified ‘mediums’ were harnessing the powers of Ise to counter an epidemic that was raging through Kyoto’s slums. Sadafusa reports that they went from door to door, chanting a ‘kami poem’: Kamikaze ya /​yomo no koto no ha /​fukiharai /​chiranu wa hito no /​inochi narikeri The divine winds [of Ise] blow away all leaves [or: words]. What will not be scattered are the people’s lives.

A talisman activated by the chanting of these sacred words was stuck to people’s doors, protecting them from illness. While the shrine halls of Ise were rapidly decaying, new types of Ise worship were spreading both within Ise itself and across the country. This set the scene for Ise’s development into the most popular site of mass pilgrimage in centuries to come.

Chapter 6 I SE R E STOR E D AND S H I N TOI Z E D

In the fifteenth century, the situation in Ise was full of contradictions. The shrine precincts were crumbling. Regular sengū had ceased in 1434 at the Outer Shrine, and in 1462 at the Inner Shrine. Interim sengū on a smaller scale helped to prevent a complete collapse, but even these construction efforts were separated by long intervals, sometimes of well over thirty years. One can only imagine what the shrines may have looked like; classical Ise rituals like kanname and tsukinami, if performed at all, must have been much reduced. The shrines’ dilapidation was all the more striking in comparison to the growing wealth of the towns that grew up around them. Yamada, especially, was rapidly expanding into a national hub of pilgrimage and associated trade. Uji at the Inner Shrine was smaller, but here, too, the compounds of oshi of many hues (some of priestly descent, others merchants without priestly rank and many somewhere in between) outshone the shrine buildings. So did numerous temples, which engaged in kanjin fundraising and had their own portfolios of danna contracts. Pilgrims’ donations ended up with Ise’s oshi and temples, and did not reach the shrines themselves. Even the shrines’ negi made their living from the pilgrimage trade, with many doubling as oshi or depending on relatives who ran the family’s oshi compound. Ise was flourishing, although the shrines were not. More worshippers than ever before were pouring money into the site, and yet the shrines were collapsing. Only rarely did the oshi-​run town councils contribute funds to vital repairs within the shrine compounds, as the Yamada council had done in 1501. As a rule, the oshi of Uji and Yamada were happy for kanjin specialists to collect funds for the maintenance of the shrines’ infrastructure. Buddhist practitioners, ranging from monks and nuns to semi-​lay mendicants, yamabushi and female ‘shamans’, solicited donations among the general public not only as a religious practice but also as a way of living. We have already encountered the temple Kokuya Dainichibō within the Inner Shrine precincts, where monks raised funds for the construction of shrine bridges. Even more effective fundraisers were the nuns of a Yamada temple known (since 1551) as Keikōin.1 This temple soon overshadowed the Kokuya, as a nun called Shuetsu succeeded where the Kokuya was now failing:  in rebuilding the Uji Bridge (in 1491 and 1505), which was washed away by floods at regular intervals.2 The origins of these nuns are not known, but it appears that Shuetsu had good

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connections with the court aristocracy, the Muromachi shoguns and some of the most powerful warlords in the land. In the 1550s, these connections enabled the Keikōin to take on the project of reinstituting the sengū of both shrines. With endorsements from the emperor and the shogun, Shuetsu’s successors Seijun and Shūyō collected enough donations to realize a regular (full) sengū of the Outer Shrine in 1563 and an interim (simpler) sengū of the Inner Shrine in 1575. They also contributed to the Inner Shrine’s regular sengū in 1585. Both shrines had had to manage without a regular sengū for well over a century. As the chaos of the Sengoku century dissipated, the shrines regained their footing. Their renaissance occurred by virtue of the kanjin nuns rather than the court, the priests, or even the oshi who now dominated the towns of Yamada and Uji. Kanjin practitioners of many kinds not only invested in the shrine precincts (while using part of their takings to build their own institutions), but also played a central role in spreading Ise’s renown among pilgrims. It was in large part due to the Keikōin nuns that Ise attracted the interest of the warlords who reunited the country and laid the foundations for the new Tokugawa order: Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. It is all the more ironic that once the country returned to (a new form of) normality, the town councils of Yamada and Uji actively sought to exclude kanjin practitioners from the pilgrimage business. In parallel with this, shrine priests were once again turning to the textual record. They drew on classical and medieval texts to argue for the reconstruction of long-​lost shrine buildings and rituals, and to redefine Ise as the pinnacle of ‘Shinto’ –​a category that was rapidly gaining currency, not least through the efforts of the Yoshida. These developments created, yet again, a radically new Ise.

A New Order Imposed It was during the regimes of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi that the economic and administrative framework of the Ise Shrines was to be settled for centuries to come; the founder of the Edo bakufu, Tokugawa Ieyasu, added little that was new. From the perspective of the shrines, two issues stood out: the restoration of the twenty-​year cycle of rebuilding and the consolidation of the shrines’ economic foundation. Traditional histories, and even modern authors, routinely refer to the new leaders’ reverence for Ise to explain the revival of the shrines at this juncture. However, the assumption that Ise must, as a matter of course, have been central to the project of restoring national authority is hardly borne out by the evidence. Accounts that frame Ise’s renaissance as a natural result of the restoration of the state under-​communicate the possibility that Ise could easily have failed to survive, and misrepresent Ise’s significance to the new regime. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the political terrain of Ise had been dominated by a shaky alliance between the Kitabatake, Uji and the Ōnakatomi saishu on one hand, and Yamada on the other. Fortunately for Yamada, the Kitabatake were occupied on many fronts. Despite periodic onslaughts (notably in 1532 and 1544), Yamada generally managed to evade concerted attacks from its

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many enemies. This military balance of power finally broke down in the 1560s when the warlord Oda Nobunaga of Owari began to expand his territory. Preparing for his push into Kyoto, Nobunaga secured his back by invading Ise Province in 1567–​ 68. This campaign ended with the capitulation of the Kitabatake at their Okawachi stronghold in modern-​day Matsusaka in 1569. A compromise was reached when Kitabatake Tomonori agreed to adopt Nobunaga’s second son, Nobukatsu, as his son-​in-​law (meaning that Nobukatsu married Tomonori’s daughter and took the Kitabatake name), and designated him as his successor. This scheme went horribly wrong in 1576. Nobukatsu murdered Tomonori, evicted Tomonori’s son from the domain and took back the Oda family name, thus ending more than two centuries of Kitabatake rule. This sudden change of rulers transformed the rules of the game in the shrines’ neighbourhood. Nobukatsu may –​temporarily –​have turned into a Kitabatake, but it soon became clear that he did not intend to behave like one. In 1575 he moved his residence to Tamaru Castle, only some five kilometres west of the Miyagawa River, and assumed control over the ancient shrine lands to the east of the river. He demanded that the town councils there pay him rather steep taxes, and demonstrated his authority by imposing a cancellation of all debts (tokusei). This ‘invasion’ occurred in the very year that the Inner Shrine was attempting an interim sengū (funded by Shūyō of the Keikōin), which was jeopardized by Nobukatsu’s decision to take over the remaining shrine lands. It was a telling sign of the new warlord’s indifference to the shrines’ fate. This ‘irreverent’ way of dealing with religious institutions was quite in tune with the times. The Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis (1532–​97) wrote about Nobukatsu’s father Nobunaga that he was ‘the greatest destroyer of kami, buddhas, and sects ever’;3 rival warlords such as Takeda Shingen agreed with Fróis on this point. Most shocking was Nobunaga’s burning of Mount Hiei, arguably the most hallowed and powerful Buddhist centre in the country, where he massacred thousands of monastics in 1571. He fought a protracted and merciless war with the Ikkō (Shin) temple Ishiyama Honganji, forcing it to surrender in 1580. In 1581 Nobunaga’s troops laid siege to yet another large temple complex, Mount Kōya, while ordering the execution of hundreds of kanjin practitioners associated with this mountain.4 Neil McMullin argues that these and countless smaller-​scale battles marked a qualitative change in the relation between Buddhism and the state. Nobunaga rendered meaningless the old conception that Buddhism and the state are two equal partners that are mutually dependent on each other, and he prepared the ground for a ‘post-​Buddhist Japan’  –​an age when temples were firmly under the control of a new warrior state, and where Buddhism’s authority was severely compromised.5 The obvious superiority of naked military might undermined the charisma of priests and their claims of other-​worldly powers. Nobunaga’s agenda was not to destroy Buddhism, but rather to break the autonomy of temples and shrines and put an end to their demands for immunity from outside interference. As the largest temple bastions fell, Nobunaga seemed to be progressing from an early phase of destruction to a phase of restoring and co-​opting prestigious religious institutions. Interestingly, he found shrines more

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congenial to such treatment than the more militarized temples. As soon as he entered Kyoto in 1568, Nobunaga began investing in the Kamo Shrines, and in 1580 he supplied funds for the reconstruction of the Iwashimizu Hachimangū Shrine, sponsored previously by the Kamakura and Muromachi shoguns. Finally, in 1582, he took on the project of reviving the regular sengū of the Ise Shrines.

The Ise Shrines Restored For decades, if not centuries, the priests of both shrines had been making regular appeals to the court for funds to restore the shrine buildings. In 1581 they addressed a similar plea directly to the new hegemon Nobunaga, who was now ruling much of Japan from his new ‘court’ at Azuchi Castle, with little regard for imperial protocol. To the priests’ delight, Nobunaga pledged thrice the amount that they had asked for (3,000 rather than 1,000 kanmon). He also made concrete arrangements for the payment of this sum and for the start of the building process, even while ordering that the ceremonial should be abridged to an absolute minimum. In return, both shrines offered prayers for Nobunaga’s spring campaign. A  mere month later, the shrines staged the first preparatory rite  –​the yamaguchi-​sai that marks the woodcutters’ entry into the shrine forest.6 However, after another two months Nobunaga fell victim to a coup by one of his own generals (6.1582). Despite Nobunaga’s untimely death, his sudden decision to ‘adopt’ the Ise Shrines transformed their situation. Nobukatsu, Nobunaga’s son and the shrines’ predatory neighbour, contributed timber from his lands in Kiso to the shrines, while at the same time expropriating Ise lands to distribute as fiefs among his retainers (9.1583). Only a month later, however, he donated four villages west of the Miyagawa, worth 2,500 koku, to the shrines’ ‘Daijingūji head and negi priests’.7 It appears that taking over Nobunaga’s Ise initiative had now become a way of claiming legitimacy as Nobunaga’s successor and as the new national leader. Nobukatsu’s change of mind about the Ise shrine lands can perhaps be seen in this light. However, his sudden generosity was to no avail. By late 1583, Nobukatsu had already been outmanoeuvred by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the struggle over Nobunaga’s legacy. Hideyoshi confiscated Nobukatsu’s Ise fief and entrusted it to Gamō Ujisato (in 1584). When Hideyoshi came up against an alliance of Nobukatsu and Tokugawa Ieyasu later in the same year, he took over the Ise project and made a sizeable grant to the Keikōin, ordering the nuns to complete the fundraising. In the end, the Inner Shrine sengū of 1585 followed on the heels of Hideyoshi’s appointment as imperial regent (kanpaku, 7.1585), adding lustre to his new position as the head of court and state. A number of records remain of this first regular sengū of the century.8 To put it mildly, the priests were not pleased. The buildings, their furnishings and the rituals all had to be completed within a very tight budget.9 The entire building time was a mere two months, whereas traditionally it had been about a year. It is doubtful whether any detailed drawings of earlier hall designs had survived (none

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exist today). The lineage of carpenters who had built the Inner Shrine’s main hall in 1462 had died out by 1585, ruling out the possibility that there was some kind of living memory of the way things had been done before.10 Surviving documents state clearly that ‘the number and style of buildings’ was determined by the size of the budget, rather than by precedent.11 The main record of this rebuilding effort, Tenshō 13nen gosengū ki, is openly critical: ‘In this age, when there is no point in talking about right and wrong, we can only leave judgment to the gods and do what we can with 3,000 kanmon.’12 When the kami treasures arrived, the negi who authored this record had a chance to inspect the contents of the chests. He was shocked: ‘When I saw [the treasures], I did not know what to say; they were completely incorrect . . . This must be kept secret.’ He closed his report in disgust: ‘Somehow or other, the sengū was completed; into the fire with it all –​into the fire.’13 This internal document casts a striking light on the realities of the celebrated revival of the sengū. It makes it abundantly clear that the rebuilding was done as cheaply as possible; this was particularly significant because the 1585 proceedings were to serve as a precedent for all sengū in the Edo period. Moreover, it shows that this sengū underwrote the authority not of the imperial court but of the new warrior hegemons –​first Nobunaga and then Hideyoshi. These warlords saw Ise as a national shrine that they inherited from the Ashikaga shoguns, rather than as an imperial institution. As in so many other matters, Hideyoshi paid scant attention to court procedures and saw no point in cloaking his power in imperial clothes. The same can be said of Nobunaga before him. It is unlikely that these warlords thought of Ise as a site with a special connection with the imperial line. Their communications with the shrines, and even their sizeable donations, were channelled not through the court, or even the priests, but through their personal oshi and the Keikōin. The proceedings of 1585 sengū differed from those of 1434 and 1462 in that they ignored court protocol. In classical times, the dispatching of kami treasures to Ise had served as the ultimate symbol of the shrines’ exclusive relationship with the court; the Ōnakatomi envoy charged with this prestigious task would eventually attain dominance over the shrines’ affairs under the title of saishu. Even in the Muromachi period, many points of protocol still reflected this old practice. Hideyoshi, however, ignored this most crucial privilege of the saishu and instead sent his mother to deliver the treasures. Hideyoshi looked to Ise primarily for two practical purposes: prayers for victory in his many battles and prayers for his mother’s health. When Hideyoshi’s mother fell ill in 1588, Hideyoshi ordered the Ise priests to pray for her recovery. He promised a donation of 10,000 koku if their intercession was successful. In all likelihood, this sum exceeded his contribution to the sengū three years earlier. Hideyoshi visited Ise in person in celebration of his mother’s recovery (10.1588). The sengū did not occasion such a visit. In the meantime, even if the buildings were now restored, the issue of the shrines’ long-​term economic foundation remained unresolved. In particular, Ise’s two communities of priests sent repeated petitions asking Hideyoshi to rescind Nobukatsu’s confiscation of the shrine lands east of the Miyagawa. Even

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Figure 6.1  (a) A map of the Inner Shrine precincts (1649).

Source: Fukuyama Toshio 1976, Ise Jingū no kenchiku to rekishi, Nihon Shiryō Kankōkai

while making large one-​off donations through his oshi, Hideyoshi was much less forthcoming when it came to long-​term commitments like restoring shrine lands. Yet rebuilding the shrines was pointless without a guarantee of income from such lands. Hideyoshi gave no such guarantee in connection with the 1585 sengū. This matter was resolved only in 1594, when it was the turn of Ise Province to undergo one of Hideyoshi’s famous cadastral surveys. These surveys calculated a hypothetical ‘assessed yield’ in terms of koku for all lands, including plots that were not used as rice fields, or even for agriculture. By means of these surveys Hideyoshi swept away the complex multilayered patterns of land rights that had developed from the late Heian period onwards. Hideyoshi took direct possession of all surveyed lands and distributed them to warriors, courtiers, temples and shrines as ‘grants held in trust’, while retaining their ultimate ownership and thereby also the right to withdraw grants of land whenever ‘trust’ was broken.14 The cadastral surveys, then, not only put numbers on the value of land, but also served as occasions for radical land redistributions under the authority of the new hegemon. The shrines must have been very disappointed that Hideyoshi hardly gave them a better deal than Nobukatsu had done: he added one more village to Nobukatsu’s four, bringing the total assessed yield to just over 3,500

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Figure 6.1  (b) A map of the Outer Shrine precincts (1649).

Source: Fukuyama Toshio 1976, Ise Jingū no kenchiku to rekishi, Nihon Shiryō Kankōkai

koku, which was to be shared by the saishu, the Daijingūji head, the negi and the Keikōin.15 The real boon, however, was Hideyoshi’s treatment of the lands east of the Miyagawa. In an unprecedented move, he exempted the whole of this area from his survey on the grounds that it constituted ‘the precincts (shikichi) of the shrines’. With this, Yamada, Uji, the harbour of Ōminato and a number of villages became the largest area in the realm (except for peripheral Tsushima and Ezo) that was not surveyed. It was fairly common for temple and shrine precincts to be granted exemptions, nor was it unusual to include city blocks or villages that serviced temples and shrines (monzen) in their tax-​exempt territories (keidai). In the case of Ise, however, the concept of a ‘precinct’ was blown out of all proportions. In effect, Hideyoshi left medieval arrangements in place in a large area that contained not only the shrines, but also two towns, a busy harbour and an extensive rural area. This ruling was confirmed in 1603 by Tokugawa Ieyasu, and after that by each consecutive Tokugawa shogun.

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A New Hierarchy of Power The exemption from cadastral surveys of such a large area around the shrines appeared to amount to the restoration of a classical-​style shrine district (shingun). In important ways, however, it was not. The vermilion-​seal document announcing this exemption was directed not to the priests of the two shrines but to the town councils of Yamada and Uji, which were dominated by the main houses of oshi.16 The inhabitants of the towns and villages east of the Miyagawa did not pay shrine taxes, although they were obliged to perform some ritual services for the shrines (notably transporting timber for the sengū). The councils imposed a levy called tsunagi-​sen on rice-​producing villagers, but the proceeds did not go to the shrines, as they had done in the shrine districts of classical times. Instead, this levy paid for the running of the councils themselves, for council members’ travels to Edo (where they were obliged to attend a New Year audience with the shogun), and for maintenance of the Miyagawa crossing and facilities for pilgrims there. The villages west of the Miyagawa answered directly to the shrines, and were (in theory, at least) overseen by the priests. The Yamada and Uji councils retained many of their medieval powers under the new regime, but this did not mean that they escaped warrior control. Beginning with the first Edo-​period sengū of 1609, the Tokugawa bakufu covered all costs, and the sengū of both shrines were now carried out with perfect regularity. To begin with, the shogunal magistrate of Ise Province supervised these grand undertakings; from 1633 onwards this became the main task of a dedicated magistrate of bannerman rank called the Yamada magistrate (Yōda bugyō). In 1635 a compound was built for this magistrate on the Miyagawa riverbank, accommodating a staff of thirty retainers, forty sailors and a modest fleet. Gradually, the powers of the Yamada and Uji councils were hollowed out by this shogunal office. The councils had legislative authority to deal with all but the most serious offences, issued their own permits for a range of economic activities and raised their own levies; but even in the seventeenth century, every decision on the part of the councils had to be countersigned by the magistrate, and matters of import often went straight to the magistrate’s office, bypassing the councils altogether. In practice, it was the magistrate who collected taxes from the villages west of the Miyagawa. The magistrate had a formal duty to inform the shrines about any trouble that occurred on those lands, and the Yamada and Uji councils about matters in the domain east of the Miyagawa; that was all. A major reform in 1780 removed the last vestiges of the councils’ autonomy, including their right to impose levies. After this reform, the main task of the councils was to attend New Year audiences in Edo, with funds supplied for that purpose by the magistrate.17 Compared to other large religious complexes, such as Mount Hiei, Honganji and Mount Kōya, Ise managed to avoid a major crisis in the transition from Sengoku to Edo and even regained some of its old glory. On the surface, the Tokugawa regime followed Hideyoshi’s example in officially recognizing of the autonomy of the shrine domain. Right until Meiji, the Yamada council’s statutes proclaimed that the shrine domain is ‘off-​limits to envoys from shogunal governors’ (shugoshi

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funyū).18 This medieval rhetoric sounded impressive, but in practice it was empty. Yamada and Uji enjoyed a degree of self-​rule, as did villages and towns throughout the realm, and their autonomy took a very unusual form in the sense that a large area remained unsurveyed throughout the Edo period. However, in all matters of consequence, the Ise shrine domain was under indirect but effective control of the warrior regime by way of the Yamada magistrate. By placing the administration of the shrine domain in the hands of the oshi-​ dominated town councils, the bakufu marginalized the classical court-​ based hierarchy of saishu –​ Daijingūji head –​ negi. The councils challenged the authority of the priests even within the shrine precincts. The tensions that this created exploded in 1641. A shrine keeper (miyamori) in charge of a small shrine booth (massha) within the Outer Shrine got into a fight with a colleague, and the Outer Shrine’s first negi punished him by permanently banning all members of his family, as well as fifteen associates, from the precincts. The shrine keeper, a man called Ōkadachi Shichirōbei, complained to the Yamada council. The council formulated stricter rules for the behaviour of all shrine keepers; in return, the council expected the first negi to pardon Ōkadachi. When the first negi complied, the other negi were outraged. They complained to the Daijingūji head and the saishu and called for the first negi to be dismissed and exiled. To this, the Yamada council reacted by blockading access to the shrine precincts for all pilgrims, forcing the negi to back down. The Yamada magistrate chose to remain passive and stay out of trouble. In the end, a compromise was reached that illustrated the dominant position of the Yamada council. Henceforth, the council would be allowed to station its own inspector (metsuke) within the Outer Shrine, and the rules that the council had formulated remained in place.19 This outcome made it abundantly clear that the priesthood was in no position to challenge the town council, even in shrine matters.

Shogunal Ise The new arrangements further ensured that the shrines now served as a symbol of shogunal rather than imperial power. This should not come as a surprise; previous chapters have shown that the situation was not much different under the Muromachi bakufu, and was moving in this direction even in the Kamakura period. Yet the Tokugawa ‘take-​over’ of Ise was explicit in a manner that the policies of earlier bakufu regimes were not. This became particularly clear during the reign of the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu (r. 1623–​51). Iemitsu is often credited with initiating a major transformation of the ideological legitimization of Tokugawa power. Seeing the potential danger in appealing to the notion that Heaven grants power to those who deserve it most, Iemitsu sought a more stable foundation for the Tokugawa dynasty. To this end he invested heavily in the worship of the founder Ieyasu, who after his death in 1616 had been deified as Tōshō Daigongen and enshrined in the Tōshōgū in Nikkō. Iemitsu identified himself closely with Ieyasu, who appeared frequently in his dreams, and he even imagined himself to be Ieyasu’s reincarnation, the ‘second Gongen’. Rather

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Figure 6.2  Tokugawa Iemitsu’s amulet. Source: Nikkōsan Rinnōji.

than carving out shogunal power by imposing strict limits on the court, as his predecessor had done, Iemitsu sought to design an overarching structure in which court authority supported shogunal supremacy. The most compelling expression of this vision was a simple amulet that Iemitsu carried on his person at all times, reading: Ise Tenshō Daijin –​Hachiman Daibosatsu –​Tōshō Daigongen –​shogun. Three shrines, one in mind and body.20

This formula summed up Iemitsu’s understanding of his role:  the shogun represented the sacred union of the ‘king of all kami’ Tenshō Daijin (i.e. Amaterasu) at Ise, Hachiman as the protector deity of the Tokugawa (Minamoto) lineage and the deified Ieyasu (Figure 6.2). In Ise, Iemitsu’s interest made itself felt in different ways. When the Yamada magistrate instructed the carpenters on the occasion of the rebuilding of 1629, he impressed on them that they were executing this project ‘on orders of the lord of the realm (tenkasama)’, meaning Iemitsu.21 Perhaps this did not even need spelling out, since the court was only involved in behind-​the-​scenes formalities of finding auspicious dates and rubber-​stamping shogunal decisions. As we have seen, the building process was both funded and overseen by the Yamada magistrate as the shogunal representative in Ise. All this stands in sharp contrast

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to medieval times, when the court-​appointed saishu had overall responsibility for the sengū. Iemitsu was also personally involved in a question of protocol regarding the Ise shrine priests’ attendance at his New Year audience, which he made obligatory in 1636. The Inner Shrine priesthood chose this occasion to plead their shrine’s pre-​ eminence over the Outer Shrine, reflected in seating arrangements at the audience. The question was referred to the court, where the imperial regent Nijō Yasumichi concluded that the Outer Shrine should retain its position of pre-​eminence. Referring to Ieyuki’s Ruijū jingi hongen, Yasumichi argued that the gods of both shrines alike carry the title of Amaterasu, ‘Heaven-​Shining’; the difference between the shrines, he maintained, was that the Outer Shrine accommodated the distant ‘Ancestor’ and the Inner Shrine the ‘Parent’. Offerings were always presented first to the ‘ancestral’ Outer Shrine, and this order should apply likewise to the New Year audience in Edo. If the matter had been a mere formality, it would have made no sense for the bakufu to snub the regent. Iemitsu, however, had a strong opinion on the matter and ordered his in-​house scholar Hayashi Razan to write a counter-​report. Razan pointed out that the two shrines were not identical but had different deities; while there were various theories as to the identity of the Outer Shrine deity (Ninigi, or Kunitokotachi, or Mike-​tsu-​kami, or Toyuke), ‘Amaterasu’ was not one of them, and this name applied only to the god of the Inner Shrine. Since the Inner Shrine was superior in all matters, Razan argued, it should also be given precedence at the New Year audience.22 Needless to say, Razan’s arguments carried the day. The whole affair underlined Iemitsu’s personal determination to ‘correct’ Ise and incorporate Amaterasu in his ‘three shrines’ scheme of divine legitimation. A final touch of Iemitsu’s co-​option of Ise was the institutionalization of official pilgrimages, by both shogunal and imperial emissaries, to Ieyasu’s Tōshōgū Shrine in Nikkō and to Ise. Iemitsu made frequent personal pilgrimages to the Tōshōgū, but not to Ise; he did, however, instigate the practice of sending the shogunal intendant changed with ceremonial matters (kōke) to Ise as his representative. Such kōke visits took place at irregular intervals from 1640 onwards. Under later shoguns, official visits to the Tōshōgū and to the Ise Shrines became the two main duties of kōke. In 1646 Iemitsu sought to raise the status of the Tōshōgū by compelling the court to send annual emissaries carrying imperial offerings (reiheishi) to his deified grandfather. To make this more palatable, he allowed the court to revive the long-​lost practice of sending imperial envoys to the Ise Shrines for kanname (1648). This restored some of the original meaning of this ritual, and, in a sense, strengthened the shrines’ special connection with the court. On the other hand, the Ise reiheishi was part of a larger scheme in which not Ise but the Tōshōgū had priority. There was now a system of official worship through shogunal and court emissaries that focused on the Tōshōgū and Ise as the twin sites of sacred authority in the realm, both embodied by the shogun. A vivid witness to the attitude of senior shogunal officials towards the Ise Shrines can be found in a 1674 record of an Inner Shrine oshi, who overheard a discussion between the kōke Kira Kōzuke-​no-​suke, Hayashi Razan’s son and

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successor Gahō (the leading shogunal scholar), and two other officials called Sakai and Tsuchiya.23 Their conversation began with Kira mentioning that on his last official Ise tour, he had been told that he must worship first the Inner and then the Outer Shrine, rather than the other way around, as he had used to do. This occasioned the following discussion about the relation between the two shrines: Sakai:  That must be because these days, the virtues of Amaterasu have been particularly prominent. . . Tsuchiya:  Aren’t the two shrines manifestations of Yin and Yang, and inseparable? Kira:  The Inner Shrine is Amaterasu and the Outer Shrine Toyuke; because they are separate deities, inseparable is not the word. That is why there is a set order of worship. Tsuchiya:  Toyuke –​what kind of deity is that? Gahō: The Outer Shrine priests say that Toyuke is Kunitokotachi, and that he is worshipped together with Ninigi. Kunitokotachi is the first of the heavenly deities, and Ninigi is the first deity who descended from heaven to rule Japan. Tsuchiya:  Then that shrine must be the most prominent. One of its deities is Amaterasu’s ancestor, and the other the ruler who received this country from Amaterasu. Together, they must be more prominent than Amaterasu. Sakai:  No, I disagree. These deities are both manifestations of Amaterasu’s virtue, and in the end, is it that not this virtue that we must revere highest? Kira:  That is correct. Amaterasu reveres Kunitokotachi, because he is her ancestor; in a way, they can be compared to Gongen-​sama [i.e. Ieyasu] and Nitta-​sama.24 Tsuchiya: Well, that might be true for Kunitokotachi, but Ninigi descended after Amaterasu and handed down the Three Divine Treasures for all eternity; certainly he is the most prominent deity. Gahō:  That is indeed so, but still, the comparison with Gongen-​sama was very well made. Kunitokotachi can be compared with Lord Kiyoyasu,25 Amaterasu with Gongen-​sama, and Ninigi with Taiyūin-​sama [Iemitsu]. Lord Kiyoyasu is revered by all as a great ancestor because his grandson Gongen-​sama pacified the country, and because Gongen-​sama passed the country on to Taiyūin-​sama, Taiyūin-​sama is similar to Ninigi. While Taiyūin-​sama was ruling the country, he was revered more deeply than Gongen-​sama, but after his death, the deepest respect has once again been reserved for Gongen-​sama who first brought peace to the land. That is why Amaterasu and Gongen-​sama are revered most highly throughout the realm.

To our eavesdropping Inner Shrine oshi, this exchange offered a rare opportunity to listen in on current views regarding Ise among the shrines’ new masters. He must have liked the fact that these shogunal worthies accepted the notion that the shrines have different kami, and that they reached the conclusion that the Inner Shrine’s Amaterasu is superior to the more ancient ancestral deity of the Outer Shrine. This was good news, worthy of recording and depositing in the Uji archive. At the same time, his record makes it abundantly clear that even the most sophisticated shogunal experts on ritual and precedent did not think of Amaterasu as an imperial ancestor, but rather associated this kami with Gongen-​sama, the deified Ieyasu enshrined in the Tōshōgū.

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Ise’s Shintoization From a long-​term perspective, perhaps the most crucial change to occur in the seventeenth century was the transformation of Ise into a site of Shinto. We have seen that although the conceptualization of Shinto started at Ise in the late Kamakura period, the transmission of Watarai Ieyuki’s ‘Shinto lineage’ was broken in the fourteenth century. The initiative to develop the notion of Shinto further passed to other circles –​most notably, the Yoshida in Kyoto. In Ise itself, the priestly lineage that had tentatively begun to see itself as keepers of a ‘Shinto’ transmission became caught up in a losing battle with local pilgrimage entrepreneurs. What remained was an interest in developing Ise-​specific traditions of purification and kagura, but no one thought of these in terms of Shinto. This changed quite suddenly in the 1650s and 1660s. In the writings of Ise priests and oshi, the term ‘Shinto’ is used with striking frequency from these decades onwards. In a 1650 work (Yōfuku ki, Record of the winter solstice) that won him some fame, the Outer Shrine oshi and gonnegi Deguchi Nobuyoshi (1615–​90) summed up the traditions of the Ise Shrines in the single word ‘Shinto’. In contrast to Ieyuki, and in line with many of his contemporaries, Nobuyoshi saw Shinto as one of three competing teachings of disparate origin:  Japanese Shinto, Indian Buddhism and Chinese Confucianism. He regarded Buddhism as a corrupting force, and Confucianism as compatible with Shinto, but foreign. Shinto represented the essence of the ‘august system’ (on-​seido) of ‘our land’, founded on Amaterasu’s mandate to her Heavenly Grandson.26 Yet Nobuyoshi had to admit that even in Ise, Shinto had only recently been recovered from obscurity. Nobuyoshi himself had neither a teacher to turn to, nor access to books that he could study on his own. The ancient (in fact, medieval) writings of his Watarai forebears had become available to him only in the last few years, one of them recovered after a mission that had taken him to ‘another province’.27 Even in Nobuyoshi’s eyes, Ise was not yet a site of Shinto; rather, Shinto constituted a new ideal that had to be realized by restoring an age-​old ‘national law’ that had been utterly lost. To make this possible, Nobuyoshi dedicated decades to a study of the 804 Ise Protocols, while developing numerous activities to press for the restoration of Ise rituals, buildings and institutions, and spreading the Shinto teachings he was developing among his fellows. Where had this concept of Shinto come from? The scheme of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto as the ‘three teachings’ had rapidly become common sense in the years around 1600. An early example can be found in Myōtei mondō (1605), a Christian critique of these three teachings by the Japanese Jesuit and later apostate Fucan Fabian.28 A more influential thinker who followed this same scheme was Hayashi Razan, whom we already met earlier. The paradigm in itself was older; most notably, Yoshida Kanetomo had argued already in the 1470s that Buddhism and Confucianism were the fruit and leaves that sprouted from the roots and trunk of Shinto.29 In Kanetomo’s time, however, this notion remained an abstraction, first and foremost because in fifteenth-​century Japan there were hardly any ‘Confucians’ or ‘Shintoists’ who were not at the same time embedded in

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Buddhism. It was only in the early Edo period that Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto became categories not only of teachings but also of people. Two new developments contributed to the sharpening of sectarian boundaries in this period. The first was the proliferation of temples that based their economy on the performance of ritual services for lay followers, notably, funerals and ordinations. Such temples created congregations of lay Buddhists who developed a sense of faith-​based identity. Groups of Shin (ikkō) and Nichiren (hokke) Buddhism were most successful in establishing such lay identities. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they organized tight-​knit communities that dominated sizeable territories both economically and militarily. The arrival and initial success of Christianity in the mid-​sixteenth century created another group of laypeople who were defined by their faith. All this added an entirely new dimension to common understandings of Buddhism: now it was no longer only a soteriological technique performed by specialists for lay patrons, but also a faith that permeated laypeople’s lives.30 The idea arose that (some) people belonged to temple groups, or to the Christian church, in a manner that defined their outlook, their loyalties and their place in the community. The wars of the sixteenth century convinced warrior leaders that some of these groups were pernicious and needed to be rooted out. This understanding formed the basis of the temple certification system, instituted by the bakufu from the late 1630s onwards and expanded into a national policy in 1665. Under this system, temples were obliged to guarantee that their patrons (danna) were ‘proper Buddhists’, and therefore not Christians. A similar concern with the faith of laypeople appears in Nobuyoshi’s writings. In Yōfuku ki, Nobuyoshi argues that the ‘supreme Way’ of Shinto offers a moral compass to ‘all people in their daily lives’. Shinto is not a matter of priestly rituals, he writes; it encompasses everything from the five human relations to even ‘the lifting of a hand or a foot’.31 Pilgrims, Nobuyoshi suggests, should base their everyday lives as laypeople on a firm faith in Shinto. A second development that enhanced sectarianism was the concerted efforts of the new regime to control religious practitioners. Following on similar attempts by sixteenth-​century warlords, the bakufu set out to organize monastics and other kinds of priests in hierarchical structures, similar to the lord-​vassal model of warrior society. From the 1630s onwards, local temples were compelled to place themselves under the authority of head-​temples with well-​defined sectarian identities. These head-​temples were given the authority to educate, certify and appoint priests to the sect’s branch temples, and to punish them if they misbehaved. This regimentation of temples and their priests prepared the ground for the temple certification system. In shogunal laws imposed on different Buddhist sects, doctrinal study was defined as the prime obligation of their priests, implying that each sect had a distinct teaching that defined the moral code of its followers. To meet this expectation, head-​temples established sectarian academies that set out to recover and teach the ‘original teachings’ of their founders. The ordering of religious specialists was gradually extended to new groups of ritualists. Already in 1613, most yamabushi were organized in two hierarchical

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networks, overseen by the Tendai and Shingon head-​temples of Shōgoin and Sanbōin. There was less urgency in regulating other types of ritualists, but eventually, there was no escaping the military regime’s obsession with establishing lines of command. Shrine priests became subject to regulation in 1665, and Yin-​Yang diviners in 1683. Yet others, such as soothsayers, female shamans and kagura performers, lived in a borderland that was less easily defined. By the late seventeenth century, however, even they had become subject to regional chiefs.32 For the aim of surveillance, then, the shogunal authorities were interested in identifying a credible head of shrine priests. In medieval times, shrine priests would appeal to major shrines in their own region when in need of protection or accreditation. If it was necessary to go beyond regional structures, they turned to either the Ise Shrines or the ‘house of Shinto’ at the imperial court, the Yoshida. Both these institutions supplied local priests with certificates that identified them as legitimate shrine priests and protégés of a higher authority.33 In most regions, the Yoshida were more successful than the Ise Shrines in attracting priests’ custom. Capitalizing on Yoshida Kanetomo’s legacy, Yoshida Kanemi (1535–​1610) succeeded in gaining recognition for the Saijōsho complex at Yoshida Shrine as the official substitute (dai) for the classical Jingikan. The Yoshida could not displace the old court lineages that had been associated with the Jingikan since ancient times, but found a way around this by winning acceptance for their claim of general supremacy over ‘Shinto’ under the novel title of ‘deputy heads of Shinto’ (Shintō kanrei chōjō). As such, the Yoshida established themselves as the national specialists on kami ritual, and used that position to outmanoeuvre Ise in that role. In the late sixteenth century, Kanemi built up an impressive network of supporters among warrior leaders. His greatest success was the posthumous deification of Toyotomi Hideyoshi as Hōkoku Daimyōjin under Yoshida auspices in 1599. This high-​profile event put the Yoshida and their notion of Shinto squarely in the limelight. After Kanemi’s death and the downfall of the Toyotomi, the Yoshida experienced a marked downturn; most damaging was their failure to maintain control over Ieyasu’s deification in 1616. In the end, however, they were too useful to fail. Yoshida Shinto was a perfect fit for the shogunal policy of establishing a centralized system of surveillance over shrine priests. The Yoshida provided a link with ancient court authority over shrines and also offered a Shinto teaching, allegedly with primordial roots. In 1665 the bakufu issued the so-​called Shrine Clauses (jinja jōmoku), a document that resembled the shogunal regulations governing the conduct of various Buddhist sects.34 These clauses ordered priests to study the ‘Way of the kami’ (jingidō), thus presuming that there was a distinct Shinto teaching. Another article tasked the Yoshida with issuing licences to priests without court ranks, allowing such priests to wear priestly garments of colours other than the lowly white. This, by the way, had no direct consequences for Ise negi and gonnegi, who already held court ranks. In conjunction, the 1665 Shrine Clauses clearly implied that the Way of the kami was none other than the Yoshida’s ‘One and Only Shinto’, and that this teaching now constituted the official Shinto teaching of the realm. Even more importantly, Shinto was now placed on a par with Buddhist sects as an autonomous ‘teaching’, with its own institutional structure.

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These developments coincided with, and partly gave rise to, attempts at implementing this semi-​ official Shinto on the ground. Around 1665, a few Tokugawa-​related domains experimented with the idea that Shinto constituted the original teaching of Japan as an autochthonous correlate of Chinese Confucianism. The daimyo Tokugawa Mitsukuni of Mito, Hoshina Masayuki of Aizu and Ikeda Mitsumasa of Okayama registered shrines in their domains, and abolished shrines that they deemed ‘illicit’ while reviving ancient court-​sponsored shrines (shikinaisha) that were no longer extant. With the help of Yoshida advisors, they sought to establish domain-​wide shrine networks with the long-​term goal of instilling Confucian ethics in the populace.35 At the same time, they sought to limit the number of temples and reduce the influence of Buddhism, which they saw as a threat to the Shinto-​Confucian Way. In other parts of the country, major shrines saw the Shrine Clauses as an opportunity to break away from the control of Buddhist temples and attain autonomy as purely Shinto institutions. The Kasuga and Izumo Shrines were among those that succeeded, while the Hie Shrines failed;36 local circumstances determined the outcome. In the process, the notion of Shinto as the Japanese version of the Way rapidly gained wide currency. How did these events affect Ise? As we have seen, the towns of Yamada and Uji and even the shrine precincts themselves had long had a marked Buddhist presence. That presence was much reduced in the course of the seventeenth century. The reasons for this were closely related to the developments just described. The notion of Shinto as a non-​Buddhist or even anti-​Buddhist Japanese Way found its way to Ise, and soon rendered all Buddhist ‘interference’ problematic. This new theological sensibility overlapped with the drive to concentrate economic and political power in the hands of the oshi who dominated the town councils (most obviously in Yamada). The idea that Buddhism defiled Ise as a centre of Shinto reinforced a process that was already under way, namely, the expulsion of Buddhist agents from the shrines and from the pilgrimage business. In Uji, a cluster of six Buddhist temples acted as large-​scale oshi. One of these temples was the Kokuya mentioned earlier;37 Jōganji was another. In 1648, the Outer Shrine oshi Mikkaichi Hyōbu filed a complaint with the Yamada magistrate against a yamabushi of Jōganji, whom he accused of engaging in kanjin fundraising and distributing Ise amulets among Hyōbu’s danna in Dewa Province in the far north.38 Hyōbu won this case, but strikingly, both councils recognized the right of Jōganji (and the other Uji temples) to provide Ise-​related services to the danna who were rightfully theirs by contract. Perhaps this encouraged the Uji temples to be bold. In 1654, three among them challenged the legal understanding that had led to Jōganji’s defeat. The Uji temples, they claimed, were the official ‘shrine temples’ (jingūji) of the Ise Shrines, and had performed Buddhist rituals for the protection of the realm since ancient times. Therefore, their argument went, these temples were free to distribute Ise amulets throughout the realm, irrespective of pre-​existing contracts that people might have with oshi of the Inner or the Outer Shrine. The Yamada magistrate gave these temples the cold shoulder, and they attempted an appeal in Edo, where the magistrate of temples and shrines was equally negative; but at least the temples were not banned from continuing to

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serve their own danna.39 In the meantime, the notion that the Shinto site of Ise had ‘shrine temples’ gradually became less acceptable. The 1665 Shrine Clauses, in particular, gave Shinto official recognition as an institutionalized ‘teaching’ on a par with Buddhism. The claims of the Uji temples were also tied up with other ambiguities in the legislation that regulated the rights of oshi vis-​à-​vis their danna patrons. Those ambiguities caused disputes that were fought out in two major lawsuits involving Yamada and Uji oshi in 1667–​68 and 1670–​71.40 Indirectly, these disputes were to prove devastating for all Buddhist oshi in Ise. Yamada’s Outer Shrine oshi claimed that Uji’s Inner Shrine oshi had no right to distribute amulets to danna who already held contracts with Outer Shrine oshi. They adduced doctrinal reasons for this: the two shrines, they argued, represented two aspects of a single sacred entity, as argued in ancient records that were well-​known from Kitabatake Chikafusa’s works. ‘Amaterasu’ was the name of that single entity, and thus designated both shrines. Just as the mike hall at the Outer Shrine served food to the kami of both shrines, the services of Outer Shrine oshi covered both the Outer and Inner Shrines. Therefore, the Outer Shrine oshi argued, it was illegal for Inner Shrine oshi to offer their services to those danna who already held an Outer Shrine contract. The Uji party, on the other hand, insisted that the two shrines had separate kami –​Toyuke in the Outer and Amaterasu in the Inner Shrine. Therefore, they maintained, all pilgrims should ideally have two oshi, as was indeed the case with many high-​ ranking warriors. In these lawsuits, oshi from both shrines made confident use of ‘ancient’ teachings about the shrines’ kami, drawing on the medieval Ise literature. This stands in contrast to earlier lawsuits, in which the parties avoided theological questions. It was a clear sign of self-​assurance among the oshi, who now argued that their privileges were grounded on such a theology. The efforts of ‘Shintoists’ like Deguchi Nobuyoshi, as well as the recognition of Shinto in the Shrine Clauses, had made this position possible. In line with its general policy towards temples and shrines, the bakufu made sure to stay clear from doctrinal issues. Rather, the shogunal judges sought to simplify matters and arrive at a workable principle for dealing with the recurring conflicts between the different groups of oshi. Since the shogun and many major daimyo had contracts with oshi at both shrines (a point adduced repeatedly by the Uji party), and because it was deemed important to respect the ‘faith of the danna’, the judges decided that ‘danna are free to conclude contracts with two oshi’.41 This put an end to the recurrent Yamada blockades of Uji-​bound pilgrims, and provided the Yamada magistrate with a clear principle in dealing with future conflicts between oshi of the two shrines. This clarification finally enabled the magistrate to resolve the still-​pending matter of the six temples. In effect, these temples had been claiming to constitute a third layer of oshi. They had asserted the right to provide Ise services to everyone, irrespective of any pre-​existing danna contracts that people might have with either an Outer or an Inner Shrine oshi. The new conception of Shinto as separate from, or even conflicting with, Buddhism provided a decisive argument not only against these assertions (which had been effectively shot down already in 1654), but also

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against the very notion of temples playing any kind of active role in Ise worship. With the Shrine Clauses in place, shrines, like temples, were now seen as embedded in an institutionalized ‘teaching’, namely, Shinto. The idea of different ‘sects’ jointly managing the same site was no longer in line with the administrative logic of the regime. In the end, the outcome was dramatic:  in 1675, the Yamada magistrate banned all ‘Buddhists’ (bukke) from acting as Ise oshi. From this point onwards, all oshi were to represent Shinto, and this excluded temples from the trade. The definition of Ise as a site of Shinto in the 1660s had repercussions not just for the six Uji temples, but for all Buddhist agents in Yamada and Uji. The nuns of the Keikōin had been honoured with special privileges by Ieyasu in recognition of their key role in reviving the sengū. From 1608 onwards, these nuns lost their original function as the shrines’ kanjin fundraisers because the sengū were now underwritten by the bakufu. In 1666, Ieyasu’s ‘vermilion seal document’ to the Keikōin was repealed and the nuns were denied any role in the upcoming rebuilding of 1669. The Keikōin had powerful protectors, however. The Tokugawa branch houses of Kii and Owari used this temple as their oshi (and continued to do so also after 1675, ignoring the Yamada magistrate’s ban), and Ieyasu’s favour was not easily forgotten. The nuns retained the right to be seated in the innermost area (naiin) of the old shrine compound during the sengyo rite, when the kami were transferred to the new shrine hall. Despite occasional official protests from the priests and the saishu, this privilege remained in place until Meiji.42 The Keikōin was a special case, but other temples were much more vulnerable. After the frequent fires that obliterated Uji and Yamada at regular intervals, it became almost customary to restrict the rebuilding of temples, or force them to move to less conspicuous locations. In 1670, a fire that started in a smithy incinerated 5,743 houses, 1,777 storehouses and 189 temples in Yamada. The Outer Shrine precincts were showered in sparks, but escaped unscathed. The fire offered the Yamada magistrate a perfect occasion to reduce the Buddhist presence in the town. Temples founded within the last forty years and temples without officially registered names were closed down; all temples were banned from soliciting funding for their restoration within the shrine domain, where their parishioners lived; and temples in the vicinity of the shrine precincts were relocated. In the end, forty-​seven temples were never rebuilt.43 Looking back on these developments, there is no doubt that the 1660s were a turning point in the Shintoization of the Ise Shrines. Before this decade, Shinto had been an abstract concept. It was enthusiastically embraced by some oshi scholars, but had little impact on the realities of life in Yamada and Uji. In the 1670s, however, Buddhist actors were actively marginalized or even removed from the scene. They were now treated as representatives of a ‘teaching’ that was alien to the shrines. The process of removing Buddhism from the shrines and the pilgrimage continued at a steady pace throughout the rest of the Edo period, laying a firm foundation for the more radical measures against Buddhism that were taken in early Meiji.

Chapter 7 P I LGR IM S’ P LE ASUR E S:  I SE A N D I T S P ATRONS IN TH E E D O   P E RIOD

The sprawling residence of the Yamada magistrate stood on the eastern bank of the Miyagawa River, south of the estuary that opens into Ise Bay. As we have seen in the previous chapter, this magistrate, the Ise representative of Tokugawa power, assumed multiple functions, ranging from monitoring shipping in Ise Bay to supervising the sengū and handling disputes between Yamada and Uji. Nonetheless, the magistrate was, on the whole, a discrete presence. At least in name, he entrusted governance of Yamada and Uji and all shrine lands to the aldermen of Yamada and Uji. These aldermen not only occupied the Yamada and Uji town councils, they were also the wealthy keepers of Ise’s inns; and they served too as oshi or pilgrim-​dedicated priests attached to either the Outer or the Inner Shrine. As priests they all held the title of gonnegi, and were recipients of court rank and office. Heads of twenty-​four families were eligible to serve as hereditary aldermen in Yamada. Prominent among them were the Mikkaichi, the Kubokura, the Ryū and the Fukushima. Fifty-​four families supplied aldermen to the Uji town council. Yamada was incidentally by far the larger of the two towns, with a population of nearly 40,000 in the late seventeenth century, as compared to Uji’s population of under 8,000.1 The aldermen families constituted the elite of the oshi community, but they were a small minority of the total. In the early eighteenth century, Yamada alone boasted some 600 oshi houses. Their numbers fluctuated over time, but 400 were still active in the nineteenth century.2 Uji-​based Inner Shrine oshi were far fewer in number: 270 or so in the eighteenth century, falling to ca. 170 a century later. These oshi, and their itinerant deputies known as tedai, were instrumental in drawing pilgrims to Ise in their hundreds of thousands, and so in guaranteeing the towns’ flourishing in Edo Japan. There is fairly reliable evidence that as many as 400,000 pilgrims arrived in Ise in the first four months of 1718.3 Thereafter, in regular years, the number seems to have fluctuated between 200,000 and 400,000. But there were extraordinary years too  –​notably 1705, 1771 and 1830  –​when pilgrims descended on Ise in millions. Over time the Yamada magistrates curtailed the authority of Ise’s oshi aldermen, but as late as the 1770s, a major dispute over tax revenue ended with the aldermen having magistrate Matsuda Sadasue dismissed on charges of bribery.4 Noisshiki

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Yoshiake, who arrived in 1786 as the twenty-​ninth Yamada magistrate, had greater success. In what was a largely symbolic dent to the authority of the aldermen, he had them submit all tax revenue to the magistrate’s office; the magistrate would henceforth disburse the moneys to the town councils as they were needed.5 The negi priests, too, challenged the authority of the aldermen, repeatedly disputing their attempts to interfere in internal shrine matters. An especially bitter dispute in the 1680s involved the aldermen’s appointment of security officers (miya bugyō) to patrol the shrines.6 Shrine-​town tensions remained a fact of life in Yamada and Uji throughout the Edo period.7 The aldermen of Yamada and Uji –​especially in their capacity as oshi priests and innkeepers –​have a vital part to play in any discussion of the making of early modern Ise; so, too, do the pilgrims on whose patronage Yamada and Uji depended for their prosperity. There is a place too for the negi priests and the men who, in writing about Ise and its shrines, helped to shape their social reality. This chapter first focuses on Ise and its spatial configurations, the better to get at the experience of Ise pilgrimage. We then move our attention to the provinces, exploring the activities of oshi and their agents, and the local cultivation of Ise belief and practice. Finally, we examine the diverse ways in which Ise was imagined in early modern Japan: by pilgrims, by priests and intellectuals, and, in the last critical decades of the era, by political activists who espied in the Ise Shrines new meanings, public and imperial.

The Ise Experience Tenaka Toshikage was perhaps a typical pilgrim. At least, he was male and young. A carpenter by trade, and the son of a village official, he arrived in Ise from Sagami Province with ten companions at New Year 1841. As many as 400,000 pilgrims may have come to Ise in that year, but Tenaka was one of a tiny minority who kept a diary. Tenaka and his party crossed the Miyagawa by ferry, heading east along the Pilgrims’ Road (Sangū kaidō) into Yamada through the Furuichi pleasure quarters, and on to Futami on the coast, where they underwent a purification. They backtracked to Yamada to check in at the inn of their oshi, Kameda Dayū, who served up a feast. The next day they worshipped at the Outer Shrine, climbed Takakurayama (the site of the Heavenly Rock-​Cave) and took in the stunning vistas. They returned to the inn for a performance of kagura dance and another feast. Heavy rain meant a quiet day intervened before Tenaka and party were on the move again. They now walked the Pilgrims’ Road through Furuichi to the Inner Shrine. They climbed Mount Asama, worshipped at the Kongōshōji temple on that mountain and enjoyed the breathtaking views of Ise Bay before returning to Furuichi. There, in the Bizen’ya, the most famous of Furuichi’s many brothels, they spent the night.8 This was not the end of Tenaka’s Ise sojourn –​he and his companions returned for a second night in Furuichi –​but we have been in his company long enough to identify what was distinctive about Ise as a place of pilgrimage. First, Ise comprised

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two independent sites, the Outer and the Inner Shrine, each with its own priesthood, its own kami and legends. Pilgrimage theory might lead us to expect a single sacred centre, a single focus of worship with a single, coherent narrative, but Ise was different. But Ise comprised two such centres and they were locked in a permanent state of conflict. Ise was a sacred site divided against itself: a destructive tension continued to mar relations between Yamada and Uji throughout the Edo period, albeit in the form of lawsuits rather than the armed conflict we saw in previous chapters. Second, at Ise’s epicentre was Furuichi, the pleasure quarters. Furuichi straddled the main pilgrims’ path that threaded from Yamada through to Uji. The pilgrim had no choice but to negotiate it in order to proceed from the Outer Shrine to the Inner. Furuichi was said to be the third greatest pleasure quarters in the land, and at its most prosperous, it boasted seventy-​one establishments employing a thousand women.9 In the Meiji period, the Outer Shrine priest Matsuki Tokihiko offered this striking reflection on Furuichi’s importance to the pilgrimage experience: There was not a single person who did not associate Ise pilgrimage with Furuichi . . . Vast sums of money were squandered [in Ise] by tens of thousands of pilgrims; almost all of it was poured into Furuichi.

‘Vigorous young men’ came to Ise not to participate in sacred rites of thanksgiving for the kami, or to offer prayers for their families’ well-​being. Rather, insisted Matsuki, ‘their sole purpose was to spend their fortunes on a night in the Ox-​ cart Palace’.10 This ‘Palace’ referred to the Bizen’ya brothel, which took for its logo the wheel of a Heian-​period ox-​cart. Matsuki proposes here that generations of pilgrims came to Ise for sex. We should not dismiss his claim lightly. The origins of Furuichi are difficult to trace with precision, not least because, in contrast to Yoshiwara in Edo, say, it was never officially recognized. But by the 1670s, an accommodation had been reached between the Yamada magistrate and brothel-​keepers:  he would turn a blind eye in return for discretion.11 Furuichi brothels discretely styled themselves as ‘teahouses’ (chaya), and their women they called ‘tea pourers’ (chakumi onna; Figure 7.1). And, unlike Yoshiwara, the women were not on open display to the public; customers had to enter the teahouse premises. By the last decades of the seventeenth century, Furuichi was featuring in the fiction of Ihara Saikaku (Nihon eitaigura of 1688 and Saikaku oridome of 1694). Early in the new century, Chikamatsu Monzaemon referred to Furuichi in his play Keisei hangonkō. Its renown was clearly spreading beyond Ise to the great cities of Osaka and Edo. In 1708, Furuichi had sixty teahouses.12 The greatest of them, the above-​mentioned Bizen’ya, had accumulated sufficient capital by 1732 to set up a branch in the castle town of Nagoya. This flourishing of Furuichi was stimulated by a surge in pilgrim numbers in the early eighteenth century. Then, in the 1780s, much of Furuichi was razed by devastating fires, but it quickly recovered. Many of its establishments were rebuilt on a much greater scale, with enhanced grandeur. Two events at the turn of the century helped fix the association between Ise pilgrimage and the pleasures of the flesh in the popular mind. The first was a

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Figure 7.1  Tea pourers and clients in a Furuichi teahouse.

Source: Furuichi no seirō in Jippensha Ikku, Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige, Waseda Kotenseki database.

mass murder that took place in the Aburaya teahouse in 1796. Magofuku Itsuki, a doctor from Uji, slaughtered perhaps ten people in a jealous fit of rage. He was unable to suffer the fact that O-​kon, his favourite tea pourer, was devoting much attention to other customers. This incident was written up by Chikamatsu Tokuzō into the kabuki play Ise ondo koi no netaba. Within two months, it was being performed on stage in Osaka and later in Kyoto and Edo.13 A  second ‘incident’ was the publication of Jippensha Ikku’s massively popular serial novel Tōkaidōchū hizakurige. The fifth sequel, published in 1806, saw protagonists Yaji and Kita reach Ise. The Furuichi pleasure quarters were their preoccupation, and the scene of some of the book’s most engaging episodes.14 But sex was not the only pleasure that Furuichi offered pilgrims. The tea pourers’ dancing and singing –​Ise ondo –​was appreciated in its own right. Pilgrims took Ise ondo’s words and gestures back to all parts of Japan, where it exerted an influence on the development of local folk song and dance. Furuichi also acquired renown for kabuki. Already in the early eighteenth century, it boasted two theatres. By mid-​century, it was regarded as the top rural theatre in the land. An outstanding performance on the Furuichi stage would launch an actor in Kyoto or Osaka.15 In the 1820s, Furuichi kabuki was being ranked alongside that of Nagoya, with only

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the great theatres of Edo, Kyoto and Osaka surpassing it.16 Furuichi remained a vital part of the kabuki scene till the end of the Edo period. Pilgrim-​diarists were typically coy about their experiences of Furuichi, but not so Tenaka Toshikage, the carpenter pilgrim we referred to earlier. He told his diary how he and his companions rode into Furuichi in a palanquin, entered the Bizen’ya and spent a night of such excitement it was ‘impossible to describe with the written word’; he struggled to convey the pleasures of his second night, too.17 Diaries are helpful, too, in hinting at a new trend in Furuichi patronage: women pilgrims were growing in number, and some were visiting Furuichi. In 1825, Nakamura Ito accompanied her husband, an Edo merchant, to Ise on pilgrimage, and kept a diary. She visited Bizen’ya and watched the Ise ondo.18 We know from the diary of a sugar merchant from Sanuki Province that he brought his aunt to Ise in 1848. She too visited Furuichi and enjoyed the dancing in Aburaya before her restless nephew escorted her back to her inn.19 In 1855, the Confucian scholar Kiyohara Hachirō arrived in Ise from Shōnai in north-​eastern Japan with his mother; they seem to have visited the great Sugimotoya teahouse together. Kiyohara then tried, but failed, to persuade a group of women pilgrims to join him to watch a performance of Ise ondo.20 These examples are sparse, indeed, but they do suggest the character of Furuichi was beginning, albeit hesitantly, to change. It was no longer unthinkable to suggest women might accompany a man into a teahouse. While Furuichi became a vital ingredient of the Ise experience, it was, of course, the Outer and Inner Shrines that gave religious meaning to the pilgrimage. Pilgrims’ guidebooks and, occasionally, diaries, provide us with a window on the ways these shrines and their kami were viewed and understood in the later Edo period. As the size of Yamada and its oshi population would lead us to expect, the number of pilgrims worshipping at the Outer Shrine was consistently higher than those heading to the Inner Shrine in Uji. In contrast to the situation in the modern period, the Outer Shrine was commonly regarded as the more important of the two main shrines. Those few diarists who offer an opinion on them, and their respective virtues, usually suggest it was the Outer Shrine that moved them. In 1749, the year after the eighth sengū of the Edo period, the philosopher and physician Miura Baien paid a visit to Ise. He was awestruck by the Outer Shrine and ‘its gold as it gleams in the sun’. ‘It emits a sort of haze’, he thought: This is the shrine of Kunitokotachi! Whom does [this kami] not shower with his blessings? The poet-​monk Saigyō wrote: ‘I know not what lies within, but my tears overflow with gratitude.’ Indeed, I too am grateful and my tears too flow, as I behold the ‘awe-​inducing marks of divinity’.21

Baien was less impressed by the Inner Shrine, but still he bowed before ‘Amaterasu Ōnkami’ and made offerings.22 A  century later, in 1855, the afore-​mentioned Kiyokawa Hachirō likewise expressed his fascination for the Outer Shrine, for him the most sacred ‘head shrine’ of the land (Nihon daiichi no on-​sōsha). Kiyokawa’s oshi got him access to the shrine’s main kami hall (Gekū honsha no naka) and, ‘after

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careful inspection’, he concluded it was ‘most precious’ among places.23 An Osaka merchant who came to Ise in spring 1845 is an interesting exception to the rule that pilgrims were moved more by the Outer Shrine.24 He wrote with rare passion about the Inner Shrine and its kami: We battled through a torrential downpour to gain access to the kami’s presence . . . We prostrated ourselves before the kami, the only pilgrims there . . . Gratitude for my faith in the greatest kami in Japan pierced me to the core, and without warning my tears flowed.25

The social history of Edo-​period Ise needs to take account of the shifting character of the Outer and Inner Shrines which reflected the tensions between them. The guidebooks that began to proliferate in the eighteenth century are helpful here. Guidebooks for pilgrims came in different shapes and sizes. Some were little more than crude maps that plotted the trunk roads and junctions directing pilgrims to Ise from, say, Osaka, Kyoto or Edo; they marked up must-​see sites in Yamada and Uji, but offered little by way of commentary. There were also more substantial, illustrated guidebooks written  –​or at least informed  –​by Ise ‘insiders’ for the literate pilgrim. The pioneering guidebook was the Ise sangū annai ki, published in two illustrated volumes by an unnamed resident of Yamada in 1707.26 How widely it was disseminated is unclear, but it was printed not only in Yamada, but also in Kyoto, Osaka and Edo. A second edition appeared in 1739 and a third in 1807, attesting to its authority and its appeal. Annai ki’s author describes the Ise Shrines as the grandest in the realm, venerated by all Japanese, high and low. To the power of the Ise kami he attributes the peace that prevails. The Outer Shrine and its kami are supreme; the shrine is nothing less than the Great Origin (daisōhon) of Two-​ Shrine (ryōgū) Shinto; its kami is Amaterasu Toyoke Subeōnkami. This kami is served at the Outer Shrine by Ninigi, Ame no Koyane and Ame no Futodama. All these kami cater to his needs at the express bidding of the Sun Goddess herself.27 Of that kami, the author reveals little other than that her full title is Amaterasu Subeōnkami. Her virtue is inferior to Amaterasu Toyoke Subeōnkami, and the shrine where she is worshipped –​here referred to as Isuzu no Miya –​is evidently subordinate to the Outer Shrine.28 The author of Ise sangū saiken taizen, published in Kyoto in 1766, offers alternative narratives of the two shrines, but takes a similar stance on their relative merits. Saiken taizen’s illustrations of the shrines’ compounds are suggestive here. The Outer Shrine is emblazoned with the legend ‘Daijingū’ or Great Shrine, while the Inner Shrine illustration is legend-​less.29 The narrative accompanying the illustrations identifies the Inner Shrine as nothing less than ‘the origin of Shinto’ (Shintō no sōgen). It tells of Amaterasu’s gifting the three imperial treasures of mirror, sword and jewel to her grandson Ninigi, and their transfer from her grandson down to the present emperor. This ‘wondrous fact unheard of in foreign lands’, nonetheless, pales before the mystery of the Outer Shrine. Its kami are Kunitokotachi, divine ancestor of terrestrial lords, and Ame no Minakanushi, divine ancestor of terrestrial vassals. Together they constitute the kami-​body of the

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great qi of heaven and earth (tenchi no ikki no shintai), and are known collectively as Toyouke Kotaijingū. These kami guard the imperial line, ensure peace in the land and guarantee abundant harvests. They constitute a ‘profound mystery’ that may not be divulged to pilgrims.30 The author of Saiken taizen urges pilgrims to worship at both the Outer and Inner Shrines.31 A generation later, in 1797, the Ise sangū meisho zue (Guide to famous places for pilgrims travelling to Ise) appeared. In the detail of its narrative and the quality of its illustrations, the Meisho zue surpassed all predecessors. Its author, Akisato Ritō, was Kyoto-​born and bred; its illustrator was the Osaka-​based Shitomi Kangetsu. The book was published in Kyoto and proliferated widely. Akisato used multiple informants of uncertain identity, and adduced a range of sources to construct his Ise narrative. He introduces the Outer Shrine as Watarai no Miya and its kami as Toyouke Kōtaijin, the Imperial Great Kami Toyouke. The priest who told him that the Outer Shrine was ‘an unfathomable mystery’ fails to impress him.32 He found one source that designated the Outer Shrine as a ‘great mausoleum’ on account of its enshrinement of the kami Ame no Koyane; another accounted for the Outer Shrine’s greatness by reading the name Toyouke as a compound of toyo ‘abundance’ and uke ‘creation’. Our author finds neither persuasive. Perhaps he was aware that, just a generation before, Saiken taizen had identified the Outer Shrine kami as the creator kami Kunitokotachi and Ame no Minakanushi. Akisato made no reference to either kami, however. Meisho zue introduces the Inner Shrine as Naikū and its kami as Tenshō Kōtaijin. Drawing on the Nihon shoki myths, it reprises at length the narrative of Amaterasu’s birth and her flight into the Heavenly Rock-​Cave, but leaves no space to narrate her dispatch of Ninigi to earth. Akisato is aware of theories that Amaterasu is the sun, and that she is the ancestral kami of all emperors starting with Jinmu.33 His conclusion, though, is that prevailing theories are incompatible, and that human attempts to make sense of them are doomed. He hesitates to pass judgement on the virtues of one shrine over the other; he invites the reader, rather, to share his perplexity.34 What impresses him is the devotion of Ise pilgrims. They are to the shrines, he writes, as filial children are to their parents.35 These pilgrims’ guides reflect conflicting theories about the Outer and Inner Shrines and their kami that were current in the eighteenth century. Prior to the Edo period, the sorts of theological commentary evident here were taboo; they were secrets closely guarded by Outer Shrine priests. As noted earlier, in the seventeenth century men like Deguchi Nobuyoshi rediscovered them and sought to have them widely read and discussed.36 Their disclosure in popular pilgrims’ guides is, in a sense, an extension of Deguchi’s endeavours to render them public knowledge. When the author of the Annai ki celebrated Amaterasu Toyoke Subeōnkami as the Outer Shrine kami, and defined the shrine itself as the ‘Great Origin of Two-​ Shrine Ryōgū Shintō’, he reprised for a wider audience the Outer Shrine position as argued in a series of lawsuits with Inner Shrine oshi a generation earlier: namely, that the Outer and Inner Shrines and their kami were fundamentally one.37 As we saw in Chapter 6, Outer Shrine oshi (first Kubokura and then Mikkaichi) lost these

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disputes, and their theories were discredited. The Annai ki appears, in this light, as a bold attempt to re-​energize them for popular consumption.38 The author of Ise sangū saiken taizen identified Toyouke Kōtaijingū with Kunitokotachi and with Ame no Minakanushi, and in so doing he too staked a claim for the supremacy of the Outer Shrine over the Inner Shrine. These kami associations had their roots in medieval Ise theology, as we saw, and more immediately in Deguchi’s (re)discovery of that theology in the 1650s. In situating Kunitokotachi as ‘the divine ancestor of terrestrial lords’, and Ame no Minakanushi as ‘the divine ancestor of terrestrial vassals’, the author was drawing on arguments of scholars as different as Yoshimi Yukikazu and Hashimura Masanobu, both active in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. For Yoshimi, Kunitokotachi was no longer the God of Great Origin but a human being, the illustrious ancestor of the Imperial House no less.39 Saiken taizen appears to follow this line, even as it stresses that Kunitokotachi and Ame no Minakanushi constituted, as ‘Toyouke Kōtaijingū’, the kami-​body of the great qi of heaven and earth. This cosmic interpretation of the Outer Shrine kami, which recalls the theological position of the Outer Shrine scholar Hashimura, is of course an assertion of Outer Shrine superiority over the Inner Shrine.40 It is difficult to know what, if anything, pilgrims can have made of these readings of the shrines and their kami.41 Indeed, by the time Ise sangū meisho zue was published in the 1790s, new theories were doing the rounds, most notably, those penned by Motoori Norinaga. Norinaga rejected vigorously what he called ‘medieval aberrant theories’, and endeavoured to recover the true nature of Amaterasu and Toyouke through close reading of classical texts. His conclusion was that Toyouke was a goddess of food, whose function was to serve the supreme kami Amaterasu at the Inner Shrine.42 In its omission of any reference to Kunitokotachi, Meisho zue was perhaps drawing on this evolving intellectual context. Anyway, as we saw, its author perused all evidence put before him, only to confess his confusion. Norinaga’s position fanned tensions between Yamada and Uji. His theories, which carried the weight of his reputation, were particularly threatening to priests at the Outer Shrine. After all, he reduced their kami from a cosmic, creator deity to a maiden in the service of Amaterasu. It is little surprise that this theory led the Outer Shrine to take legal action. In 1798, Outer Shrine oshi learned that a student of Norinaga, one Sonodanishi Moritsura, had been distributing copies of a work promoting those theories. He insisted moreover that kagura dance should be performed only for Amaterasu, and was a rite ‘peculiar to the Inner Shrine’. This was especially galling since income from kagura performances made up a sizeable proportion of Outer Shrine oshi income. But when the Yamada aldermen filed a suit with the Yamada magistrate, the latter sought to stifle further controversy by banning all oshi from discussing the two shrines with patrons (danna) in the provinces, and from divulging any of the shrines’ ‘secrets’.43 As one might expect, this was no long-​term solution to tensions between the Outer and Inner Shrines. In 1803, there was a clash between the agents of two oshi who were working parishes in Himeji in central Japan:  Uebe Sakon of Yamada

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Figure 7.2  Oshi performing kagura in Yamada. Source: Ise daidaikagura zu (Saigū Rekishi Hakubutsukan).

and Shirahige Dayū of Uji.44 This incident rumbled on until 1827, making it the longest of the many oshi disputes of Edo Japan. Further incidents erupted in 1825 and again in 1834.45 It would be tedious to rehearse the detail but, as before, the Outer Shrine oshi ended up on the losing side. At the heart of the matter was a contest for power and influence, principally over patronage. Patrons, cultivated in the provinces by oshi over generations, were all potential pilgrims, and pilgrims were the foundation of oshi livelihoods and of the flourishing of Yamada and Uji.

Ise Abroad: Oshi and Their Agents Earlier, we identified the Outer and Inner Shrines and their contested relationship on the one hand, and the epicentral Furuichi on the other, as distinctive early modern Ise spaces. One should, perhaps, point to the oshi inns as a third defining space. They came in different sizes and offered different standards of service, to be sure, but many pilgrim-​diarists attest to the fact that the oshi inn was essential to the total Ise experience.46 Oshi provided many services, but their staging of the sacred kagura dance in the inns’ Kagura halls and the serving of sumptuous feasts were Ise highlights (Figure 7.2). As Edo pilgrim Mori Jizaemon found in New Year 1807, the oshi offered a unique combination of sacred and sensual. Mori and his party stayed at the inn of Yamada oshi, Ryū Dayū.47 They were served two bowls of rice with soup, rice wine and red snapper before the kagura dance on the morning

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of New Year’s eve. There was an interval, when akameshi, soups and more fish and wine appeared. The kagura duly resumed, only to be followed by more helpings of rice and fish, sushi and two types of soup. Mori and his party enjoyed yet more fish, and some four litres of sake, before they were received in formal audience by the great oshi, Ryū Dayū himself.48 This was not the extent of Ryū Dayū’s hospitality. His agents (tedai) had met Mori and companions at the Miyagawa River; they provided palanquins to ferry them round the shrines and to the major sights, including Mount Asama and Futami (Figure 7.3). Finally, the agents saw them off at the bank of the Miyagawa at the end of their five-​day pilgrimage. Ryū Dayū was one of Yamada’s wealthiest oshi,

Figure 7.3  The pleasures of pilgrimage: Mount Asama and Futami. Source: Ise sangū meisho ichiran, 1862 (Iida Yoshiki collection).

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and Mori Jizaemon was a future village-​head whose status perhaps earned him and his party privileges not otherwise available. Nonetheless, the diaries of many pilgrims attest to a reception of a sort they had never before experienced. Diaries like Mori’s underline the import of the oshi-​pilgrim relationship to the total Ise experience. What is much less clear is how the oshi maintained their connections with pilgrims; how, more fundamentally, they worked the provinces. After all, the oshi-​pilgrim relationship neither began nor ended in Ise. It was nurtured in the provinces by agents of the oshi. The constant flow of pilgrims into Ise, generation after generation, was the outcome of nothing so much as the oshi’s provincial endeavour. We need to know much more than we do of the oshi-​pilgrim relationship, and how it evolved. Here we explore evidence as it relates to the activities of three oshi families in three different regions of Japan:  the Miyajiri Santō in Ōmura domain on the west coast of Kyushu; the Uji Asōguchi house whose parish comprised patron households in Zenkōji in Shinano Province in central Japan; and the Mikkaichi who were active across the Tsugaru Straits in the northernmost island of Ezo (in addition to swathes of central and northeast Japan). In all cases, evidence is fragmentary, but it can serve at least to convey something of the extraordinary energy of the oshi and their regional reach in the Edo period. From as early 1561, it seems, the Miyajiri Santō were distributing Ise amulets to the domain lord of Ōmura and his vassals. By the early seventeenth century, they enjoyed exclusive rights of distribution in Ōmura; no other oshi were active there, it seems. The Miyajiri Santō, for their part, had patrons elsewhere in Japan, but nowhere did they dispense more amulets than in Ōmura. The relationship between the Ōmura lord and Miyajiri Santō was close. By the 1620s, for example, the lord was dispatching an emissary to Ise annually to pray for his family’s well-​ being; the emissary lodged in the Miyajiri Santō inn in Yamada. In the 1650s, the lord specifically requested Miyajiri Santō to distribute amulets throughout the domain of Ōmura. This unprecedented request was in response to the discovery in 1657 of a clandestine community of Christians in Ōmura.49 If villagers refused Ise amulets, they would be deemed suspect; if they accepted the amulets, faith in the Ise kami would take root and ensure Christianity withered. It is not clear how successful this strategy was in cultivating popular belief in Ise. Mid-​eighteenth-​ century records show that Miyajiri Santō was distributing amulets to some 9,500 households in Ōmura;50 this may have been no more than 50 per cent of the total number of households in the domain.51 Be that as it may, the head of the Miyajiri Santō family travelled from Yamada to Ōmura at the end of every year, armed with amulets, calendars and gifts. Like most oshi, he employed an agent to work for him, too.52 From the eighteenth century, both oshi and agent seem to have stayed in the Ōmura ‘Ise house’ (Iseya), a compound by the castle that accommodated lodgings and a shrine. This was a Shinmei shrine, dedicated that is to the Ise kami. It was an early Edo-​period creation, subsequently rebuilt and relocated several times. Miyajiri Santō headed to Ōmura to preside over the rebuilding rites and the transfer of the kami to the new

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shrine. He commissioned Ise artisans to build the kami body containers, the pivot post and the treasures that would decorate the shrine. On one notable occasion, he even procured timber originally designated for use in the last Ise sengū.53 Two moments in the 1820s hint that the special relationship between oshi and the domain lord endured. In 1824, when the Miyajiri Santō residence in Yamada was razed by fire, the family head turned to the Ōmura for help and immediately received donations of 150 pieces of silver from the lord and his vassals.54 Then, in 1829, the Ōmura lord admitted Miyajiri Santō to his vassal band. Miyajiri Santō was to remain resident in Yamada, and he continued to visit Ōmura yearly with his amulets and calendars, but in his new (and presumably stipended) position as Ōmura vassal he was now to offer up prayers on his lord’s behalf at the Ise Shrines.55 For the past 200 years, the lord had dispatched an emissary; henceforth, that responsibility devolved on Miyajiri Santō. The Uji Asōguchi were an Inner Shrine oshi house working the territory of the Zenkōji temple in Shinano Province. In 1786, the family head, Hisaoyu, undertook a five-​month parish tour.56 His purpose was to announce to patrons his assumption of the family headship.57 Zenkōji was, of course, one of the great Buddhist temples in the land, and a popular site of pilgrimage in its own right.58 Uji Asōguchi’s danna were concentrated on Zenkōji land and in villages in neighbouring Matsushiro domain. A late-​eighteenth-​century record put their number at 10,000 households.59 Zenkōji land was nominally supervised by Matsushiro domain, but monks of two Zenkōji sub-​temples ran its day-​to-​day affairs. It was they who came to greet Hisaoyu the day after his dramatic arrival in Zenkōji. Hisaoyu entered Zenkōji territory in a palanquin, clad in formal court attire, with a sizeable escort supplied by the monks. His initial act was to worship at the Shinmei shrine by Zenkōji’s eastern gate. Hisaoyu spent his first fortnight in lodgings near the shrine, entertaining officials from nearby villages, delivering lectures on the Kojiki and other classics, and writing poetry.60 He then paid a formal visit to Zenkōji. Only now, in the middle of the fourth month, did he embark on his parish tours.61 Hisaoyu made five forays in all, the shortest three days, and the longest a fortnight. His strategy was first to visit the village head, at whose residence he would perform a ‘rite of cups’ (sakazukigoto), a formal sharing of wine to consolidate the connections between oshi and village. These rites, he confided to his diary, bored him to distraction, but he knew well that village heads were indispensable to his cause. They handed him ledgers (chōmen) and cash. Ledgers recorded the names of individual danna and their financial contributions. Hisaoyu lodged with yado, men with special responsibility for the care of the oshi and his agent. It was these yado, it seems, who distributed Ise amulets to individual village households, and collected payments. How much personal contact Hisaoyu had with members of the 10,000 households in his parish during those five forays is unclear, but before leaving Zenkōji for home in the eighth month, he seems to have met officials from most villages where he had danna.62 Hisaoyu entrusted annual amulet distribution to his agent, but he returned in person to Zenkōji in 1802 and again in 1803. His purpose was to raise cash. Hisaoyu’s personal extravagance had landed him in serious debt. In Ise, he

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Figure 7.4  The Mikkaichi Inn, Yamada.

Source: Mikkaichi Dayū Jirō tei in Kikan Ōbayashi 43 tokushū: oshi, 1998.

had been able to ‘mortgage’ more than 2,000 Zenkōji parish households to the Muramatsu Fuji family of oshi. This transaction had raised a loan of 70 ryō, but it was insufficient for his needs. His 1802 and 1803 trips yielded a further loan of 200 ryō. This money was drawn from the accounts of the pious associations known as kō, active in Zenkōji for generations.63 Kō moneys, of course, had been put aside to fund members’ pilgrimages to Ise. Hisaoyu died a year after returning to Ise in 1804, leaving huge debts for his son to manage. How the family survived to the end of the Edo period is unclear, but when statistics were taken in early Meiji, the Uji Asōguchi were still distributing approximately 10,000 amulets per year in and around Zenkōji.64 If oshi power and influence might be measured in terms of danna numbers and geographical reach, the Outer Shrine Mikkaichi house was peerless. Statistics from the 1770s reveal that the parish of the main Mikkaichi house and its lesser branch extended across a huge swathe of Japan northwards from central Honshu up to Tsugaru, and across the Tsugaru straits into the island of Ezo. Patron numbers are staggering: the main house had agents serving some 354,000 households ever year; the branch family was much smaller with 40,000. The Mikkaichi also had some twenty daimyo on their books.65 The scale of their wealth is evident not least in the grandeur of the Mikkaichi inn, which occupied 1,800 tsubo (c. 6,000 m2) and could accommodate over a hundred pilgrims on a single night (Figure 7.4). We know too little of how they operated, but there are some clues to their method in Matsumae on the island of Ezo. Mikkaichi agent Ishikawa Kōnoshin crossed the Tsugaru straits and landed in Matsumae, Ezo, in the fifth month of 1802 to cater to the 7,000 households

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that comprised the Mikkaichi parish there.66 His first action was to pray at the Shinmei shrine, his base for the next five months. Shiratori Hinata, the shrine’s resident priest, interceded with domain authorities and arranged for a first Ise amulet to be enshrined in the castle’s Great Reception Hall. Ishikawa was some time later admitted to an audience with the Matsumae lord, when he presented his Ise gifts: a personal amulet of the most efficacious variety known as ichimando-​barai (‘10,000-​fold purification’), dried bonito and abalone.67 The Shinmei shrine held its annual festival in the sixth month to coincide both with the tsukinami rites held in Ise and, it seems, with the oshi agent’s anticipated visit. The festival was a domain-​sponsored event; shrine buildings were adorned with hangings and illuminated with lanterns that bore the Matsumae family crest. The festival involved shrine priests’ reciting the Nakatomi harae purification formula and other prayers 5,000 times over a period of seventeen days. And there was celebratory kagura and tonago –​a dance performed in Ise’s tsukinami rites –​as well as sumo wrestling. These were the crowd-​pullers.68 Only now, it seems, did the distribution of amulets begin. Of the logistics we know little, except that Ishikawa was dependent on support from shrine priest Shiratori. By the tenth month, when Ishikawa headed back to Ise, he had overseen the distribution of some 7,000 amulets. According to one estimate, this generated between forty and fifty ryō in revenue for the Mikkaichi.69 By the latter half of the eighteenth century, thousands of oshi agents were criss-​crossing Japan, dispensing amulets, calendars and souvenirs, cultivating enthusiasm for Ise, and tempting people with the pleasures of pilgrimage. Ise oshi were active in every domain in the land, and every domain lord was served by at least one oshi. Generations of Tokugawa shoguns in Edo were served by the Haruki family of Outer Shrine oshi, and the Yamamoto family of the Inner Shrine.70 Emperors, for their part, received amulets from the Fujinami, the Kyoto-​ resident family of saishu, and from the Outer Shrine Higaki family of oshi.71 In the 1770s, 479 Outer Shrine oshi were, between them, manufacturing and distributing over four million amulets a year. No statistics are available for the 270 Inner Shrine oshi active at around the same time, but Shinjō Tsunezō has estimated, based on population figures for the late eighteenth century, that 80–​90 per cent of all households in Japan were receiving amulets from one or more Ise oshi every year.72 The examples cited above suggest certain common strategies. Oshi set out to cultivate domain lords –​and Zenkōji monks. And lords were sometimes proactive, as in the Ōmura case, urging the oshi to dispense amulets across the domain. Common to oshi strategy in Ōmura, Zenkōji and Matsumae was the local Shinmei shrine. These shrines, whose origins are rarely clear, stood as visible testament of official support for the oshi and of public devotion to the Ise kami. They served as the headquarters for oshi activity in the domain, and were a place of local Ise worship, too.73 What is intriguingly absent from the records of oshi activity in the provinces is any direct reference to Ise kō. Kō were the ‘pious associations’ –​to use Chamberlain’s term  –​whose members were drawn together by a shared enthusiasm for Ise pilgrimage, and by a need for financial assistance to effect pilgrimage.74 Members

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pooled savings so that all might, in turn, make the otherwise impossibly expensive journey to Ise. These associations were not unique to Ise pilgrimage, of course. There were Ōyama, Fuji, Fushimi Inari, Kōyasan, Zenkōji and Narita san kō, among many others.75 We saw fleeting evidence of such an association in Zenkōji. It was to the Ise kō –​ known there as Eitai kagura kō or ‘Perpetual kagura association’ –​that Hisaoyu turned for a cash loan. The yado with whom he lodged were senior association members, and the village heads he visited probably served as association leaders. It is unclear, however, whether, or to what extent, such associations existed in Ōmura or Matsumae. Perhaps they did not, as there is little evidence that these domains produced Ise pilgrims in significant numbers.76 We anyway need to look elsewhere to evaluate Ise’s pious associations and their operations. There is too little work on this subject, but recent studies by Onodera Atsushi on Higashi Futami village near Akashi on the Inland Sea coast are insightful.77 There were ten Ise kō in Higashi Futami, dating back to the 1680s. They were organized along professional lines, it seems: kō for fishermen, kō for farmers and kō for merchants. There were also two Shinmei shrines in the village: one in the west patronized by five Ise kō; the other five patronised the eastern Shinmei shrine.78 Of the ten kō leaders, two served as ‘Ise houses’ (Iseya) for the whole village. That is, they took charge of annual events, and provided lodgings for the agent of the Ise oshi, Ajiro Dayū.79 The kō drew on two sources of income for its activities: membership fees and rent on fields owned by the kō (known as ‘association fields’ or kōden). There were two main outgoings:  an annual programme of kō-​sponsored events and, of course, Ise pilgrimage. Annual events included a celebratory gathering in the first month of the year, when rent on the kō land was payable. If the kō was sending members to Ise that year, then lots were drawn now to determine which members. There was a day’s pilgrimage to nearby Hiromine Shrine in the third month, and a ‘hoe festival’ or okuwa matsuri in the fifth month. Hoe festivals, common across central Japan, were incidentally an oshi innovation. They involved songs, dances and processions focused on hoe-​like sticks, whose numinous power was said to guarantee abundant harvests and the purging of pests.80 The Iseya also directed the ninth-​month festival of the Shinmei shrine, and the celebrations accompanying the arrival of the oshi in the eleventh month.81 The earliest records of Higashi Futami pilgrimage to Ise date from 1793. In the third month of that year, twenty-​five members of one of the village’s ten pious associations set off for Ise, leaving behind forty-​one of their number. One non-​member was allowed to participate in return for a barrel of sake.82 It appears that Higashi Futami’s pious associations sent pilgrims to Ise not annually, but typically every five or six years, with different associations participating in different years. The villagers who left for Ise in 1793 drew on savings of over 1,000 kan. The total cost of that pilgrimage was a little over 700 kan. The single greatest sum, of 202 kan, was paid to the oshi for the group’s lodgings and food in Yamada, while ‘entertainments’ accounted for another 98 kan. The rest went on travel expenses.83 A  later pilgrimage in 1798, again involving twenty-​five

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members of an association, is interesting for its inclusion of sixteen women from the village. There were numerous regional variations on the Higashi Futami model. So, for example, in 1825 the heads of five different villages in the district of Samukawa, north of Shikoku, founded an Ise kō, which they styled Fuki kō, or ‘Pious association for the wealthy and noble’.84 With recruits from ten neighbouring villages, they had a membership of 107. Here, unlike Higashi Futami, a single kō engaged multiple villages. Members paid a joining fee, which the kō used to purchase a plot of land. The income from rent of the land funded their pilgrimages to Ise.85 Samukawa was in the parish of the Outer Shrine oshi Kita Shinzaemon, but sources say nothing of his personal involvement with the kō. The village of Iwakura near Kyoto was like Higashi Futami in having multiple Ise kō, but here they were organized not by profession but by age: 16–​20, 20–​25 and 25–​30. Membership was for males only and all males, on reaching twenty-​ five years, headed off to Ise together.86 On the island of Oki there was an Ise kō that admitted women as full members. It is not clear when the participation of women was sanctioned, but the possible impurity of menstruation had been an issue. On Oki, kō regulations stipulated that ‘women may be well subject to monthly impediments en route to Ise, but [pilgrimage] is a sign of sincere devotion . . . The kami will accept them, and their travels to Ise will not be in vain’.87 Ise pious associations were set up across Japan, but were concentrated in central provinces. They had a vital role in perpetuating popular enthusiasm for Ise, and at times during the year, they brought Ise tantalizingly close. The arrival of the oshi, or more usually his agent, was one such moment. He came but once a year, bearing amulets, calendars and, of course, Ise gifts aplenty. Kō members typically feted these men on their arrival. The folklorist Inoue Yorihisa reported on an Ise kō in Kyoto where the oshi agent, clad in formal attire, would sit silent and unmoving in the reception room of the Iseya residence for two full days. Kō members came to purchase amulets and calendars, and place money in his offertory box. The third day was then given over to informal merrymaking.88 The pilgrims’ departure and return were other moments of great consequence. Participants in a given year’s pilgrimage were dispatched to Ise with much ceremony and with prayers for their well-​being in their absence. They returned with gifts and stories, often transformed by their experience. Inoue cited the case of an Ise kō in Shūgakuin, northeast Kyoto, where members met pilgrims en route and escorted them back into the village on horseback, before instigating celebrations in the pilgrims’ households.89 It is impossible to understand the phenomenon of Ise pilgrimage without taking due account of these pious associations. They constituted the local link in a chain that joined villagers, and urban dwellers, to the pleasures of the Ise pilgrimage. The associations, and of course the oshi and their agents, all played a vital part in generating a yearning for Ise across Japan. This was a yearning manifest not only in annual pilgrimages, but also in the extraordinary cases of mass pilgrimage that erupted in 1705, 1771 and 1830. These pilgrimages engaged millions.

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Popular Imaginings In the final section of this chapter, we consider the multiple ways in which Ise was imagined and reimagined in Edo Japan. We have already noted that pilgrims saw Ise as a place of prayer: they prayed at the Outer and Inner Shrines and the clusters of mini-​shrines attached to them; they offered up kagura dance in the inns of the oshi. Pilgrims thought of Ise as a place of pleasure too. We have underscored the importance of Furuichi in this regard. One should add to Ise’s inventory of pleasures the stunning vistas on offer to pilgrims on Takakurayama, at the viewing platform on Mount Asama and down on the coast in Futami. Here, though, we examine two quite different and conflicting imaginings: pilgrims’ imagining of Ise as a place of miraculous happenings, and intellectuals and activists imagining Ise as a public place of imperial politics. Hikosuke was a day labourer. He was out cutting wood in the forests of the Kiso Mountains in the summer of 1702 when a tree fell on him and broke his back, leaving him crippled. At New Year 1705, an old man appeared to him in a dream urging him to head for Ise and seek divine help; after all, it was for the forthcoming Ise sengū in 1709 that Hikosuke had been cutting wood. So, with wooden clogs on his hands and horseshoes of straw to protect his knees, he crawled his way to Ise. When he prayed at the Outer Shrine, his back unlocked and his right leg straightened. He reached the Inner Shrine, prayed and feeling returned to his left leg. His recovery was complete, and he was able to walk home from Ise.90 Thus begins the Ise daijingū zoku shin’iki (Further record of miraculous happenings at the Great Shrines of Ise). It is an extraordinary collection of miracle stories compiled by Outer Shrine priest Watarai Hironori at the end of 1705. That unprecedented year saw over three million pilgrims head to Ise, and it marks a pivotal moment in the social history of the site.91 Ise was not just a place of pilgrimage on a scale never seen before in Japanese history, but also now a place of miracles. The blessings of the Ise kami enabled the lame to walk and the blind to see, and even the dead were restored to life. More than half the stories in Watarai Hironori’s collection featured men and boys of low social status, such as labourers and servants; the remainder featured women and girls. These were the very people excluded from the pious associations and who, in normal years, had no access to Ise. These and other stories proved the Ise kami made no distinction between pilgrims on the basis of gender, class, age or means. Ise was a wondrous place where everyday status distinctions ceased to matter. Indeed, the Ise kami punished any who would stop the powerless from making a pilgrimage. Maruya Kurobei from Kyoto, for example, suffered ‘divine paralysis’ for standing in the way of a servant hoping to head to Ise.92 Ise, in 1705, was a place transformed. Innkeepers, merchants and peasants offered pilgrims free accommodation and sustenance, dispensed them cash, replaced their footwear, and tended to their wounds. They even offered free palanquin rides and guided tours to the Outer and Inner Shrines. Ise amulets played a vital role in these and other miracle stories, revealing a numinous power not evident in regular years. A  woman from Sakamoto at the

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foot of Mount Hiei boarded a boat with her son to cross Lake Biwa en route for Ise. She accidentally dropped her son in the lake and he drowned. In her anguish she prayed, and then an extraordinary thing happened. From the depths of the lake arose a hirsute turtle, and on the back of the turtle was her son. When she offered prayers of thanks, the turtle transformed itself into an Ise amulet.93 A man beat a servant girl when she returned from an illicit pilgrimage to Ise. In his anger, he cast into the fire the amulet she had brought back for him. That amulet metamorphosed into a huge snake that wrapped itself around the central pillar of the house and glared at him till he repented.94 The oshi were, no doubt, the principal tellers of these healing tales, of Ise as a place beyond status, and of amulets’ numinous power. They had most to gain from a surge in pilgrim numbers, after all. The 1705 pilgrimage was in part a response to the circulation of such tales. Of the dynamics involved we know little, but tales once told must have done much to nurture a yearning for Ise among common people in the years that followed. The tales were remembered and handed on, and they helped situate Ise in the imagination as a place of wonder. Ise guidebooks and pilgrims’ diaries in the years after 1705 make no mention of miraculous events, however, and it is as if the miraculous powers of the place quickly receded. Two generations later, however, they resurfaced with a vengeance. In 1771, some three million pilgrims descended on Ise once more. This was the year in which the phrase okage mairi, ‘pilgrimage of thanksgiving’, took root. There was much to be thankful for, as the road to Ise opened up for men, women and children of all ages and all social classes. Mori Kosen, resident of Matsusaka northwest of Yamada, recorded his observations of the mass phenomenon in his diary, Ise mairi okage no nikki.95 Day in, day out, he tracked pilgrims passing through his town. What interested him was their provenance. In the third and fourth months, he discovered, it was Kyoto and the home provinces, but in the fifth month, pilgrims were arriving from Osaka, Mikawa, Nagoya, Hyōgo, Gifu, Akashi, Okayama, Awaji and the island of Shikoku. In the sixth month, he encountered pilgrims from Izu, Edo and Hitachi to the east; and Shimonoseki and north Kyushu to the west. In the seventh month, pilgrims were coming from across central Japan, and now from the southernmost regions of Kyushu. Mori’s diary conveys the extraordinary magnetic force generated by the Ise Shrines, as they pulled in young and old, male and female, high and low from across the land. As for their motivation, Mori is content to record what he learned from a pilgrim. Around the time of the seasonal festival in the third month of 1771, a large group of girls from a village in Tanabe, Tango Province, suddenly departed on pilgrimage. They were the beneficiaries of an act of kindness. A wealthy man in Tanabe had saved 100 ryō to fund his own pilgrimage. Illness prevented him going, so he offered to fund the pilgrimage of any who would go in his stead. Word got around, and many, like the group of girls, took to the road; in time, the man recovered. Mori understood the mass phenomenon to have been triggered by this act of kindness and the miraculous recovery it effected.96 What matters here is that millions of people across vast swathes of Japan were once more lifted out of the everyday, and drawn towards Ise in the expectation of wondrous events. People left

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home and work without formally taking their leave; en route, many experienced acts of charity and saw much that defied belief.97 When the mass phenomenon came round for a third time in 1830, it was on a scale that dwarfed all previous pilgrimages. Reliable accounts put total pilgrim numbers at a staggering five million  –​fully one-​sixth of the population.98 The trigger, at least as understood by Minowa Zairoku, the compiler of the Bunsei shin’iki (Collection of miracle stories in the Bunsei era), was innocuous enough. A group of twenty or thirty schoolchildren in Sako village in Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku, decided one day in the third month of 1831 to lay down their brushes and books and head for Ise.99 This apparently spontaneous act created a ripple effect, which spread the length and breadth of Japan. This account was good enough for Minowa, but others insisted that natural disasters and fires in 1828 and 1829 had generated a sense of doom, which yielded to joy at the abundant harvests of 1830. These events got people praying, and their minds turned to Ise. This was only natural given the Ise sengū in 1829.100 Once again, Ise was transformed into a place of miraculous power. This time the kami deployed a new technique to summon the faithful:  they caused Ise amulets to fall from the sky.101 All over Japan, people reported this extraordinary phenomenon. It happened in Himeji, where an amulet fell between two houses, leading to a dispute between the householders over its ownership. The matter was quickly settled when the amulet flew up into the air and divided miraculously into two.102 Also in Himeji, a fire broke out in a house abandoned by a family who had headed off to Ise. The fire threatened the castle itself, but the flames died of their own accord. It transpired that the house had been showered with Ise amulets.103 Amulets sometimes arrived in unconventional ways. Two cockerels flew into a village in Tanba Province, bearing Ise amulets in their beaks. Inevitably, this event was the prompt for a pilgrimage.104 There are several stories of amulets landing on or near the homes of sceptical Shin Buddhists. When this happened in Kawaguchi Province, the Shin follower tried to burn the amulet, only for his own clothes to catch fire. The terrible burns he suffered were taken as divine punishment, and prompted many fellow Buddhists to set off for Ise.105

Bakumatsu Politics: Imperializing Ise In the early to middle decades of the nineteenth century, just as Ise was manifesting to the realm its powers of enchantment, a very different way of imagining Ise was taking shape in more intellectual circles. It had nothing to do with Ise’s flourishing as a pilgrimage site: as a place of prayer, pleasures or miracles. This was, rather, the imagining of Ise as a ritual site with a vital place in the public realm: a place of imperial practice that gave meaning to Japan in a time of dire crisis. The arrival of first foreign gunboats, then foreign emissaries, followed by the signing of treaties of friendship and then trade, triggered the crisis. This sequence of events quickly undermined bakufu authority, leading to political interventions by not only the

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great domains but also the imperial court. Indeed, this new politicization of the court enabled –​or rather demanded –​a re-​imagining of Ise. Ise was, from the start of the early modern period, a state shrine; it always had a presence in the public realm. The early modern Japanese state comprised both the military bakufu in Edo with its law-​making councils staffed by loyal daimyo, and the imperial court in Kyoto with its bevies of courtiers. Ise was one of a number of sacred sites actively cultivated by both wings of the early modern state. The bakufu funded Ise to the tune of 6,000 koku per year; the court, for its part, appointed Ise priests and granted them court rank (with bakufu sanction). The involvement of bakufu and court in certain Ise rites gave to them a distinctly public quality. The sengū was prominent among them. The shogun underwrote the successive rites of rebuilding, and the emperor  –​nominally at least  –​fixed the ritual schedule. Both bakufu and court dispatched their own tribute-​bearing emissaries to Ise to mark the transfer of the Ise kami to their new shrines. Every year at New Year, moreover, the shogun dispatched a personal envoy to Ise. The emperor, for his part, dispatched emissaries to Ise annually in the ninth month for the kanname rite, the greatest event in Ise’s ritual calendar.106 This essentially public quality of the Ise Shrines (and of select other sacred sites, too) intensified as Japan’s political crises deepened after the arrival of Commodore Perry and his black ships in 1853. The Ise Shrines came to assume a central role in the state’s search for a solution. Emperor Kōmei responded to Perry’s arrival by instructing priests and monks at seven shrines –​first among them was Ise –​ and seven temples to recite seventeen days of prayers for ‘harmony across the world, peace in the realm, the durability of the imperial line and happiness for the people’. Later in the year, he had Ise priests, and priests at twenty-​one other shrines, recite prayers once more. This activity was court-​initiated and bakufu-​ approved. Hereafter, it became the practice for the emperor –​always with bakufu sanction –​to commission priests in Ise and elsewhere to recite prayers every first, fifth and ninth month; increasingly those prayers were aimed at achieving military victory over foreign barbarians. In 1855, the bakufu sanctioned the emperor’s dispatch of personal emissaries to Ise.107 The bakufu had now signed treaties with foreign powers, opening three ports to foreign vessels. Devastating earthquakes and comets in the night skies in that year contributed to a sense of doom; the polity, it seemed, was fast fragmenting. The Ise kami were being drawn into matters of the realm as never before, no longer as protectors of shogun and emperor together, but increasingly as divine symbols of imperial authority that were anti-​bakufu. In the first weeks of 1858, for example, the bakufu sought imperial sanction to sign commercial treaties with the foreign powers. The emperor refused, insisting trade would bring shame on the imperial ancestors, especially his great ancestor Amaterasu. As he demanded the bakufu consult the daimyo once more, so he declared his personal intention to dispatch senior courtiers to Ise to pray for peace. He would appoint as emissaries Tokudaiji Kin’ito and Ichijō Tadaka, two close anti-​bakufu allies in a deeply divided court. Regent Kujō Hisatada composed the prayers in accordance with established court practice. The text of

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the prayers reflected the regent’s pro-​bakufu disposition, and so Kōmei secretly doctored them, the better to reflect his own anti-​foreign obsessions. It was the doctored version that Tokudaiji and Ichijō took with them to Ise in the sixth month of that year.108 An unprecedented amount of (secret) ritual activity accompanied this new articulation of the imperial will.109 On the night of the twenty-​second of that month, the emperor dressed himself in formal court garb before he entered the palace garden to face Ise. There he recited the prayers he had composed for barbarian expulsion. He then proceeded to the naishidokoro, the palace shrine dedicated to Amaterasu, to recite those prayers once more. He performed this ritual activity nightly until his emissaries returned on the twenty-​fifth of the month.110 Knowledge of the emperor’s ritual activity spread quickly. Daimyo throughout the realm knew of the emperor’s fears that foreign trade would offend the Ise kami; samurai activists were aware of it too. Yoshida Shōin made a point of praising the emperor for adhering to the will of the Ise kami, but the most striking development in 1858 appeared in a manifesto for the overthrow of the bakufu, penned by the activist Maki Izumi. Maki wrote, in his Taimuki, that revolution was to begin with an imperial summons for all subjects to assemble in Kyoto. From there the emperor would lead his army first to the Ise Shrines to inform the kami of his intentions; next, he would proceed to Atsuta Shrine to venerate the sacred sword there. He would finally take his forces east to destroy the bakufu. Maki, who presented his manifesto to samurai from Chōshū at the end of 1858, was the first, it seems, to advocate an imperial progress to Ise. For Maki this was a natural enough evolution. After all, the emperor had in recent years commissioned prayers at Ise; he had dispatched emissaries there; now, he would progress there himself. Maki was, however, indulging in a great fantasy (taimu) far in advance of its time: there would, for now at least, be no revolution and no Ise progress. In 1863, though, the idea resurfaced with a vengeance. The year 1863 was arguably the most dramatic in the long life of the Tokugawa bakufu. In that year, the fourteenth shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi, made an historic progress to Kyoto. This was the first time in 230 years that a shogun had left Edo castle and entered that city. Emperor Kōmei received him in audience in the palace, not as head of Japan’s military government, but as an imperial subject. This ceremonial event transformed the relationship between emperor and shogun forever, and had a profound effect on the state’s relationship with Ise and other sacred sites. Immediately after humiliating Iemochi, the emperor embarked on his own historic progress, to the nearby Lower and Upper Kamo Shrines, with the shogun in tow. His purpose was to display to the realm the new power relationship between emperor and shogun, and to seek divine help in achieving his personal goal: the expulsion of barbarians from Japan. This was, incidentally, the first time since 1626 that an emperor had set foot outside the court compound –​except to flee the ravages of fire. The emperor later launched a second barbarian-​expelling mission, this time to the Iwashimizu Shrine south of Kyoto.111 The emperor’s authority and his political will were plain for all to see. The bakufu, buckling under pressure from the court, announced its intention to expel the barbarians from

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Japan early in the fifth month of 1863, in full knowledge that this was militarily and politically impossible. The shogun had been scheduled to arrive in Kyoto on fourth day of the third month, but the emperor arranged for a party of emissaries, the Ise saishu Fujinami Noritada, along with courtiers Yanagihara Mitsunaru and Hashimoto Saneyana, to leave the city for Ise on this very day. The court made it clear the emissaries would not yield to the shogun’s party, and Iemochi was forced to delay his arrival till the fifth. The emissaries’ purpose was to convey to the Ise kami the emperor’s wish that they might yet stir up a storm and destroy the barbarian fleets. This duty the emissaries duly performed on the night of the eighth. The emissaries were to remain in Ise to see to the defence of the Outer and Inner Shrines, and to implement a series of reforms. Imperial emissaries remained in Ise for a full six months. Ise was now on the minds of many, and this was the political context in which an imperial progress to Ise resurfaced. As articulated in 1863 by anti-​bakufu activists from Chōshū domain, inspired again by Maki Izumi, the progress would be the dramatic climax of an emperor-​led expedition through the home provinces from the palace to the mausoleum of the first emperor, Jinmu, and then to Kasuga shrine in Nara. The emperor would convene a military council there to determine military strategy, before leading his army of loyal vassals to place his plans before the Ise kami.112 Emperor Kōmei was not privy to discussions about the expedition, it seems, and such intelligence as reached him made him fearful. There was no keener advocate than he of ridding Japan of the barbarians, and he may well have wished to progress to Ise. He had no desire, though, to destroy the bakufu especially as the bakufu seemed increasingly anxious to do his bidding. On the thirteenth day of the eighth month, the emperor issued an historic rescript declaring his intention to progress to Ise. No sooner was the rescript in the public domain, though, than the emperor confided his profound anxieties to a trusted courtier.113 It was in response to these anxieties that the domain armies of Satsuma and Aizu warriors took joint action. On the eighteenth, they launched a major offensive in Kyoto that swept Chōshū warriors and their radical courtier allies from the city. As a result, Emperor Kōmei’s Ise progress never materialized. However, the emissaries he had dispatched to Ise earlier in the year, Yanagihara Mitsunaru and Hashimoto Saneyana, were even now plotting reforms there that foreshadowed the dramatic events of the early Meiji years. Here it must suffice to observe the main thrust of their endeavour. Yanagihara and Hashimoto set out to establish that in Ise imperial authority was supreme; that Ise was, in brief, a public, imperial site. Naturally enough, the emissaries’ first target was the military class. No longer would shogunal envoys, daimyo or indeed Yamada magistrates be escorted into Yamada or into the compounds of the Outer or Inner Shrines. They might still be admitted to the shrines, but only if wearing formal court garb (kanpuku).114 Yanagihara and Hashimoto had common pilgrims in their sights, too: no longer might they enter the tamagushi gates of either shrine.115

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The incumbent Yamada magistrate, Akiyama Masamitsu, died while Yanagihara and Hashimoto were in Ise. Till now the death of a magistrate had been marked with three days of mourning and a ban on all music and noise. To Yanagihara and Hashimoto this practice was ‘the height of disrespect to the emperor’s emissaries’, and they abolished it.116 In the sixth month, they were replaced by courtiers Rokujō Ariosa and Kawabata Kin’akira. The particular targets of these men were the Buddhist presence and Ise’s outcaste communities. They demanded Buddhist temples close gates and silence bells for the duration of major Ise festivals. Pilgrims, they instructed, were at no time to recite sutras or ring bells in Yamada or Uji, nor were monks to tour homes during the summer bon festival, chanting sutras for the dead. The outcaste communities who inhabited the villages of Ushidani and Haiden were now banned from begging in and around the towns of Yamada and Uji; they were to absent themselves from the vicinity of the shrines.117 It is unclear to what extent the reforms initiated by the emperor’s personal emissaries were enforced in 1863. What is clear, though, is that the court had begun to make its presence felt in Ise. Ise’s transformation, from a place where people of all classes might pray, find pleasure and experience the miraculous into an imperial site of unparalleled significance, was underway.

Chapter 8 M EIJI I SE :  A M ATE R ASU’S M AU S OLE UM AND TH E M ODE R N P I LGRI M

The Meiji Revolution of 1868 had an immediate and profound impact on the Outer and Inner Shrines of Ise, and the towns of Yamada and Uji that accommodated them. With little fear of exaggeration, we can say that the Ise we know today was a product of those revolutionary years in the mid-​nineteenth century. The impact came in waves of reforms designed by local priests and local entrepreneurs, and then authorized by the modern state. These reforms reconfigured Ise’s physical spaces, transformed shrine rites and replaced the priests who performed them. The relationship between Ise and secular power was restructured in the process, as Ise developed an entirely new relationship with the state and with the imperial institution. In early modern Japan, Ise had been the most popular site of pilgrimage in the land; after the revolution, it became the modern state’s holiest of holies. Before the revolution, it was the oshi who, to all intents and purposes, had determined the fate and fortunes of both the Ise Shrines and the towns that flourished by them. After 1868, the state assumed sole responsibility for the shrines, transforming them to meet its very modern needs, as they abandoned the towns to their own devices. The agents operating at the forefront of Ise’s Meiji transformation can be identified with relative ease. There were the leaders of the revolution, courtiers like Iwakura Tomomi and Sanjō Sanetomi, and bureaucrats from Chōshū and Satsuma who ran the successive ministries that oversaw the Ise Shrines:  the Council of Kami Affairs (Jingikan), later restructured as the Ministry of Kami Affairs (Jingishō); the Edification Ministry (Kyōbushō); and the Home Ministry (Naimushō) thereafter. Most important of all, perhaps, were the agents active on the ground in Uji and Yamada, working to further the state’s interests. Most prominent among these was Urata Nagatami, a priest at the Inner Shrine, who in pre-​revolutionary times had functioned as an oshi, before finding cause with political activists in the 1860s. After the revolution, Urata was employed by Watarai Prefecture; he worked briefly thereafter for the central government in Tokyo before returning to Ise as assistant chief priest. Urata was almost single-​handedly responsible for the reforms that gave to Ise its modern meanings. By no means was all change effected from above, however. One of the consequences of Ise’s Meiji transformation was the dismantling of Edo-​period oshi networks. These networks, which extended to all corners of

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the realm, depended for their functioning on the oshi, but the oshi were among the modern state’s first victims. Their abolition in 1871 had an immediate and detrimental effect on pilgrim numbers, which in turn had severe implications both for the shrines’ economic viability and, of course, for the economic and cultural thriving of Uji, Yamada and Furuichi. This new situation generated numerous responses. The first response was evident in the struggles of a new generation of Ise priests to reconnect the shrines and their modern meanings to the citizens of post-​revolutionary Japan. A second response was launched independently by local entrepreneurs and the innkeepers of Uji and Yamada, many of whom were erstwhile oshi. They too devised new techniques to entice pilgrims back to Ise. A  third, related response was initiated by the owner of the Bizen’ya, the most successful and famous of Ise’s many teahouses; Ōta Kosaburō was his name. In an unlikely alliance with the Ise Chief Priest, he established an organization called the Shin’enkai or Sacred Garden Society. Its aim was to transform the appearance of Ise and, with it, the possibilities of the modern pilgrims’ experience. The Shin’enkai, as we shall see, left an enduring mark on Ise’s shrine-​scape. In what follows, we  begin by observing and evaluating the state’s dramatic intervention in Ise in the aftermath of the 1868 revolution. We then examine the several re-​engagement strategies deployed by shrine priests, and by Yamada, Uji and Furuichi entrepreneurs; finally, we turn our attention to the activities and the legacy of Ōta’s Shin’enkai.

The Meiji Emperor and the Ise Shrines In 1869, the 16-​year-​old Meiji emperor made a pilgrimage to Ise; it was an epoch-​ making event. In the previous millennium and more of Ise’s illustrious history, no emperor had ever set foot in the Ise Shrines. Reigning emperors worshipped Amaterasu at the naishidokoro shrine in the Kyoto palace, it is true, and, until the reign of Go-​Daigo (r. 1318-​1339), emperors also dispatched daughters to Ise as abstinence priestesses. In the Edo period, indeed, the imperial court’s connection with Ise evolved further. The Tokugawa bakufu sanctioned the dispatch of imperial emissaries to Ise at New Year and again for the kanname rite of the ninth month. An imperial emissary participated in the sengū rites too, and the court bestowed court offices and ranks (kan’i) on priests who served the Outer and Inner Shrines, including the oshi. In the modern period, however, the relationship between emperor and Ise acquired an entirely new proximity. Following his enthronement in autumn 1868, the young Meiji emperor left Kyoto for Edo, now restyled Tokyo or Eastern Capital. He travelled by palanquin along the Tōkaidō Road, and en route rested at the Suzuka barrier. There, he faced Ise and performed an act of worship. This was the emperor’s first personal engagement with his Ise-​enshrined ancestor. In the New Year of 1869, he returned to Kyoto to perform ancestral rites for his deceased father, Emperor Kōmei, and to take Ichijō Haruko for his bride. It was on the return journey to Tokyo that he made his historic pilgrimage to Ise. Chief Priest Kawabe greeted him at the Miyagawa

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Figure 8.1  The Meiji emperor enters the Inner Shrine. Source: Nisei Goseda Hōryū, Hekiga gadai kōshōzu, Meiji Jingū.

River on the eleventh day of the third month, offering to him, as though to a kami, a sakaki branch.1 The emperor stayed over in Yamada and on the twelfth day, clad now in the formal yellow kōrozen robes of the ancient court, he worshipped first at the Outer Shrine before proceeding along the Pilgrims’ Path through Furuichi to the Inner Shrine. There he entered the shrine precinct on a palanquin, alighting at the foot of the stone steps that led up to the compound. He ascended the steps and passed through the outer tamagaki and tamagushi gates (Figure 8.1). He purified himself, donned the yukatsura headgear of a high priest, and proceeded on through the bangaki and mizugaki gates. At the foot of the wooden steps that rose to the main kami hall, he stopped and washed his hands. He knelt and made offerings of tamagushi, informing his ancestor, the Sun Goddess, of the establishment of the new imperial government. Leaving behind him gifts of gold, white silk, silk floss and flax, he set off again to complete his overland journey to Tokyo.2

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The boy emperor did not visit Ise of his own volition, of course. His pilgrimage was planned and produced by the courtier Iwakura Tomomi and leaders from Chōshū domain like Kido Takayoshi, who in turn were informed by the new government’s specialists on ritual, religious and ideological matters, most notably, Kamei Koremi and Fukuba Bisei. These men were in Ise with the emperor.3 As we have seen, Chōshū radicals had, in fact, drafted plans for Emperor Meiji’s father, Kōmei, to progress to Ise back in 1863, but the timid Kōmei had declined to go.4 The point about Ise in 1869 was precisely the same as in 1863: to dramatize the emperor’s intimacy with the Sun Goddess through a public display of filial piety, thus locating the source of his authority beyond interrogation. The myth of the emperor’s descent from the Sun Goddess, articulated first in the Nihon shoki and Kojiki in the eighth century, had lain dormant for centuries before its revival and refinement in writings of late-​ eighteenth-​and early-​ nineteenth-​ century nativists like Motoori Norinaga, Ōkuni Takamasa and the later Mito school. The Meiji emperor’s Ise pilgrimage was a piece of imperial theatre that drew on their writings to transform for good the nature of the Ise Shrines and, indeed, the imperial institution. The Meiji emperor visited Ise three times more: in 1872, 1880 and 1905.5 For his son, grandson and, indeed, great-​grandson, the very modern practice of imperial pilgrimage to Ise became a vital technique in the animation of the imperial myth. In the aftermath of the emperor’s Ise visit of 1869, a succession of more or less drastic reforms was implemented at the Inner and Outer Shrines. They were underwritten by the revolutionary government, but their chief architect was the afore-​mentioned Urata Nagatami. Appointed as government commissioner (goyōkakari) after the revolution, Urata launched his vision for modern Ise with proposals to purge the towns of Yamada and Uji of Buddhist influence. His plans resonated with anti-​Buddhist ideas formulated back in 1863, but they were more radical by far.6 Urata found authorization in the new government’s Shinto-​Buddhist Clarification Edicts (shinbutsu hanzenrei) of spring 1868. These historic edicts set out to legislate new categories of sacred space: imperial, public spaces centred on shrines, their kami and priests’ ritual activity, and, quite distinct, private ‘Buddhist’ spaces dominated by temples, buddhas and the ritual activity of temple monks.7 In pre-​revolutionary Japan, these spatial distinctions had simply not existed. The edicts had quickly prompted a first wave of vandalism in Kyoto and Shiga.8 Buddhism mattered to Urata because it was an unwelcome reminder of the historical fact that Japanese emperors  –​including the Meiji emperor’s father  –​ were devout Buddhist adherents, who had entrusted to monks the performance of their ancestral rites. The Buddhist presence, especially in Ise and the imperial palace, questioned the imperial myth and threatened the very legitimacy of the new sovereign.9 Urata first articulated his vision of a Buddhist-​free Ise in a petition to Watarai Prefecture’s governor Hashimoto Saneyana in the summer of 1868.10 He proposed the dismantling of all Buddhist temples, pagodas and halls. Profits from sales of Buddhist buildings, land and treasures might be transferred to the monks, who would then vacate Ise. Urata’s purge began, in fact, shortly hereafter with the closure of the Kōtokuji and Yōtokuji temples. The pace of the purge quickened once

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intelligence reached Ise of the emperor’s imminent pilgrimage.11 There were 258 temples in an around Yamada and Uji in 1868, and 183 of them were closed down or destroyed, the vast majority around the time of the Meiji emperor’s historic visit. There was a process of renaming, too. Place names ‘reeking of Buddhism’ like Jizō Machi, Jōmyōji Monzenmachi and Myōken Machi were wiped from the map and substituted with the new, unfamiliar names of Nakano Machi, Yamato Machi and Onoe Machi.12 The sale of Buddhist images and Buddhist statuary was banned, too. Almost overnight, the towns of Yamada and Uji became –​and they remain to this day –​the Buddhist-​free zones that Urata envisioned. Urata’s sights were already levelled at another impediment to the imperial, public quality of Ise’s modern spaces:  the oshi, those pilgrim-​dedicated priests attached to the Outer and Inner Shrines. As we have seen, there were perhaps as many as 600 oshi houses in Ise, some two-​thirds of which were located in Yamada. The sprawling oshi inns accommodated pilgrims from across the land. Oshi feted them with sumptuous food, and performed solemn kagura dances for their spiritual benefit. They guided them to the sacred and the more secular attractions of Yamada and Uji. These activities brought oshi houses like the Mikkaichi, the Fukushima and the Ryū –​all of them Yamada oshi –​fabulous wealth. In Urata’s eyes, oshi were motivated by nothing but desire for personal profit, and this was an affront to the dignity of the imperial site that was Ise. Urata proposed an immediate ban on oshi and their practices.13 Urata submitted his oshi proposal to the Watarai authorities in the summer of 1868. It was one part of a more comprehensive document that revealed another abiding concern of his:  the Outer Shrine. With its superior number of priests, parishioners and pilgrims, the Outer Shrine in Yamada was always an immensely more popular and powerful institution than the Inner Shrine. Urata, whose family was attached to the Inner Shrine, despaired that the ‘ignorant populace’ took the virtue of the Inner and Outer Shrine kami to be identical;  some even thought the Sun Goddess was worshipped at the Outer Shrine. Pilgrims were anyway confused. Urata’s solution was typically radical: the uprooting of the Outer Shrine and its relocation to the precinct of the Inner Shrine. Lest there remain any room for doubt, the Inner Shrine should be restyled as Daijingū (Great Shrine) and the Outer Shrine as Toyouke no Miya (Shrine of Toyouke). The labels ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ should go; administration of the shrines, their priests and rituals should henceforth be assigned to a single administrative office located in the Great Shrine compound.14 In 1871, as the Council of State bureaucrats planned the construction of a powerful, centralized imperial state, they let Urata shape their policies in Ise. In New Year of 1871, the government removed Fujinami Kyōchū from his post as Ise’s head of rituals (saishu). Fujinami was of the Ōnakatomi branch that had monopolized the saishu office in the Edo period. He was replaced now by Konoe Tadafusa, a young courtier with no previous Ise connections. Konoe’s appointment was a warning that heredity had no future in Ise. Then, in the early summer of 1871, the government issued an historic declaration on the meaning of shrines and their place in the imperial realm. Shrines were ‘sites for the performance of state rites’;

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they were ‘not the private property of individual families’. The practice of heredity at Ise and other shrines conflicted with the hallowed principle that ‘shrine rites and imperial rule are one’ (saisei itchi).15 The Council of State then sanctioned a new, nonhereditary hierarchy for the Ise priesthood:  of saishu as head of rituals, and daigūji and shōgūji as chief and assistant chief priests. Beneath them were priests of negi and gonnegi rank, who would serve at both Inner and Outer Shrines. These were all state appointments.16 In the seventh month, the Council of State took this principle to its logical conclusion. It removed the Arakida and Watarai lineages from their control of the Inner and Outer Shrines, and abolished the oshi. A new shrine administrative office, styled Jingū shichō (the Ise Shrine Office), was established in the Inner Shrine precinct, tasked with overseeing all aspects of administration and ritual performance at both shrines. These reforms all began life as proposals penned by Urata Nagatami three years earlier in the aftermath of the revolution. The one Urata proposal not implemented was the uprooting of the Outer Shrine. It remained in Yamada where it always had been, albeit disempowered and diminished now –​at least in the eyes of government bureaucrats. Urata was rewarded with a posting to Tokyo in the summer of 1871 where, for four months, he worked in the Council of Kami Affairs (and its successor, the Ministry of Kami Affairs) alongside men like Fukuba Bisei. His main task appears to have been to give substance to an astonishing idea he had hatched back in 1869. This was nothing less than the de facto abolition of the Inner Shrine. His idea was to remove the sacred mirror from the Inner Shrine and re-​enshrine it in the new kashikodokoro sanctuary of the imperial palace in Tokyo. The kashikodokoro –​ known also as the naishidokoro  –​contained a sacred mirror, but this was a simulacrum of that in Ise. The emperor of modern Japan should be venerating the true mirror in the palace, in the heart of the capital city. Such, after all, had been the case before Emperor Sujin dispatched the mirror to Ise at the dawn of historical time. Whether Urata’s plan was simply to switch the mirrors, so that Ise now enshrined the simulacrum, or whether, indeed, Ise was deemed surplus to the state’s requirements is unclear. The idea garnered wide support in the Council of State’s highest echelons. It had an especial appeal to bureaucrats in autumn 1871, after the government had abolished the feudal domains and so laid the foundations of the modern state. In circumstances that are unclear, Urata eventually distanced himself from the plan, and returned to Ise in 1872 as assistant chief priest. Perhaps he was moved by reports of civil unrest in Uji and Yamada that had greeted rumours of the Sun Goddess’s departure for Tokyo. Nonetheless, for another year at least Satsuma bureaucrats in the government’s new Edification Ministry favoured transferring the Ise mirror to Tokyo. The staunchest advocate was a Satsuma man called Tanaka Yoritsune. In 1874, in a move that defies comprehension, the Edification Ministry appointed Tanaka to the vacant post of Ise chief priest. Tensions between Chief Priest Tanaka Yoritsune and his Assistant Chief Priest Urata Nagatami were a defining feature of Ise in the 1870s.17 Urata, Fukuba and the Council of State bureaucrats saw ritual performance as an essential stratagem in identifying the modern emperor with the Sun Goddess.

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The emperor’s historic pilgrimage had been vital here, but important in the longer term was the merging of the ritual cycles of imperial court and Ise Shrines. Urata’s first success in this regard was to have Ise’s greatest annual rite, the kanname, inserted into the modern imperial court’s ritual cycle. On 17.9.1871, the Meiji emperor faced Ise from the Tokyo palace and worshipped the Sun Goddess. His emissary meanwhile was in Ise, there to offer first fruits to the kami at his behest. Imperial acts of remote worship (yōhai) during kanname had been the norm in the Edo period, too, but the rite now acquired an entirely new public quality. In 1871, the Council of State gave the realm advanced notice that this ritual act of the emperor was imminent, and ordered all members of government to join him in worshipping the Sun Goddess at the palace’s kashikodokoro shrine.18 In the ninth month of the following year, the government enjoined the entire realm to follow suit. Prefectural offices would host rites, while local officials, all clad in formal wear, would perform solemn acts of worship; local shrines would host yōhai rites of ‘veneration from afar’. The Council of State instructed shrine priests to ensure the attendance of all parishioners.19 From 1873, the day of the great kanname rite then took its place in the new register of national holidays.20 Kanname was later officially designated a ‘Great Rite’ (taisai) in Ise’s annual ritual cycle and in the annual ritual cycle of the court. The new ritual symbiosis was evident elsewhere, too. On 23 November 1873, for the first time ever, Ise’s priests performed the greatest of the court rites, the autumnal niiname. Niiname became another Ise Great Rite (taisai), and a national holiday. The court’s new January genshisai rite, marking the foundation of the imperial line, the older kinensai rite, the emperor’s birthday (tenchōsetsu) and the anniversary of Emperor Jinmu’s enthronement all were accommodated in Ise’s modern ritual cycle. But Urata was concerned about overhauling the entire programme of premodern rites at Ise. He did this in concert with junior priest Magofuku Hirozane.21 Between them they compiled a nineteen-​volume ritual compendium called ‘Meiji-​era Ise rites’ (Jingū Meiji saishiki). It was implemented in 1875, and from then until the publication of the Ise Ritual Ordinance (Jingū saishi rei) in 1914, it provided the framework for all ritual performances at the Ise Shrines. All in all, Urata and Magofuku abolished twenty-​six rites, created anew twenty-​one more and substantially revised another forty-​two.22 The compendium effected a symbiosis between Ise and the imperial court, re-​established the kanname as the greatest of all Ise’s rites, and did away with the classical ritual offices of uchibito, kouchibito, monoimi and monoimi no chichi. There was no place for hereditary ritualists, and the hosophobic regime was no more.23 The Meiji Revolution also left numerous indelible marks on the physical appearance of the Inner and Outer Shrines. This point can be readily grasped by comparing two Inner Shrine images that appear in guidebooks published for pilgrims, before and after the revolution of 1868. Figure 8.2 is taken from the pages of the Ise sangū meisho zue published in 1797.24 The illustration is by the renowned ukiyoe artist, Shitomi Kangetsu. Figure 8.3 is from the Shinto meishōshi (Famous sites in the Divine Capital), published by the Ise Shrines in 1895.25 The Meisho zue and the Meishōshi both presented idealized images of the Inner Shrine, and

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Figure 8.2  Inner Shrine compound, eighteenth century.

Source: Naikū kyūchū no zu in Akisato Ritō and Shitomi Kangetsu, Ise sangū meisho zue (vol. 5).

Figure 8.3  Inner Shrine compound, nineteenth century.

Source: Kōtai jingū kyūchū no zu in Jingū Shichō ed., Shinto meishō shi (vol. 4).

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it is clear that the ideal shifted dramatically over the intervening century. What is striking, first of all, is the place of pilgrims. The earlier image shows pilgrims walking the pilgrims’ path, passing under the kabuki gate, up the stone steps and on to the tamagushi gate. Some pilgrims press their foreheads to the ground in worship, while others amble through the cluster of miniature shrines situated east of the Inner Shrine compound. Still others wander away through the western gate. Some pilgrims carry staffs, while others wear swords in their belts, and are presumably samurai; there are beggars and priests too. This is a bustling, busy site that belongs to the pilgrim. The Meishōshi artist chose to exclude pilgrims altogether, and in doing so gave the site a forbidding quality that was new to the modern era. Apart from the absence of pilgrims, the new physical features (that he accurately portrays) are striking. The Inner Shrine kami hall is now wrapped fourfold in wooden fences, so that spaces easily accessed in the 1790s are now sealed off. Newly erected are the itagaki and outer tamagaki fences. These draw on the protocols of classical Ise and are not new in conception, but what matters is that they suited the modern state’s purpose:  they situated the shrine’s spaces beyond the pilgrims’ gaze in order to generate in the pilgrim a new, enhanced sense of awe. The spatial relationship between the main kami hall and the two treasure halls that flank it has shifted, too. In the 1790s, the treasure halls occupied the same west-​east axis as the main kami hall. The 1890s illustration shows that the treasure halls have retreated. Note, too, in the 1790s that the Inner Shrine’s old kami hall, vacated by the Sun Goddess in the 1789 sengū still stands on the adjacent site (just visible to the extreme left of the picture). In the illustration of the 1890s, the old kami hall vacated in 1889 is nowhere to be seen; it has been dismantled to leave a vacant plot (now to the right). All that stands there now is a small wooden ōiya or ‘cover hut’.26 It marks the site of the pivot post above which the new kami hall would be erected in 1909. These physical changes, which were implemented in two phases in 1869 and 1889, had a clear purpose:  to remove anything that threatened the dominance of the Inner Shrine kami hall and the Sun Goddess it enshrines. But the 1895 Meishōshi misleads if it suggests pilgrims were no longer welcome. This was not the case. Indeed, from 1871 onwards, Buddhist priests, people from outcast communities and foreigners, too, were granted equal access to Ise. The new shrine spaces served, rather, to discipline the modern pilgrim. This point is suggested by the Home Ministry’s sanpai ichi (‘pilgrim placing’) regulations of 1889. They stipulated, for example, that imperial family members shall worship from within the inner tamagaki gate; leaders of the Upper and Lower Houses of the Diet worship from outside that gate. Members of the two Houses of the Diet worship from the nakanoe gate, while heads of towns, villages and wards worship from a spot under the outer tamagaki gate.27 The place of worship for the common pilgrim was outside the tamagaki gate. Apart from shrine priests, only the emperor may approach the foot of the steps leading up to the main kami hall. The new spatial arrangements of fences and gates served to replicate in Ise the key power relationships that structured the modern Japanese state.

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Changes to the Inner Shrine were essential to the site’s redefinition as Great Mausoleum (daibyō) for the imperial ancestor. It is true that early modern and even medieval Ise was also occasionally referred to as a mausoleum (byō or sōbyō), but that usage did not endure, and its meanings were anyway ambivalent.28 It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the wake of these modern reforms, that Ise became widely known as the Great Mausoleum. It is, in fact, possible to pinpoint the very moment at which the new understanding took root: 11 February 1889. The day is famous for two events. On this day, the Meiji emperor bestowed on his subjects the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, but this was also the day on which a certain Nishino Buntarō assassinated Education Minister Mori Arinori. Nishino, a disgruntled civil servant raised in Yamaguchi Prefecture, accused Mori of disrespecting Ise on his visit the previous year. Mori’s assassin, who was himself cut down shortly after stabbing Mori with a carving knife, left a note explaining what motivated him: The Great Mausoleum (daibyō) of Ise is a sacred site in which the spirit of the great ancestress is venerated; this spirit is the origin of our imperial family, which has existed without break since the beginning of time. As the mausoleum of our empire, Ise’s sacredness is beyond compare.29

Mori had defiled this site –​either, it was alleged, by using his walking stick to lift up the curtain that hung across the outer tamagaki gate or by entering the kami hall with his shoes on –​and got his just deserts. The assassin’s note was published in newspapers across Japan, and its publication prompted the modern practice of referring to Ise as Great Mausoleum. National dailies like the Yomiuri shinbun, and local papers like the Ise shinbun, began to refer to Ise routinely hereafter as daibyō.30 The concept worked its way into popular guidebooks and then into school textbooks.31 In 1907, the press framed what was to be the Meiji emperor’s last pilgrimage to Ise as a daibyō gyōkō or ‘imperial progress to the Great Mausoleum’.32

Uji, Yamada and the Provinces of Modern Japan The modern state’s reimagining and reshaping of Ise –​its meanings, practices and physical contours  –​had a profoundly isolating effect. The closer Ise was allied to the modern state, the more remote it became from pilgrims’ needs. The raft of government-​led reforms had rendered Ise unfamiliar. Critical among these reforms was the abolition in 1871 of the Ise oshi, who were the vital link between the Ise Shrines and pilgrims. In 1871 Watarai Prefecture issued a curt notice to erstwhile oshi, ordering them to ‘return to the straight path, devote themselves to farming or commerce, and thank the kami for their blessings’.33 The prefecture did permit oshi to start new careers as innkeepers. Some did and, of these, as we shall see, a small number flourished. The vast majority of oshi faced ruin, however.34 Pilgrim numbers appear to have plummeted in the early Meiji years, which in turn impacted on the shrine’s income, and on the fortunes of Ise’s entrepreneurs,

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innkeepers in Yamada and Uji, and the teahouse owners of Furuichi. Just how low pilgrim numbers descended is not possible to say with precision. The first statistics available for the new era date from 1884, the year in which Kashima Nobufumi arrived from Kashima Shrine in eastern Japan to assume the post of Ise chief priest. Kashima wrote to a friend shortly after taking up his post in pessimistic mood. The shrine was seriously in debt, he lamented; it was hard to see a way forward: ‘This year pilgrim numbers are extremely low, and the shrine’s income has dropped to one third [of what it has been].’35 Kashima was almost certainly responsible for the 1884 survey conducted at the Miyagawa River crossing, the traditional location for counting pilgrim numbers. The survey yielded a rough total of 267,000 people crossing into Yamada in that year.36 Two years later, the Ujiyamada Police Department initiated a survey based on occupancy of the inns of Uji and Yamada. They found the average number of occupants per year between 1886 and 1889 to be 280,000.37 These figures seem to represent something of a recovery after a steep drop in the very early Meiji years. Edo-​period figures are far from reliable, but pilgrim numbers in the 1880s might amount to something over half those in late Edo. Numbers would not rise significantly again until the early twentieth century, following the completion of the Sangū Railway and the opening of Yamada Station in 1897. In the aftermath of the abolition of oshi in 1871, two distinct groups of agents stepped in to assume and exploit the key functions that the oshi had once performed. One of those groups was the new shrine priesthood. They took over the distribution of Ise amulets, shrine propaganda and publicity, and the performance of kagura dance.38 A  second group comprised the keepers of Ise’s inns, who attended to the more secular needs of the modern pilgrim. The priesthood in Ise and bureaucrats in Tokyo shared a belief that Ise and the Sun Goddess had a vital role to play in the lives of modern Japanese. While Urata was on secondment to the Ministry of Kami Affairs in Tokyo, he and Fukuba Bisei –​who effectively ran the ministry –​suggested how this might happen. All shrines in the land should enshrine the Sun Goddess alongside their own kami; all imperial subjects should venerate these shrines on national holidays; they should also install Ise amulets in their family altars and worship the Sun Goddess there daily. The Ise amulet was, for Urata and Fukuba, a key stratagem in connecting modern Ise to all Japanese. The Ise Shrine Office should assume charge of amulet production and distribution, which the central government would underwrite. The office would dispatch amulets directly to prefectural governors, who would oversee distribution to town and ward chiefs. The local priests’ role was to sell them on to shrine parishioners.39 The plan to enshrine the Sun Goddess in every shrine in the land was later abandoned, but the state-​sponsored, state-​enforced distribution of amulets duly went ahead. The government appropriated the amulet manufacturing facility owned by the Mikkaichi family, and re-​employed many of the amulet artisans active before 1871.40 The factory may have churned out as many as seven million amulets in 1872.41 These were new-​style amulets, however, different in appearance and meaning from those of the oshi. No longer did they bear the oshi name; and no more were

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they known as oharai taima or ‘purification’ amulets. All new amulets were now embossed with the legend Tenshō kōtaijingū, identifying them exclusively with the Inner Shrine, and stamped Ōmishirushi or ‘Sacred symbol’ (the distribution of Outer Shrine amulets now ceased)42. The restyling heralded new uncertainties over meaning. The dominant function of amulets in Edo Japan was purification.43 Urata argued now that that the new Tenshō kōtaijingū amulets achieved more besides. Prayers addressed daily to the amulets would indeed remove impurities, but also, he insisted, guarantee a long life and even ensure the worshipper ‘entry into paradise after death’.44 In 1874, the Ise Shrine Office proposed another interpretation:  ‘There is no impediment to venerating amulets as mitamashiro; such actions are in accord with [noble] sentiments of veneration and sincerity.’ Mitamashiro was a generic term for physical objects like sticks, trees, stones and mirrors, to which kami descend when summoned. The new Ise amulet was just such an object. The Ise Shrine Office conceded that this interpretation was liable to come unstuck, since mitamashiro were usually kept in perpetuity while Ise amulets were to be replaced annually.45 The office proposed no solution to this difficulty, and confusion abounded. The Nara prefectural governor was among the first to register his concerns. The governor, personally responsible now for amulet distribution throughout Nara, explained to Ministry of Edification bureaucrats that local people were bewildered. Some thought the new amulets were the same as those distributed earlier by the oshi, but, of course, they were not. But what exactly, he asked, were they? Are we to understand amulets as offerings to the kami? If, rather, they are objects onto which the kami descends, do they need to be distributed anew every year? Will a one-​off distribution not suffice? The governor himself was unable to make sense of the government’s instructions.46 Resistance to the state-​sponsored amulet project was stiffest in regions where Shin Buddhism was deep-​rooted, but reports were coming in from all over Japan –​Ibaraki, Yamanashi, Shizuoka, Okayama and Hiroshima, to begin with –​of people burning amulets they had had forced upon them;47 others were casting them into fast-​flowing rivers. Opposition from local bureaucrats, and from Buddhists, built up such a head of steam that in 1878, the government conceded defeat. It was simply impossible to compel all Japanese to purchase and venerate Ise amulets. A Home Ministry ordinance of that year declared people free to accept Ise amulets or not; prefectural governments’ involvement in their distribution would cease henceforth.48 This did not mean that the Ise Shrine Office –​or, indeed, central government –​ deemed amulets any less important; far from it. Deprived now of direct government support, the Ise Shrine Office simply channelled amulets through an alternative network. Once again, Urata Nagatami was a key player. After his return to Ise in 1872, Urata had founded the Ise Shrine College (Jingū kyōin). This was to be the hub of a national network of prefectural ‘Ise churches’ (Jingū kyōkai); the churches were charged with appropriating and reorienting the local ‘pious associations’ that had sprung up across Japan generations earlier. Urata restyled them ‘Pious Associations of the Divine Storm’ (Shinpū kōsha). The Ise Shrine Office used this burgeoning network to dispense amulets across the land.49

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Urata’s network of new pious associations, overseen by prefectural churches subject to the supervision of the Ise Shrine College in Uji, was originally intended to accomplish something other than amulet distribution. The first purpose was to disseminate an entirely new Ise-​centred cult. The cult, its invention and propagation had government approval and came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Edification, newly established in 1872. This ministry was tasked with mobilizing shrine priests and Buddhist monks to lead a nationwide edification programme. Even as they served their shrines and temples, priests and monks would serve as kyōdōshoku or state proselytizers, and propagate the Great Teaching (taikyō). This teaching did not yet exist; it was to be developed in Tokyo at a new institute called the Taikyōin. Urata’s aim was to ensure his brand of Ise Shinto was the dominant influence on the Great Teaching. In his vision, which ministry bureaucrats seemed to share, all state proselytizers –​Shinto and Buddhist alike –​would propagate Ise Shinto to ‘unite all people of the land in belief in the Ise Shrine’. Urata worked on his Shinto theories at the Ise Shrine College, and published them in 1877 as the three-​volume Daidō hongi (Essence of the Great Way), the most widely consulted text on Ise Shinto in Meiji. Urata began Hongi insisting that ‘Our Way is infinitely broad, and there is nothing it cannot encompass’.50 He wrote of cosmogony and the heavenly kami, of the Sun Goddess as the greatest kami in the cosmos and of Ōkuninushi’s rule of the terrestrial realm. He narrated the descent to earth of Ninigi, the heavenly grandson. He also expounded on such diverse matters as social ethics, good and evil, sin, death and the immortality of the soul. Like Motoori Norinaga, Hirata Atsutane and Ōkuni Takamasa before him, Urata was refashioning belief in the Ise kami to fit the global standard set by Christianity, whose missionaries were even now poised to enter the Japanese interior. Urata even found room to accommodate European ideas about freedom, rights and obligations: ‘Men are not bound by other men, but they are bound by the kami. Politics sanctions freedoms, and so guarantees rights; teachings restrict freedoms and demand obligations. Politics and teachings are thus parallel and not incompatible.’51 It was precisely this insistence on the inseparability of politics and (Ise-​ based) teachings that galvanized opposition to the Great Teaching campaign. Shin Buddhist priests, several of whose prelates had just returned from study tours to Europe, spearheaded the opposition. Inspired by European ideals of the separation of state and religion and of freedom of conscience, men like Shimaji Mokurai engineered the Buddhists’ exit from the Great Teaching programme, causing the collapse of the Taikyō-​in institute, and any possibility for joint Shinto-​ Buddhist propaganda.52 The days of the Edification Ministry, which had staked all on the programme’s success, were clearly numbered, and it was abolished in 1877. Its final act of note was to approve the creation of a National Shinto Bureau (Shintō jimukyoku) in Tokyo in 1875. This was the brainwave of Ise Chief Priest Tanaka Yoritsune, who was convinced that, even if it was impossible to work with Buddhists, all shrine priests in the land might be co-​opted into the propagation of Ise Shinto. But he was wrong. The National Shinto Bureau’s heavy Ise bias quickly encountered resistance, especially among priests from the Izumo shrine in

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Shimane Prefecture. Matters came to a head in 1880 in a vituperative spat between Tanaka Yoritsune and Izumo Chief Priest Senge Takatomi. From before the revolution, Izumo shrine priests had been developing their own brand of Shinto, drawing inspiration from the writings of Hirata Atsutane. While Urata’s new Ise Shinto was structured around Amaterasu as the absolute kami and imperial ancestor, Izumo priests prioritized the Izumo kami, Ōkuninushi. In 1880, Tanaka built a new sanctuary on National Shinto Bureau premises, and Senge spoke for many priests in western Japan when he insisted Ōkuninushi be enshrined there alongside Amaterasu. Tanaka dismissed this as preposterous.53 What began as a personal dispute between two chief priests, vying for power and influence came to engage priests everywhere in debates about the relative merits of Ise and Izumo.54 The Home Ministry  –​now in charge of shrine and temple affairs –​espied here a grave threat to the modern state’s very legitimacy: after all, shrine priests were lining up behind these two great shrines to debate the virtue of the emperor’s ancestor. The depth of government concern is evident in the actions it took. First, it intervened in the dispute in 1881, settling in favour of Tanaka Yoritsune and Ise Shinto: the Izumo kami had, after all, no place in the pantheon of the National Shinto Bureau.55 The government’s concerns were not yet quelled, however, and in 1882, it intervened again. This second intervention had profound consequences for the Ise Shrines and, indeed, for shrines everywhere. The government took the radical step of banning all shrine priests, including the Ise and Izumo chief priests, from developing, disseminating and debating ‘teachings’. The performance of rites was to be their sole concern. Government action generated a new and enduring distinction between shrines and their rites on the one hand, and teachings or ‘religion’ on the other.56 Tanaka Yoritsune now faced a choice: to stay on as chief priest of the Ise Shrines, engaging uniquely in shrine rites and desisting from the ‘religious’ activities that had preoccupied him till now; or to resign as chief priest to pursue those activities elsewhere. Tanaka chose the latter course. He resigned in May 1882 to found Jingūkyō, a new Ise-​derived religion. In the same month, the Home Ministry recognized Jingūkyō as one of six new Shinto ‘religions’.57 Tanaka’s Jingūkyō took for its headquarters the Ise Shrine College; it also took over the Ise Shrine’s Tokyo office, which became known as Hibiya Daijingū. Jingūkyō now assumed responsibility for not only propagating Ise teachings, but also disseminating Ise amulets. The latter fact had serious consequences for the Ise Shrines’ economic viability, since amulet income was now diverted into Jingūkyō activities. What, then, were the Ise Shrines’ economic prospects in modern Japan? Prior to Meiji, the shrines had relied on lands set aside for their use by the Tokugawa, and, to some extent, on the contributions of pilgrims, although much of this money enriched the oshi rather than the shrines themselves. In 1871, as part of a radical reform of landholding across the new Japan, the state confiscated Ise’s shrine lands and began disbursements to the shrine from state coffers.58 From 1872, the Finance Ministry disbursed to the Ise Shrines, via Mie Prefecture, the sum of 15,000 yen per annum. This was the Shrine Subsidy (kyōshinkin) intended

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to cover the costs of the shrine’s ritual performances –​though not the sengū that was budgeted separately –​as well as the income of its many priests and the sundry expenses they incurred. The shrine subsidy was never intended to be sufficient; the shrines were always expected to supplement it with what the government referred to as Shrine Takings (shanyūkin). This was a reference to pilgrim-​ generated income: from amulet sales, kagura performances and other donations.59 From 1882, however, sales were financing Jingūkyō activities. What was more, the government had just recently slashed the Ise Shrine Subsidy to 9,000 yen per annum. It is little wonder that when Kashima Nobufumi arrived in Ise to replace Tanaka Yoritsune as chief priest in 1884, he expressed grave concerns about shrine finances.60 It took another three years for the government to come to the rescue. In 1887, the government increased the annual Shrine Subsidy from 9,000 yen per annum to 16,000 yen, setting aside an additional 9,600 yen for ongoing shrine repairs. In 1900, the government raised its subsidy again to 50,000 yen per annum to cover additionally the costs of offerings to the shrine from the imperial court, and the budget for shrine security. The sum rose to 70,000 yen in 1910.61 The Ise Shrines were at last on a relatively stable footing, but it was never the case that they thrived exclusively on government support. Shrine Takings remained an essential source of income, and this in turn depended on nothing so much as pilgrim numbers. Pilgrim numbers were the lifeblood of not only the Ise Shrines, but also, of course, the inns in Uji and Yamada and the teahouses of Furuichi. The oshi were no more, but some of their number sought to fashion new careers as regular innkeepers. The government sanctioned this option in 1871, and it made good sense. After all, erstwhile oshi alone possessed the facilities to accommodate pilgrims.62 The Mikkaichi, the greatest of all the oshi houses before the revolution, were a case in point. In Chapter  7 we saw the extent of their power and influence: the main and branch families between them had a ‘parish’ comprising some 400,000 families, extending from central to northeastern Japan at the end of the Edo period. In 1871, the Mikkaichi shared the fate of oshi everywhere, though. Their links to the Ise Shrines were severed; they were relieved of their priestly duties and their role as hereditary aldermen; they also lost their entitlement to court office and rank. But they nonetheless thrived in Meiji. It is not easy to track their fortunes in Meiji, but the local newspaper, the Ise shinbun, offers some scattered clues. In 1880 the Ise shinbun reported that Mikkaichi agents had been commissioned by the Ise Shrine Office to distribute Ise amulets to 33,333 households in northeast Japan; the paper then retracted the story.63 What prompted these articles is unclear, but the Mikkaichi were continuing to cultivate former patrons with success. So splendid was the Mikkaichi Inn twenty years after the revolution that Prince Arisugawa stayed there on a much publicized pilgrimage to Ise in 1887.64 After the 1897 completion of the Sangū Railway, which brought pilgrims into Yamada from across Japan with a speed and comfort heretofore unimaginable, the Mikkaichi launched an advertising campaign. It featured in all the major travel guides. In the Ise sangū annaiki of 1897, for example, there was this:

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Mikkaichi Dayū:  a renowned Dayū and a famous, spacious inn. In former times, he had parishioners in Sendai, Tsugaru, Matsumae, Iwaki and Miharu, and throughout the region that extends from Mutsu to Kōzuke Province. In the past, he was the king of the oshi, and [to this day] almost all pilgrims from those regions of the realm stay overnight at the Mikkaichi Inn. Mikkaichi is now attracting pilgrims from elsewhere too.65

Around 1900, the head of the Mikkaichi house began to deploy new tactics. He created a pilgrim association styled the Oshi Club (Oshi kōsha). Members of the Mikkaichi Oshi Club had privileged access to a network of new inns built near railway stations from Aomori, Sendai and Fukushima in the north down to Tokyo and Nagoya, and were guaranteed favourable treatment. Mikkaichi was now publishing calendars, too, dispensing them to clients in northeast Japan with New Year messages attached. The New Year message for 1903 boasted to would-​be patrons that two million calendars were being dispatched that year.66 This is an assertion, the accuracy of which cannot be proven, but it does serve as a measure of Mikkaichi’s continued success. Part of the success may have had to do with the Mikkaichi endeavouring to meet clients’ more spiritual needs. Around 1900, the Mikkaichi founded an organization called the Church for Emperor Worship (Sonnō kyōkai). Little is knowable about this church, but the 1903 calendar carried a depiction of the Mikkaichi Inn with the legend ‘Church for Emperor Worship: Headquarters’. These several strategies were not unique to the Mikkaichi; they were shared, for example, by the Fukushima oshi house, once responsible for some 260,000 households in northern Kyushu.67 The Fukushima had enjoyed fabulous wealth before 1868, some sense of which can be grasped by the splendour of the gabled Fukushima Inn gate, which stands today outside Kōgakkan University in Ise. The house hit hard times in early Meiji. In 1876, Fukushima even wrote to erstwhile parishioners, saying he was on the verge of ruin, pleading with them to come and stay at the Fukushima Inn. But somehow he survived and, judging from travel guides of the 1890s, flourished once more. He did this by heading in person to Kyushu to visit former parish households in Kyushu and, it seems, selling his own privately manufactured amulets. Like Mikkaichi, he too sought to meet pilgrims’ spiritual needs; he did so by founding the Church of the Heavenly Ancestor (Tenso kyōkai).68 The Mikkaichi and Fukushima were exceptional, it seems, in proclaiming their status as former oshi and, initially at least, relying on former parishioners for custom. Others, like the former oshi owners of the Kadoya and Unidachi Inns (of Uji and Yamada, respectively), adopted new business models. Their owners took advantage of new national transport networks that had sprung up in the early Meiji years, such as the Dependable Club (Shinsei kō) and the Restoration Club (Isshin kō).69 The former was the tourist wing of a national transport company (Rikuun moto kaisha), established by the government in 1872. The latter was a private transport/​travel enterprise created by entrepreneurs in Shizuoka in 1873; quickly it established branches throughout Japan. The appeal of these networks to inns like Kadoya and Unidachi is obvious: it gave them access to clients from across Japan,

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not just the specific locales of erstwhile parishioners. The Kadoya Inn joined the Dependable Club in 1877; Unidachi registered with the Restoration Club in 1881. They paid a registration fee to have their inns feature in the guidebooks distributed by these organizations, and agreed to abide by codes of practice. As a member of Shinsei kō, for example, Kadoya Inn staff were to treat customers ‘with sincerity’ and ‘never lack hospitality’; they were to offer reduced-​price rickshaw transport, and take special care of pilgrims travelling alone; and they were to abstain from touting.70 The Kadoya Inn, later restyling itself Shinpūkan (‘Divine Storm Hall’), flourished for a generation and more, and even opened a branch in the resort town of Futami. But early in the twentieth century, just as pilgrims began to return to Ise in great numbers, the owner sold up to a rival. The Unidachi Inn, for its part, was a phenomenal success. In the 1880s, Unidachi resurfaced, following extensive building work, as a three-​story Western-​style hotel, variously calling itself Yamada Hotel and Sangū Hotel. A  guidebook of 1890 lauded its ‘sky-​scraping roof ’, the stunning views it offered of the Outer Shrine hills and the excellent service of its staff.71 Unidachi was aggressive in its business practices, and was sued by more than one rival for stealing its custom. It was the first to install electric lighting in all its rooms; it had telephones, too.72 In 1897, it withdrew from the Restoration Club, which had contributed so much to its success, announcing in the local press it was now ‘going it alone’.73 The only indication that the Unidachi owner had ever been an oshi was the magnificent gabled gate that stood outside the annex. Unidachi subsequently bought up other inns –​Fujiya, Tachibanaya and Kikuya –​and even opened a branch in Ueno, Tokyo. The Unidachi enterprise thrived on the custom of modern pilgrims until it was destroyed in the Allied bombing of Ujiyamada in 1945. The competition for custom among the inns of Uji and Yamada was fierce. In the 1880s, no more than a score of former oshi were engaged as innkeepers, it is true, but pilgrim numbers had dropped and other types of establishments were competing for business, like Aburaya. Aburaya was one of the three great teahouses in the Furuichi entertainment district.74 It burned down in 1871 and was rebuilt, but like most of Furuichi’s other teahouses it struggled through the 1870s and 1880s. Partially destroyed by fire again in 1885, it stopped business altogether in 1888. The following year, though, it reopened as a regular inn. This proved an extremely astute move, which attracted the attention of the national press when the Tokyo-​ based Japan Christian Women’s Organisation praised its owner for abandoning prostitution.75 In the same year, two imperial princes were among the dignitaries who stayed there.76 In 1890, Aburaya registered with the Dependable Club and began to attract clients from all over Japan. As the teahouse business in Furuichi failed to recover, other establishments followed Aburaya’s example: Asakichi, Ryōguchi and Matsuya were among them. But none thrived quite as Aburaya did. It became one of the most sought-​after inns in Ise. Like Unidachi, it was quick to install electric lighting and the telephone.77 When the Sangū Railway came to Yamada in 1897, Aburaya constructed an imposing branch hotel right outside Yamada Station. Its guests included princes, and statesmen like Ōkuma Shigenobu. Fukuzawa Yukichi

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stayed there in 1896.78 Aburaya had been advertising itself in English as ‘Hotel S. Aburaya’ since 1890, and hosted many a foreign dignitary, too: British, French, Chinese and Korean.79 In the longer term, the Sangū Railway, which contributed so much to Aburaya’s success in the 1900s, did little to further Furuichi’s fortunes. This was because the new Yamada Station became the hub of a new, and more accessible, entertainment district, known locally as ‘New Furuichi’.

Shin’enkai and Its Legacy It is not possible to make an accurate assessment of the success or otherwise of all these efforts to reconnect Uji and Yamada with the people of post-​revolutionary Japan. We might simply observe once again that pilgrim numbers seemed to remain fairly constant through the 1880s and 1890s. The situation began to change only in the early twentieth century after the completion of the Sangū Railway in 1897. The Sangū Railway connected Yamada to Tsu in the north of Mie Prefecture; Tsu was itself linked to the Tōkaidō Line, the main rail artery that already joined Tokyo in the east to Kobe in the west. The arrival of the steam train in Ise was the achievement of numerous actors, but none was more important than Ōta Kosaburō. Ōta was the owner of the great Furuichi teahouse, Bizen’ya. He was also the founder of Yamada Bank, the Ise paper mill and the Miyagawa Electric Company (Miyagawa denki kaisha), which ran Ise’s trams. Subsequently, he also served as Sangū Railway president. The railway, vital though it was, was but one part of Ōta Kosaburō’s vision for Uji, Yamada and the Ise Shrines. In 1886, Ōta found common cause with Ise Chief Priest Kashima Nobufumi, Urata Nagatami (serving now as governor of Watarai District), Ōiwa Hōitsu, local doctor, philanthropist and entrepreneur, and Mie Prefecture Governor Ishii Kunimichi. Together they launched an organization called the Shin’enkai, or ‘Sacred Garden Society’. The society was born in Yamada, but quickly acquired the support of the central government and of the imperial family. The society’s aim was quite simply to transform the nature of Ise’s sacred spaces, and so the pilgrim experience. Only a radical transformation would draw pilgrims back to Ise, and enable the inns and teahouses to thrive again. The Shin’enkai first articulated its Ise vision in the society’s founding statement (Shin’enkai sōsetsu shushi). It involved, first of all, ‘sweeping away the town that [occupies] the eastern side of Uji Bridge [at the Inner Shrine in Uji], transforming that space into a sacred garden, and building a major gallery there to display the shrine’s kami treasures’. The ‘town on the eastern side of the Uji Bridge’ was a reference to a cluster of two hundred or so buildings –​priests’ houses, inns and shops  –​on the shrine-​side of the bridge. Yamada, too, was to be transformed. The area adjacent to the Outer Shrine would become an extended area of natural beauty (ichidai shōku).80 The Shin’enkai now invited Ozawa Keijirō, the most renowned of a new generation of landscape gardeners, to refine the plans. Ozawa proposed a well, a spring, a stream and a tea hut for the Inner Shrine garden. The Outer Shrine would feature a lake, shaped like the magatama jewel of the imperial

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regalia, and a tea hut, whose design would suggest the gabled gate of one of the great oshi inns. In both sites, a network of gravelled paths would be laid around thousands of square metres of turf. Hundreds of pine, plum, cherry and peach trees, and many hundreds of peony and iris shrubs would delight the eye of the modern pilgrim.81 The Ozawa plan was to be completed in time for the 1889 sengū, which gave the Shin’enkai just three years to raise the estimated costs of 1,200,000 yen. But in the late autumn of 1886, before the fundraising campaign took off, Ōta learned that the emperor’s mother-​in-​law was planning a visit in spring the following year to the resort of Futami and then a pilgrimage to the Ise Shrines. The Shin’enkai took immediate action. They took out a loan from the No. 105 Bank and bought a plot of land on the Futami shoreline. In the space of just three months they constructed the stunning Hinjitsukan Inn.82 The emperor’s mother-​in-​law duly stayed there in March 1887, and her sojourn proved a vital first link between the Shin’enkai and the imperial family. Subsequently, Prince Arisugawa visited Futami, and also stayed in the Hinjitsukan.83 The Shin’enkai would exploit the imperial connection further in 1888. From 1887, the Shin’enkai began its fundraising campaign in earnest. Mie Prefecture pressured district governors to lean on village and ward chiefs to collect local contributions. The society began to seek help further afield, too. They placed notices in papers like the Tōkyō Nichinichi shinbun and the Chōya shinbun to advise readers of Shin’enkai plans and solicit donations.84 At the end of 1888, teahouse owner and entrepreneur Ōta and Ise Chief Priest Kashima headed to Tokyo on a fundraising mission. It proved an extraordinary success. While they were in Tokyo the empress and the emperor’s mother made a substantial donation to the Shin’enkai.85 Ōta then managed to recruit Prince Arisugawa Taruhito  –​ the Ise Shrines’ Tokyo-​resident head of rituals –​as Shin’enkai chairman (sōsai).86 Other eminent figures joined thereafter. Yoshii Tomozane, second in command in the Imperial Household Ministry (Kunaichō) became president (kaitō), and Tokyo Imperial University chancellor, Watanabe Hiromoto, vice president (fuku kaitō). The following public figures signed up to the new board of governors:  Interior Minister Sanjō Sanetomo, Justice Minister Yamada Akiyoshi, Imperial Household Minister Hijikata Hisamoto, and Matsukata Masayoshi, who presently served as both finance and home minister. Entrepreneur Shibuzawa Eiichi, and Kuki Ryūichi (president of the new national museums in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara) came on board as well. A decision was now made to locate the Shin’enkai headquarters in Tokyo, and to dispatch Yoshii Tomozane to Ise immediately on a fact-​finding mission.87 One outcome of Yoshii’s mission was an understanding of the need for a railway into Ise. Shibuzawa Eiichi provided much of the capital for the project, and the railway reached the Miyagawa River in 1894 and Yamada in 1897. It was only after his return to Ise in spring 1889 that Ōta began work on the spaces around the Inner and Outer Shrines. The work was completed in autumn 1892. Ozawa’s original design was compromised, it is true. The fountain, stream and tea hut planned for the Inner Shrine were abandoned, but the shrine grounds were transformed forever. The historian Takagi Hiroshi sees in these new spaces

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Figure 8.4  Sacred Garden at the Inner Shrine.

Source: Naikū hōmen kaien chizu in Jingū Shichō, ed. 1987, Jingū Meiji hyakunenshi (vol. 2), Jingū Bunko.

a ‘neurotic obsession with order and tidiness’, and it is easy to see why.88 But they made a vital contribution to the modern pilgrims’ sensory experience of Ise, and they were well received. The Ise sangū annaiki guidebook of 1897 wrote of the ‘scenic beauty now evident at the Inner Shrine’. There was ‘a riot of colour from the flowers and trees in the gardens set  alongside the Isuzu River, facing Kamiji Mountain’.89 As for the Outer Shrine’s new garden, it offered ‘a stunning spectacle of cherries amongst the pines; of plums in the snow, of spring flowers and summer coolness, of autumn moons, of winter snowfall’. The Magatama Lake was ‘brimful with water; lotuses garner its surface, and water birds bathe on its banks’.90 The sensuality of the Inner and Outer Shrine gardens contrasted with the new austerity of the shrine sanctuaries; this, of course, was the point. In the voluminous documents of the Shin’enkai, the words kairaku and goraku recur time and again:  the Shin’enkai set out to satisfy modern pilgrims’ demands for ‘pleasures’ and ‘distractions’. As it turned out, this was but the first stage in the Shin’enkai plans to meet the needs of the modern pilgrim (Figure 8.4). In 1888, the quite separate towns of Uji and Yamada merged to form Ujiyamada Town. In 1906, Ujiyamada Town was recognized as a city.91 The Shin’enkai was concerned, during just this twenty-​year period, with leaving its mark on the nature of this city in the making. To this end, they purchased a plot of land in Kuratayama, between Yamada and Uji, which they developed into an entirely new type of sacred space. The site was ‘sacred’ by virtue of its connection with the Ise Shrines, but entirely secular in its appeal to pilgrims. They then ran a road from Yamada to Uji through this site, co-​joining Yamada and Uji in a new symbiotic

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Figure 8.5  The Kuratayama complex in late Meiji.

Source: Nakamura Sasu, Jingū Chōkokan Nōgyōkan chōkanzu, in Ise Shi, ed. 2007–​13, Ise shi shi (vol. 4).

relationship. The Shin’enkai articulated its ambitious plans for the Kuratayama site as early as 1888. They would construct a history museum, an agricultural museum, an archive, a gallery, a zoo, a botanical garden, an aquarium, a racetrack and a stage for noh drama; and there would be a park, too, for the display of ‘ancient customs’.92 This Kuratayama plan, which required the raising of stupendous sums of money, aimed to create at the heart of Ujiyamada City a site for pilgrims’ entertainment and, indeed, their edification. In 1891, the Shin’enkai had actually built an agricultural museum, the Nōgyōkan, on the perimeter of the Outer Shrine. It was meant to educate and entertain pilgrims from rural areas, who ‘regarded the Ise kami as the founder of agriculture’.93 The museum displayed the latest farming technologies, and there were handbooks and charts on agricultural themes; there was even a store where pilgrims could buy seeds and saplings. In 1895, the Shin’enkai then opened a temporary history museum, within the Hinjitsukan in Futami. The year 1895 was the 1,100th anniversary of the creation of the founding of Kyoto, and it was hoped the museum would help attract to Futami some of the many visitors heading to Kyoto in that year.94 The Kuratayama fundraising campaign –​conducted across Japan –​was hit first by the outbreak of the Sino-​Japanese war in 1894, and then by the Russo-​Japanese war a decade later.95 It was not till 1909, a full twenty years after its inception, that Kuratayama finally opened, just in time for the sengū of that year (Figure 8.5). The zoo, botanical gardens, aquarium and racetrack were put on hold, but Kuratayama was –​and remains –​an extraordinary site (Figure 8.5). Its main facilities were a new Chōkokan history museum, which stood as a monument to Ujiyamada’s modern aspirations. Designed by Katayama Tōkuma, the architect famous for the Akasaka Palace in Tokyo, it was built in stone in what has been called

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Renaissance style. The sculpted Chōkokan gardens were the work of Imperial Household landscape gardener Ichikawa Yukio, who drew his inspiration from the palace gardens in Versailles. This was Japan’s first-​ever history museum. The second facility was the agricultural museum (Nōgyōkan), transferred from the Outer Shrine. It was Japan’s first private natural history museum. Made of wood, its design was meant to recall the stunning Phoenix Hall at the Byōdōin temple near Kyoto. Then there was the Shrine Gallery (Tekka gyobutsu haikansho), which displayed the kami treasures removed from the Inner Shrine at the 1869 sengū. The gallery featured in the earliest Shin’enkai plans, and, to judge from Meiji guidebooks, it attracted much favourable attention.96 What sort of experience did this site offer the modern pilgrim? The Chōkokan comprised nine exhibition rooms, each thematically conceived. The thematic structure allowed no space for narrating the imperial myth. The Meiji visitor did not learn here that Amaterasu was the ancestor of Japan’s imperial line, or that Princess Yamato-​hime had brought Amaterasu to Ise in the time of Emperor Sujin. The visitor did, however, learn about Buddhism. There were treasures on display from the great Hōryūji, Tōdaiji and Yakushiji temples. Where the curators were unable to acquire the Buddhist treasures they desired, they had replicas made.97 The absence of the imperial myth and the presence of Buddhism were two striking features of the Meiji Chōkokan museum.98 Museums were essential to the meaning of the modern city. National museums had opened in Tokyo in 1889, in Nara in 1895 and in Kyoto in 1900, and, with the completion of Kuratayama, Ujiyamada too had met a basic condition of the modern city. It remained for the Shin’enkai to integrate this new site into the new city of Uji-​ Yamada. To this end, they built a new road, 5.5 km long, which ran from the Outer Shrine in Yamada through Kuratayama to the Inner Shrine in Uji.99 The only route to Uji from Yamada till now had been the old, narrow and precipitous pilgrims’ way, known as the Sangū kaidō. The new Imperial Road (Miyuki dōro) was meant to facilitate the emperor’s personal progress from the Outer to the Inner Shrine. But it also had in mind the modern pilgrims’ experience of Ise. No longer would they worship at the Outer Shrine, indulge in the pleasures of Furuichi, before worshipping at the Inner Shrine, walking on to Mount Asama and down to Futami. Modern pilgrims were directed along a new course: Outer Shrine gardens ➔ Outer Shrine ➔ Kuratayama, its museums and gallery ➔ Inner Shrine gardens ➔ Inner Shrine ➔ Mount Asama ➔ Futami. This effectively bypassed Furuichi, and one outcome of this new imagining of Ise space was indeed Furuichi’s dislocation; its demise was now truly underway. We should not overlook the irony here: the man who drove these changes was Ōta Kosaburō, owner of the Bizen’ya, the greatest of Furuichi’s teahouses. The Ise shinbun rejoiced when, in 1906, Ujiyamada became a city. The paper reminded its readers that Ujiyamada City was known throughout the land ‘by the venerable title of Divine Capital (shinto), on account of the emperor’s Great Mausoleum there. This Divine Capital is very much like Jerusalem for the Christians in Europe . . . It is thus superior, in every way, to the three cities of Tokyo, Kyoto

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and Osaka.’100 To the chagrin of many, Ujiyamada never was officially renamed shinto, but it came to occupy an enduring place in the popular imagination as such. It was back in 1895, the year in which the nation’s attention was directed to Kyoto, that Ise began to promote the shinto idea in earnest. In that year, the Ise Shrine Office published its first official guidebook of the modern era, Shinto meishōshi; it was targeted at visitors to Kyoto. In 1895, too, Ujiyamada invented a new autumn shinto festival. In quick succession a shock of events and institutions appeared with the shinto tag:  shinto buyūkai, shinto gakai and shinto gungakutai (i.e. the comrades, art and military music societies of the Divine Capital), to name but a few. Shinto starts to appear as a tag for Ujiyamada in guidebooks also around 1900. Newspapers refer to Ise as shinto from the Taishō period onwards. That this new synonym took root and endured beyond Meiji and into the post-​war period was precisely because, between 1868 and 1912, Ise had changed beyond recognition. Much of that change was the legacy of Shin’enkai.

Chapter 9 I SE AND N ATION IN T AISHŌ A N D E A RLY S HŌWA   J APA N

The Meiji years saw the modern state co-​opt the Ise Shrines, before sanctioning a raft of reforms that transformed them beyond recognition. Ise became the Great Mausoleum for the modern emperor, a sacred site serving first and foremost to confirm his sacred authority and the sacred nature of the realm over which he ruled. Meanwhile, Yamada and Uji had merged into first Ujiyamada Town (1889) and then Ujiyamada City (1906). The very same period of dramatic evolution had witnessed a decisive dislocation of the shrine from its early modern clientele so that pilgrim numbers dropped and the vitality of the early modern pilgrimage was lost. The efforts of a new generation of shrine priests, of the innkeepers of Uji and Yamada, of the teahouse owners of Furuichi and of the Shin’enkai –​with its unique capacity to coordinate the talents of priests and entrepreneurs –​appeared to have had little immediate effect in reconnecting the people with Ise. Only in the Taishō and Shōwa periods was that connection re-​established. The new connection was of unprecedented intimacy, and of a quite different quality from that in the Edo period. The new relationship between Ise Shrines and the people reached its apogee in the events of 1929. In that year, the shrine hosted the fourth sengū of the modern era. In terms of production and performance, the 1929 sengū represented a dynamic evolution from the three that had preceded it. The sengū of 1869 had been funded by the Tokugawa bakufu and was essentially ‘early modern’. The modern version of the sengū was launched in 1889, and reprised in 1909. There was a new imperial quality to these sengū, as we shall see, and because the emperor was now head of state under the Meiji Constitution, they were produced as state events. But what was strikingly new about the events of 1929, which took place during the period of so-​called state Shinto, was their production and performance as national rites.1 They engaged not only the emperor and other state representatives, but also the people in a way that had never happened before. The sengū of 1929 was at once the cause and effect of a new, and newly intense, relationship between the Ise Shrines and the Japanese nation. In this chapter, we  begin by recreating the ritual performance of 2 October 1929, exploring its new national character. The second section attempts a contextualization of this performance, through an examination of multiple forms

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of Ise discourse. We  pay attention to the national press, to Ise as it featured in textbooks in the state-​approved school curriculum, and, of course, to the shrine’s own publicity. These media, which were both textual and newly visual, played a vital part in shaping popular perceptions of Ise from the early decades of the twentieth century. In the third section, we reset the focus on the physical site of Ujiyamada. The 1929 sengū located Ujiyamada at the very centre of Japan’s public culture, and it became, to all intents and purposes, the Divine Capital that the Shin’enkai had imagined a generation earlier. How was Ujiyamada transformed, then, in these years, and how did that transformation in turn reshape pilgrims’ Ise experience?

The Sun Goddess’s Progress, 1929 At 8 p.m. on 2 October 1929, the Sun Goddess left the Inner Shrine’s main hall where she had been feted for a full twenty years, and progressed to her new abode, just completed on a site immediately adjacent to the west. The 27-​year-​old Shōwa emperor, her direct descendant, was not in Ise to greet her; he was kneeling within a purpose-​built wooden structure outside the Shinkaden sanctuary in the imperial palace grounds in Tokyo.2 Clad in yellow kōrozen court attire, he prostrated himself at the very moment the Sun Goddess left the sanctuary. ‘For five minutes he venerated her with utmost solemnity’, reported the Asahi shinbun. Princes Takamatsu and Fushimi, who knelt by the emperor, also prostrated themselves. The empress did not participate, as she had just given birth, but the empress dowager and the imperial princesses each in their own residences faced Ise and venerated.3 The emperor had earlier dispatched the court noble, Kujō Michizane, to Ise as his envoy. He had a second representative there in the person of Prince Kuninomiya Takao; the prince was the shrine’s head of rituals (saishu). There were, in the imperial dimension to the 1929 sengū, continuities with the past, to be sure. The setting of the ritual schedules, first by the Taishō emperor in 1920 and then, following his death, by the Shōwa emperor in 1929, was a continuation of Edo-​period practice; so, too, was the emperor’s dispatch of a personal emissary. Of course, in Edo Japan these practices had always been initiated and mediated by the bakufu. The modern imperial interventions were striking, however. It was at the 1869 sengū that the emperor, for the first time, faced Ise and worshipped the Sun Goddess in an act of ‘remote worship’ (yōhai). In 1884, Ise’s head of rituals was redefined as ‘imperial proxy’ (ōmiteshiro, a term that in classical times had referred to the abstinence princess), and his presence at Ise for the sengū from 1889 onwards underscored their unmistakably imperial quality. An imperial ordinance of 1897 then determined that the emperor would personally appoint the head of rituals, a post to be occupied by a member of the imperial family.4 In 1889, there began the practice of the Ise chief priest bringing to Tokyo for the emperor’s perusal a selection of the treasures to be placed in the Sun Goddess’s new kami hall. The emperor viewed them in the palace’s Phoenix Hall.5 It was a natural enough outcome of these imperial innovations that the

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government defined the sengū as a Great Rite (taisai) in the 1908 Ordinance on Court Ritual (Kōshitsu saishirei). It is worth noting that the 1929 sengū was shaped, to some degree, by the Meiji emperor’s personal interventions. He had proposed in 1889 that the Sun Goddess’s safe arrival in her new shrine be celebrated with a performance of the sacred dance known as mikagura. From the night of 3 October 1889, this became a new tradition.6 Reflecting subsequently on the events of 1889, the emperor had voiced grave concern about the mihishiro, the gold box that accommodates the sacred mirror. The practice till now had been for a new gold box to be crafted at each sengū, and the sacred mirror removed from the old and then transferred to the new box. The emperor deemed the practice ‘too dreadful to contemplate’, and so, at his behest, it was abandoned; the mirror has remained in the same gold box ever since.7 It seems the Meiji emperor later quashed a radical proposal put to him by the home minister in 1904 to redesign the Inner Shrine in concrete and abandon the sengū altogether.8 The idea got nowhere, but a decision was taken now for the first time to stand the sanctuary’s main wooden pillars on stone foundations.9 Presumably this had the emperor’s approval. The 1929 sengū was then an imperial rite, but it was a state rite, too, in a way that had not been apparent in the three Meiji-​period sengū that had preceded it. Ever since the Meiji Constitution of 1889 defined the emperor as head of state, his involvement with the rites sengū, of course, gave them a public quality. Ise was, moreover, a state shrine: its priests were paid by the state, which also underwrote all its rites, including the sengū. Nonetheless, the state had failed to exploit its potential in terms of production and performance. For example, on 2 October 1889 the governor of Mie Prefecture was the state’s sole representative at the Inner Shrine. Twenty years later, on 2 October 1909, the Mie governor was accompanied by the home minister and the chief of the Home Ministry’s Shrine Bureau. But on 2 October 1929, matters were very different. First and foremost, there was Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi (Figure 9.1). Clad in the garb of the ancient Japanese court, Hamaguchi participated as a ‘ritual escort’ (gubuin), an integral member of the sengyo procession that accompanied Amaterasu on her way from the old kami hall to the new. Hamaguchi’s presence was an unprecedented display of intimacy between the state and Ise rites; this was a late 1920s manifestation of the hallowed Meiji ideal of unifying rites and rule (saisei itchi). In that solemn procession many other state representatives were also found: the Imperial Household minister, the interior minister, the president of the Privy Council, and the speakers of the Upper and Lower Houses of the Diet. Representatives of the chiefs of the Home, Foreign, Finance, Army, Navy, Justice, Education, Agriculture, Commerce and Railway Ministries, and of the Upper and Lower Houses of the Diet were there, too; as were recipients of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum. Imperial Army generals and Navy admirals were joined by the governor generals of Korea and Taiwan, Sakhalin and the South Sea Islands.10 Multiple definitions of a modern state rite are no doubt possible, but a prerequisite must surely be the participation of the prime minister, and of the men occupying the upper echelons of state power. These conditions were amply met in Ise on 2 October 1929.

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Figure 9.1.  Prime Minister Hamaguchi in Ise, 2 October 1929. Source: Rekishi shashin, 11 (1929), p. 6.

Striking, too, was the uniformed presence of the Imperial Army and Navy. From 1889, the army had been deployed to escort the Sun Goddess on her progress; soldiers were organized into a ceremonial guard (gijōhei) of units comprising some 200 men. In 1929, 300 men of the 33rd Infantry Regiment provided Amaterasu with her armed escort, and their trumpeters marked her safe withdrawal into the new kami hall with a performance of the anthem Kuni no shizume (Pacifying the realm). Thirty-​six warships from the Imperial Navy were anchored in Ise Bay off Futami: destroyers, minesweepers and submarines.11 On the morning of 2 October, the commanders and crew of these vessels, numbering some 8,000 uniformed men, marched to the Inner and Outer Shrines to perform acts of worship. And when darkness fell, these warships, fully dressed, were illuminated.12 There is a final, and most obvious, point to be made about state and sengū in 1929. From its very inception the sengū rite had an inherent political quality. It is, after all, nothing so much as a display of the sacred source of secular power since the Sun Goddess, ancestress of the emperor, deigns fleetingly and tantalizingly to enter the human world. In 1929, she had as escorts not only shrine priests and ritualists, but also the most powerful men in the land. Her apparition served as a dramatic, public demonstration of the nature of state power as centred in the emperor, a sovereign

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of divine descent. To overlook this essentially political nature of the modern sengū is to misread the meaning of the rite. The Sun Goddess does not, in fact, move to a new kami hall on account of essential building works; rather, shrine rebuilding is a political strategy deployed to enable the goddess’s appearance in the human realm, which is nothing other than a display of political power. The emergence of the Sun Goddess, not the rebuilding, is the point. It is interesting that in 1929, bureaucrats and intellectuals began to speak about the sengū in precisely these terms. In 1930 Home Ministry bureaucrat Saida Moriuji compared Ise’s sengū to the familiar practice of senza (‘moving the kami’) during local shrine festivals. He observed that building work was always secondary; what mattered was the ‘resurrection’ of the kami, or the kami’s ‘apparition’ in the human community. For Saida, this was precisely the sengū dynamic.13 Ise ritualist (shōten) Hoshino Teruoki reached a similar conclusion:  the rite was not so much about erecting buildings, as it was about the emperor’s public display of veneration for his ancestor, the Sun Goddess.14 Shinto intellectual Kakei Katsuhiko proposed the Sun Goddess’s procession be likened to an emperor’s progress through his realm of the sort that was carried out in former times.15 When Prime Minister Hamaguchi said in an interview with the Asahi that the rite served to ‘strengthen understanding of the fundamental meaning of our national essence (kokutai)’, he, too, was pointing to the rite’s dominant political function.16 The sengū was for him nothing so much as a dramatic display of the sacred source of imperial power.

Popular Participation The 1929 sengū was a multilayered affair. It was an imperial rite situated in both Ise and the imperial palace, and a state rite involving the most powerful men in the land. It needs to be understood ultimately, however, as a national rite that engaged the entire nation in a way that had never before been imagined, let alone attempted.17 The conditions for a national rite are understood here to be that the ‘beat’ emanating from the ritual centre reverberates across the nation, and that it generates a resonance in the form of a popular response to the reverberation. Ritual reverberation and resonance are not spontaneous phenomena; they are the outcomes of the state’s deployment of multiple technologies, although some scope typically remains for people to respond –​or not –​of their own free will.18 In 1929, the emperor issued a rescript declaring 2 October a national holiday. This was the technique that made nationwide popular participation possible. So, where on 2 October were the people? Rows of spectators were accommodated in the Inner Shrine along the path from the old compound to the new. The spectators of Amaterasu’s progress included peers of the realm, Upper and Lower Houses Diet members, representatives of all Buddhist denominations and Shinto sects, senior clergy from different Christian denominations, members of prefectural governments, mayors, city counsellors, and ward and town chiefs. Also present were delegates of school pupils, university students and youth groups from across Japan. Some 15,000 were accommodated

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in the Inner Shrine precinct. The Asahi newspaper reported that all these people ‘prostrated themselves, foreheads to the ground’ as the Sun Goddess passed by; there then arose ‘the most moving surge of hands clapping’.19 Some 20,000 other pilgrims lined the main path from the Uji Bridge through the sacred garden towards the Inner Shrine compound. After the Sun Goddess had withdrawn safely into her new sanctuary, ‘pilgrims in endless numbers made their way to the Inner Shrine compound where, prostrate, they offered up sincerity to the goddess’.20 All in all some 60,000 people are said to have descended on Ujiyamada on this day. People came on steam trains, some run especially for the occasion, taking advantage of cut-​price day tickets. Despite the pouring rain, ‘the city was a-​bustle as never before in its history’. Many pilgrims alighted at Yamada Station, and there awaiting them was a massive celebratory arch. The streets beyond the arch were lined with red and white banners; there were lanterns inlaid with mother-​of-​ pearl; the national flag fluttered everywhere in the autumn breeze; one-​yen taxis were constantly on the move, ferrying people back and forth from the station. ‘Nothing in Ujiyamada City was immune to the mood of celebration.’21 But it was not merely Ujiyamada that was gripped with a festive mood. Celebrations were held across Japan. Shrines and schools up and down the country were expected to play a major role. The Home Ministry instructed all shrine priests in the land –​those of the elite kokuheisha shrines as well as ‘general shrines’ –​to host ‘rites of remote veneration’ (yōhai shiki) for their parishioners. The Education Ministry, meanwhile, instructed schools and youth groups to stage what it called rites of celebration (hōga shiki). These were formal events, newly fangled for October 1929. Headmaster and pupils would turn to face Ise and worship Amaterasu. The headmaster would then recite the Imperial Rescript on Education, and talk to pupils about its meaning; the rites would also involve the singing of a new ‘Ise hymn’ (hōshō shōka). 2 October was a national holiday, but schools would open to engage pupils in these celebrations. The Ise Shrine Office prepared guidelines for schools and youth groups, which the Home and Education ministries distributed across the land.22 The radio was another technique deployed by the government to achieve nationwide reverberation. Less than 10 per cent of households in urban Japan owned radios in 1929, but the government, nonetheless, believed radio broadcasts were essential to engaging the populace. Reporters from NHK’s Nagoya Bureau (JOCK) were at the Inner Shrine, and the station broadcast the events of the evening live, scene by scene.23 JOCK also broadcast a series of lectures by prominent figures on Ise’s place in modern Japan. On 2 October, the home minister himself addressed the nation. Speaking on the topic of ‘Celebrating the Goddess’s progress’, he declared the rite to be a unique opportunity to ‘consolidate a sense of spiritual unity among the people, centred on belief in the Ise Shrines’.24 In Tokyo, the Meiji Shrine was a major focus of celebration. From 5.30 in the morning, people descended on the shrine in large numbers. The festive mood was sustained by crowds of students, workers who had come to mark the national holiday, sightseers from outside the capital and soldiers. At 8  p.m. Meiji Shrine priests performed a rite of Ise worship. In Kyoto, a news reporter found the city

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overtaken by a reverent mood, and was especially struck by events in the Kanebō factory, where thousands of employees, male and female, had assembled in the early morning to face Ise and worship the Sun Goddess. The Meiji emperor’s mausoleum in Fushimi Momoyama, and the Upper and Lower Kamo Shrines in central Kyoto all staged night-​time rites of Ise worship. In Osaka, too, ‘the entire city was swept up in a mood of celebration’. Houseowners flew the national flag, and streetcars sported bunting as a sign of their festive intent. Crowds of pilgrims made their way to Ikukunitama, Ōsaka Tenmangū and Iwatsuta Shrines.25 The government mobilized the Home Ministry, the Education Ministry, the Railway Ministry, the Army and Navy Ministries, and the Finance Ministry to set in motion a nationwide ritual reverberation. Indeed, the reverberation was felt in the colonies, too. Some forty consulates in Manchuria and China performed celebratory rites of one sort or another, and engaged schoolchildren as well.26 It is nigh on impossible to weigh up the ‘resonance’: how the populace responded, in what numbers and with what degree of spontaneity, as opposed to compulsion. One can assume a multiplicity of motives for popular participation; this was, after all, a national holiday. A few cases of resistance were recorded. The Gyōsei School in Tokyo, the Osaka Meisei Shōgyō School, the Kaisei School in Nagasaki and Ōshima Girls’ School in Amami Ōshima all refused to host the celebratory rites explicitly requested by the Education Ministry. These were all Catholic schools, which resisted participation on religious grounds.27 It would appear, though, that they were exceptional. What is clear is that the events of 2 October 1929 mark a new intensity in the relationship between the Ise Shrines and the people, who were now travelling to Ise in numbers far in excess of those in the Meiji period or, indeed, at any time before then.

Ise Discourse in the 1920s and 1930s Here we  explore multiple discursive developments that were essential to the formation of this new twentieth-​century relationship. We refer specifically to not only the print media, the Education Ministry and the evolving school curricula, but also the publicity campaigns launched by the Ise Shrines and various associated groups. The question of discourse, which relates not only to textual narrative but also to the deployment of visual images, matters because we know that it plays a vital role in the construction of social reality. Media constructed people’s understanding of Ise in the 1920s and 1930s and shaped their experience. The Asahi shinbun coverage of the 2 October 1929 sengyo rite can help us to understand how media evolved in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Asahi was selling 1.5 million copies a day in the 1920s, and its approach to Ise was more or less typical of the national press coverage in 1929. A striking feature of this coverage, especially when compared to that of twenty years before, was the use of visual images. Back in 1909, printing techniques were still primitive and the understanding of the impact of images was limited. In March 1909, for example, the Asahi carried a photograph of Ise’s Uji Bridge, but

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no further images until 2 October when it featured two small photos of the Inner and Outer Shrine compounds. The caption read simply:  ‘Today the sengyo rite.’ The images were, in fact, embedded in an article unconnected with Ise or the Sun Goddess’s progress on that evening, and neither they nor their reductive captions revealed anything of the rite. On 4 October 1909, the Asahi morning edition had an image of the imperial envoy crossing the Uji Bridge in a horse-​drawn carriage, and –​incongruously perhaps –​of the shrine’s Noh stage. Again, these images can have done little to enhance readers’ understanding of the momentous events that had unfolded two days earlier. Twenty years on, the Asahi’s use of visual media reflects the availability of new technologies, to be sure, but also new understandings of the power of the image. From September 1929, the paper carried multiple images of ritual events; they functioned as vital embellishments to the text. In that month there were, for example, photographs of treasures offered up to the Sun Goddess, and a vivid artist’s impression of the tokugō ‘reading rite’, in which priests run ritual checks over the treasures prior to their being placed in the Inner Shrine kami hall. The Asahi morning edition of 2 October reproduced a painting of Amaterasu progressing from old sanctuary to new, the better to convey the mystery and solemnity of the rite that was to unfold later in the day. The photos of the prime minister, imperial envoy and government ministers reproduced in the 2 October evening edition and again in the 3 October morning edition recreated for readers the events in all their gravity. During the course of 1929, the Asahi published some 160 articles dealing in some way with Ise and/​or the sengū; this was more than twice as many as in 1909. In the four days from 1 to 4 October 1929, the paper published twenty-​ four articles with a total character count of 14,000 characters. The vast majority featured on either page 1 of the evening edition or page 2 of the morning edition (the front page of which was always given over entirely to advertisements). In the same period in 1909, the Asahi had published a mere six articles of some 4,000 characters, with all articles appearing on pages 4, 5 or 6. The Asahi page layout in 1929 was far more visually arresting than twenty years before, too: the headlines were altogether more explanatory in nature, and the textual narrative itself was fragmented into digestible portions by subheads and sub-​subheads. The Asahi headline on 2 October 1929 ran like this: Unprecedented ceremony performed with awe Today the progress at the imperial Inner Shrine With the deepest respect, we report that His Holiness the Sovereign of Japan will venerate from within the palace The joyous festival of the shikinen sengū28

The headlines, and the textual narrative that follows, were garnered with key adjectives and adverbs selected to tug at readers’ emotions and move them to feelings of awe. The most frequently recurring adjective in the article was

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kashiko(ki), meaning ‘awed’, ‘awe-​inspiring’ or ‘awe-​filled’. Twenty years earlier the word appeared nowhere in the Asahi. The adjectives kōgōshii (sublime) and gen/​gon (as in shingen, solemn, and sōgon, majestic) frequently recurred, too. The emperor’s act of veneration was ‘awe-​inspiring beyond compare’; the withdrawal of the Sun Goddess into her new kami hall was a moment of ‘limitless awe’; the fact that all her treasures were crafted in Japan was ‘inspiring of awe without end’. ‘Sublime’ was the Goddess’s progress, for it transported the nation back to the mythical Plain of High Heaven. The court garb worn by the emperor in Tokyo partook of ‘sublimity’, as did the murmuring of the Isuzu River. There was a ‘sublimity and a nobility that defy description’ in the imperial ancestress nearing her new kami hall. An ‘inspiring solemnity’ overcame the Inner Shrine as darkness fell; the strains of court music were ‘elevated’, ‘mystical’ and ‘elegant’.29 The Asahi’s Ise discourse in 1929 constituted a striking evolution from 1909, but it also laid down an important marker for future coverage of the shrine and its rites. The same discourse was reproduced in the Asahi –​and other papers, too, of course –​when the Shōwa emperor visited Ise in June 1940 as part of the nationwide celebrations to commemorate the 2,600th anniversary of Japan’s founding; it was reprised when he visited again in December 1942, as Japan was engaged in total war. The point is not simply that new media techniques changed media discourse, but rather that the Ise Shrines themselves evolved. The year 1929 was a major turning point. One striking feature about the Asahi coverage in 1929 is its references to motifs from the foundation myths: to the Plain of High Heaven and Amaterasu’s emergence from the Heavenly Rock-​Cave in particular. This was a discourse that had for years now featured in the national school curriculum. By the start of the Taishō period, the Ise Shrines and the Sun Goddess had come to assume a prominent place in history, literature and ethics classes. The classes were taught using state-​sanctioned textbooks, and they merit our attention here. The system of state sanctioning was implemented in 1903, and underwent periodic revision thereafter. Here, for the sake of convenience, I consider Ise discourse as formulated for the third and fourth revisions of the curriculum, published in 1918 and 1933, respectively. By 1910, 96 per cent of all Japanese children were attending primary school; 100 per cent attendance was achieved in 1939. In the period under consideration, then, the vast majority of Japanese children were poring over the pages of history, literature and ethics books. So what did they learn there of the Ise Shrines and their kami? The Normal Primary School National History (Jinjō shōgaku kokushi), published in 1921, was the approved history textbook. It began its narrative of Japanese history with the foundation myths, and so was little different from its predecessors published in 1904 and 1910.30 The mythical content was now thicker, though, with characters depicted for the first time as historical personages, and their adventures narrated as real historical events. ‘Amaterasu Ōmikami’ is the opening chapter in National History for fifth graders. Here they learned that the Sun Goddess sought refuge in a rock-​cave, unable to endure the misbehaviour of her younger brother, Susanowo; that Susanowo

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was then expelled to the region of Izumo; and that Ōkuninushi, Susanowo’s offspring, ruled the earth before ceding it to Amaterasu’s descendants, the unbroken line of Japanese emperors. The textbook authors constructed vital links between these ‘historical’ events and contemporary Taishō society: ‘Thus [did the myths] lay the foundations of our national polity (kokutai), immovable for all ages, with its legacy of a line of emperors unbroken.’ The mirror, which Amaterasu conferred upon her grandson Ninigi, ‘has been handed down from one generation of emperors to the next’ and is, to this day, ‘the sacred symbol of the imperial throne’. The National History links this mythical account to the Inner Shrine:  ‘The Ise Shrine worships the Great Goddess in the form of the sacred mirror, and is thus the subject of profound reverence on the part of generations of emperors and their subjects.’31 In the wake of the 26 February incident of 1936, the waging of total war on China in 1937 and the launch of the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign in the same year, the Education Revision Deliberative Committee (Kyōgaku sasshin hyōgikai) rewrote the history curriculum. It subordinated everything to the promotion of the kokutai. For the National History’s Ise discourse, this meant an evolution of well-​established themes, rather than dramatic change. The fourth revision (1940) began with a calligraphic rendering of the most famous of Amaterasu’s commands to her grandson, as featured in the Nihon shoki. Amaterasu tells Ninigi her descendants shall rule over Japan and dispatches him with the command: ‘Go ye! And assume rule!’ On the facing page is a chronology of emperors from Jinmu to Shōwa. The 1940 revision further emphasized Amaterasu’s boundless virtues:  ‘The Sun Goddess is a person (onkata) of the highest virtue. It is she who first planted rice and barley in our fields, and introduced sericulture, thus bestowing her blessings on all people.’32 The Ise Shrines also featured in the Japanese literature curriculum in the Taishō and Shōwa periods. Topic 1 in volume 8 of the Normal Primary School Reader (Jinjō shōgaku dokuhon) is ‘The Great Imperial Shrine’. Pupils learned that the shrine had been venerated not only by generations of emperors, but also by all Japanese people, whose hope was to visit Ise once in their lifetime. As an example of imperial reverence for Ise, the Primary School Reader cited ‘the emperors’ habitual dispatch of imperial emissaries’ to Ise on the occasion of its great rites, reporting to the Sun Goddess on great events in the realm. The authors gave special prominence to Emperor Meiji’s historic pilgrimage to Ise after the Russo-​Japanese war in October 1905. It was of ‘a splendour never before seen’.33 Topic 2 in the same volume was an encouragement to popular pilgrimage. The reader follows a fictional (female) pilgrim as she crosses Uji Bridge into the shrine’s sacred garden, passing the spoils of the Russo-​Japanese war displayed there:  the great cannon and the commemorative Cannon Barrel Tower. The pilgrim leads her readers on to the Inner Shrine compound, recording details of shrine architecture as she goes and articulating her profound sense of awe. The diary concludes with a poem by the Meiji emperor. A picture of a mother and child crossing the Uji Bridge embellishes the conceit.34 Pupils encountered Ise in their history and literature classes as fifth graders. But they were in fact already well acquainted with the shrine, owing to its appearance

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Figure 9.2.  The Taishō emperor entering the Inner Shrine, 1915. Source: Jinjō shōgaku shūshinsho, 1918, pp. 2–​3.

in the ethics curriculum for third graders. Chapter 15, ‘The Great Imperial Shrine’, of the Normal Primary Ethics Text (Jinjō shōgaku shūshinsho, 3rd revision, 1918, vol. 3)  carried a tantalizing image of the Inner Shrine roof, just visible beyond the itagaki fence. The accompanying text, deploying elaborate respect language, informs pupils that this is the shrine in which the emperor’s most august ancestress is enshrined, ‘and this is why we too must respect the shrine’.35 Chapter 27, ‘A Good Japanese’, underlines the point: ‘To become a good Japanese, we must praise the virtues of the emperor and empress, always revere the imperial shrine of Ise, and thus manifest hearts of loyalty and patriotism.’36 The ethics curriculum revisited Ise and the Sun Goddess in the fourth and fifth grades. But the most powerful narrative is reserved for sixth graders, who have already studied Ise in their history and literature lessons. Chapter 1 of the 1918 Normal Primary Ethics Text features a picture insert of the Taishō emperor in a horse-​drawn carriage at the Inner Shrine, shortly after his enthronement in 1915 (Figure 9.2). Pupils learn that the emperor personally appoints the Ise chief priest, that he dispatches envoys to Ise, that he venerates Ise from the imperial palace at the autumn kanname ritual and that he attaches the deepest significance to the sengū. Indeed, at the last sengū the emperor even consulted detailed documents relating to the building of the shrines. The ‘sacred precinct’ is described as ‘sublime beyond compare’; all who enter ‘feel purified to the depths of their hearts’. This culminates in a summons: ‘It is determined that all Japanese subjects must without fail visit [Ise] once in their lifetime.’37 Earlier exhortations to revere Ise have now become a command to embark on an Ise pilgrimage. It cannot be coincidental that school excursions to Ise began in earnest around this time. Of the 1934 revisions to the Ethics Text, one merits mention here. Heretofore, the connection of Sun Goddess with emperor had been that of divine ancestor to human sovereign. In the 1934 edition, the emperor’s descent from the Sun

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Goddess is taken to its logical conclusion, as the emperor himself is located now as a living god. This new imagining of the emperor appears in section 2, ‘Imperial House’, where pupils learn that ‘the emperor, whom the Japanese people revere as a kami, is the august descendant of the Sun Goddess. The emperor loves all his subjects just as the sun bestows its light on all of creation.’ This fact alone ‘renders Japan beyond compare with all nations on the earth.’38

Promoting Ise: The Shrine and Its Publicity In the 1920s, especially from around the time of the sengū in 1929, the press did much to promote Ise. The Education Ministry was playing its part, too, publishing textbooks that situate Ise as a topic vital to the education of all Japanese children. Throughout this time, the shrine was deploying complementary strategies of its own. To get a perspective on these, we need to step back briefly and pick up a narrative thread that began in late Meiji. We saw in Chapter  8 that the Ise chief priest, Tanaka Yoritsune, left the Ise Shrines in 1882 to found Jingūkyō, a new Shinto religion based on Ise-​centred belief and practice. Jingūkyō assumed charge of the ‘religious’ activities formerly conducted by the shrine and its priests. Theological formulation, religious preaching and the dissemination of Ise amulets were prominent among them. The life of Jingūkyō was short, however; it was dissolved in 1899. In its place emerged a new organization called Jingū hōsaikai (the Ise Worship Association). This Hōsaikai, unlike Jingūkyō, was a legally incorporated foundation and in law quite unrelated to religion. To all intents and purposes, however, it was the same organization. The head of Jingūkyō (a man called Fujioka Yoshifuru) now became Hōsaikai’s president. The head of Jingūkyō’s Kyoto HQ ran the Hōsaikai Kyoto office, and served as Hōsaikai’s vice president. The Hōsaikai also inherited all Jingūkyō property and rebranded it. The Ise Shrine College in Uji became Hōsaikai Central Headquarters; the Tokyo shrine formerly known as Tōkyō Daijingū (or Hibiya Daijingū) was rebranded the Hōsaikai Central Hall. Jingūkyō’s regional churches were reassigned as ‘regional headquarters’.39 The activities conducted by the Hōsaikai were extraordinarily similar to those of Jingūkyō; they, too, were simply rebranded now as ‘non-​religious’. Prominent among them was the manufacture and distribution of amulets (taima). Several reasons are at hand to explain this new situation. In 1899, the Japanese government abolished foreign settlements, granting foreigners the right of residence in the Japanese interior. Senior figures in government feared that this would prompt a surge in conversions to Christianity; this in turn would make inevitable the resumption of theological disputes about the Sun Goddess and her merits. The government deemed it vital that the Ise Shrines, especially, be removed from the disputatious realm of religion. In 1900, the Home Ministry created a new Shrine Bureau (Jinja kyoku), which it ran independently of the Religions Bureau (Shūkyō kyoku). The point was to make an institutional distinction between non-​ religious shrines on one hand, and religions like Christianity, Buddhism and

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‘sect (kyōha) Shinto’ on the other. Indeed, for many post-​war commentators, the creation of the Shrine Bureau was a moment of critical importance that marked the beginning of ‘state Shinto’.40 In this new situation, with shrines resituated as supra-​religious entities, it was anomalous to have Ise identified with the ‘religious’ Jingūkyō, and to entrust Jingūkyō with the dissemination of amulets as religious objects. Indeed, concern had already been voiced in the Diet about Jingūkyō’s involvement with amulet distribution.41 The demise of Jingūkyō meant an end to Ise’s institutional connections with ‘religion’ as newly defined, but the creation of the Hōsaikai made it possible for Ise’s propaganda activities to continue under a new ‘non-​religious’ guise. The Meiji government appeared to have high expectations of the Hōsaikai. At least, that much is implied by the presence at its launch in Tokyo in 1899 of the Imperial Household minister, the Imperial Household’s senior ritualist, the cabinet secretary and the Home Ministry’s undersecretary. Hōsaikai activities involved more than the manufacture and dissemination of amulets. The association established a Worship Centre (Hōsaisho) in its Tokyo headquarters, where officials performed rites of Ise worship. This site was neither a ‘religious’ church nor a ‘non-​religious’ shrine. The nature of the rites conducted here is not clear, but they were performed to coordinate with all major events in Ise’s annual ritual cycle.42 The Hōsaikai also ran a programme of lecture tours, which seem to have begun in earnest in the 1920s. Lectures addressed such ‘non-​religious’ themes as the legacy of the Sun Goddess, imperial rescripts and the essence of the classics. Finally, it produced and distributed numerous pamphlets:  Kyōrin (Forest of teachings), Sokoku (Motherland), Yōtoku (Cultivating virtue) and Kōka (Resplendent flower).43 The Hōsaikai was active from 1899 to 1945, but its engagement with Ise amulets lasted a mere decade. In 1912, manufacture and distribution were restored to the Ise Shrine Office, more specifically to a new department called the Kanbesho (Ritualists’ Division).44 The Kanbesho used the Hōsaikai network, itself based on the earlier Jingūkyō network, to distribute amulets across Japan, but it appears to have enjoyed only limited success, and in 1926, the Kanbesho surrendered its distributing role to the National Association of Shrine Priests (Zenkoku shinshokukai), even as it retained responsibility for amulet manufacture. Amulets were perhaps the most vital strategy for connecting the people to Ise. The early decades of the twentieth century saw a substantial increase in the numbers manufactured and disseminated per year. In 1905, the Hōsaikai oversaw the distribution of about 3.5 million amulets. By the following decade, the number had risen to five million. In the latter half of the 1920s, when the Kanbesho relinquished responsibility to the National Association of Shrine Priests, the number hit six million; in the 1930s it surged to ten million. In the 1940s the distribution of Ise amulets continued to expand, reaching a peak in 1945 of fourteen million, which approximated the total number of households in Japan at the time.45 There was a vital economic dimension to the distribution of amulets, of course. In the 1920s, when the National Association of Shrine Priests took over, the large amulet sold for fifty sen, and the regular size for ten sen.

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Twenty sen from the sale of the former and four sen from the latter went to the priests charged with their distribution.46 The remainder provided indispensable income for the Ise Shrines. These extraordinary numbers bear testament to the tireless work of local shrine priests, visiting parishioners to urge on them the purchase of amulets. The numbers also, no doubt, reflect the new national interest in Ise in the run-​up to, and aftermath of, the 1929 sengū. Again, the sense of national crisis prompted by Japan’s war against China and then against the United States in the Pacific War seems to be reflected in amulet sales. Amulets provided a source of spiritual comfort and strength in these crisis years. The statistics cited here conceal much, too. They do not reveal whether, or how frequently, amulets were forced upon households, how they were used, or whether they were habitually treated with respect, placed in family altars and revered. As we saw in the Meiji period, there was now too open resistance. The Research Group for Social Shinto Studies (Shakai Shintōgaku kenkyūkai) published in 1920 a wide-​ranging report on the past and present state of Ise amulet dissemination. It reported stiff resistance to their distribution in places as far apart as Kyoto, Fukui, Nagasaki, Niigata, Gifu, Yamagata, Hiroshima and Kagoshima Prefectures.47 The research group found that Shin Buddhists in these places were outspoken in their objection to the imposition of Ise amulets. In Hiroshima the situation was difficult in the extreme, with an average of ‘only 0.17 amulets distributed per 1000 households’ in some districts.48 The Shin Buddhists’ position on Ise amulets was well documented. The booklet Shinshū nitai myōshi dan (Reflections on the mystical principle of the doctrine of two truths), penned in 1916 by Yakushiji Kōshō, is one example among many. Yakushiji observed with alarm how local officials and schoolteachers led the way in insisting that all good subjects purchase an amulet annually, and that they worship it morning and night with two claps and two bows as they intone prayers. He reminded his readers that the government had made amulets a matter of free choice in the early Meiji years.49 He then fired a flurry of questions at Home Ministry bureaucrats: Are Ise amulets the sacred body of the Sun Goddess, or not? If so, why the necessity to purchase a new one every year? Surely it is the height of disrespect to dispose of the kami’s sacred body year in and year out, as though it were so much rubbish? But if amulets are not, after all, the kami’s sacred body, then what are they? Are they talismans? Is their purpose the purging of evil? If Ise amulets perform either one of these latter functions, they are tantamount to ‘ritual practice for this-​worldly benefits’, which Shinran explicitly prohibited. Yakushiji’s conclusion: ‘It is only natural therefore that [adherents of] Shin Buddhism cannot accept Ise amulets.’50 Ise amulets’ nature and meaning had remained a matter of contention ever since early Meiji, but in 1942, the government sought to clarify the matter once and for all. The Jingiin, the new free-​standing Office for Kami Affairs instituted in 1940, offered the definitive statement. Ise amulets were sacred himorogi, physical objects in which the kami dwells; families were to worship them morning and night throughout the year for the sacred objects they are. Amulets were, in brief, ‘a type of sakaki branch, a manifestation of the real presence of the sanctity of

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the Sun Goddess’.51 This conclusion was, of course, no comfort to Shin Buddhists. What is important to stress here is that amulets were distributed throughout Japan in millions in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. There were cases of resistance, to be sure, but it is clear that they played an essential role in sustaining and animating the connection between the emperor’s ancestor in Ise and his subjects in all quarters of the realm.

Ujiyamada and the Pilgrims’ Return It was no doubt a complex combination of factors that brought pilgrims back to Ise in the Taishō and Shōwa periods. But back they came –​in unprecedented numbers. In 1929, the year of the sengū, two million Japanese visited Ise, a jump of 500,000 from the previous year. In 1938, the year after Japan embarked on all-​out war with China, pilgrim numbers hit three million. When the Pacific War erupted in 1941, four million Japanese made their way to Ise.52 National events, such as the 1929 sengū, and crises like the war with China from 1937 and with the West from 1941, drew people to Ise in vast numbers. That people chose Ise as their destination was partly, at least, the outcome of the strategies we have been observing thus far: the intensity of media coverage, the content of compulsory education and the vigour of shrine priests devoted to amulet distribution. The statistics cited here are taken from records kept by the Ise Shrine’s Security Department. They are of considerable interest. They show, for example, that notwithstanding the strategies mentioned earlier, far more pilgrims were visiting the Outer Shrine than the Inner Shrine. In 1929, for example, just over two million people visited the Outer Shrine, while 1.7 million visited the Inner Shrine. In 1942, the Outer Shrine hosted 4.3 million pilgrims, while numbers at the Inner Shrine were considerably lower at 3.4 million. This phenomenon is to be explained partly, at least, by convenience: Yamada was simply easier to access than Uji, notwithstanding the creation of the new Imperial Road. This phenomenon endured well into the post-​war period. A second point to mention is that the Ise Shrine Office assembled two sets of statistics: for pilgrims at the Inner and at the Outer Shrines, and aggregated the two. The 3.7 million pilgrims claimed for 1929, and the 7.7 million for 1942, were aggregates of numbers taken at both shrines.53 The problem with the aggregate is obvious: it counts many pilgrims twice. After all, the majority visited both shrines. The statistics cited in this chapter relate to Outer Shrine pilgrims, since they are consistently the greater number. It seems to be a fairly reliable number, too, corresponding closely, as it does, to statistics compiled by the Ujiyamada Chamber of Commerce of passengers alighting from trains at Ujiyamada’s several stations. From the Taishō period onwards, people from all social classes, all walks of life, all ages and both sexes were heading to Ise. In early Shōwa, various new pilgrimage phenomena appeared. The Ise Pilgrimage Handbook (Ise sangū yōran) published in 1929 by Yamada innkeeper Kitamura Jinzō notes, for example, significant numbers of Ise-​bound newly-​weds. There was, he reminds his readers,

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a long-​held taboo that couples making a pilgrimage to Ise would suffer some misfortune in their marriage, but the Taishō emperor banished this taboo when he visited Ise as crown prince with his bride in May 1900. The young were now exploiting this imperial precedent in what Kitamura described as an ‘especially significant and joyous’ development.54 The same handbook identified pilgrimage en famille as ‘a most striking phenomenon’:  ‘Harmony, peace and smiles all around: small intimate families, one after the other, make their way through the shrine precinct. Up and down the pilgrim’s path they go.’55 The handbook draws to its readers’ attention a veritable boom in company-​organized pilgrimage, too. Large companies, notably those involved in railway and streetcar manufacture and shipping, were sending employees to Ise on company pilgrimages. The benefits to employers were undeniable, insists our author. Employees post-​pilgrimage were altogether different, their attitude invariably transformed into one of enthusiasm and sincerity. ‘They work with a new sense of harmony and loyalty. Gone are fears of abominable industrial disputes and strikes!’56 Finally, the handbook’s author drew attention to pilgrimage by schoolchildren: Adorable primary schoolchildren, middle school and girls’ school pupils, special school students, army reservists, and members of youth groups: in ever-​ increasing numbers they make their way to Ise in spring and autumn from every prefecture in the land, led by their teachers and instructors.57

School trips to Ise were, indeed, a signal feature of its reconnection with the people of Japan in the 1920s and beyond. They are sufficiently important to merit further comment here. It was around 1918 that school textbooks first urged pupils to head to Ise. In 1921, the first statistics were compiled and published for school-​organized pilgrimages. It is difficult to get a national perspective on this new phenomenon, but Osaka appears to have taken the initiative. A philanthropist by the name of Obiya Denzaburō was a key figure. As Obiya explains it, his first move was to fund a trip to Ise for sixty pupils in the primary school attended by his own children. This was in 1918. The next year, he invited the Osaka prefectural governor, the Osaka mayor and members of Osaka City Council –​220 men in all –​to Ise. There, he seized the opportunity to argue that Osaka City should sponsor what he called ‘commemorative pilgrimage’ to Ise for all its final year pupils. Pupils should be told at matriculation that an Ise pilgrimage awaited them in their final year; they would then anticipate it for a full six years so that, on the dawn of the day they headed for Ise, they would be moved profoundly by a spirit of reverence. The benefits for children’s spiritual education would be immense.58 Obiya’s arguments won the day and, from 1921, all 25,000 final year pupils from Osaka municipal schools went on a pilgrimage to Ise, subsidized by Osaka City Ward budgets. Obiya organized accommodation for the pupils at inns in Uji and Yamada, and negotiated good prices with souvenir sellers.59 At the same time, he funded the building of a young people’s recreational facility in Ujiyamada, which he called the Divine Capital Woodland School (Shinto rinkan gakusha). Obiya maintained

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his passionate interest in Ise and later built Josetsuen Park, a recreational area for pilgrims adjacent to the Inner Shrine. Whether Obiya really was, as he insisted, the pioneer of school trips to Ise is unclear. What matters is that from the 1920s more than a quarter of a million pupils were visiting Ise each year. The majority came from central Japan. A decade later, that number had doubled. In the latter half of the 1920s, school parties began arriving from further afield, including Tokyo. The impetus in Tokyo came not from an individual philanthropist, but from the Tokyo Prefectural Federal Education Committee. In 1927, this committee passed a resolution that ‘pilgrimage to Ise and the Momoyama and Tama mausoleums was most efficacious’ for cultivating in school pupils a sense of reverence for the kami.60 Six thousand pupils from Tokyo visited Ise that same year. Two years later the same committee was arguing that Ise pilgrimage and mausoleum veneration were now indispensable.61 There was opposition from some quarters that the costs of travel from Tokyo were prohibitive, but by the 1930s, 200,000 pupils from schools in charge of the committee were heading to Ise each year. New impetus to the endeavour was added by the infamous ‘declaration to clarify the national polity’ (kokutai meichō seimei), issued by the government of Okada Keisuke in 1935. This declaration, drawn up by the civilian government under pressure from the military and ultra-​right wing groups, was intended to banish from the public realm constitutional theories about emperorship, and to resituate the emperor uniquely as a sacred presence who transcends historical space and time. This theory of emperorship, as we saw, featured in school textbooks in the 1930s, too. The Ise kami gave legitimacy to this new orthodoxy, and it is not surprising that the government was newly enthusiastic about Ise pilgrimages for schoolchildren. The Tokyo Prefectural Federal Education Committee duly requested the Railway Ministry to introduce concessions on Tokyo-​Ise train fares. Similar pressure was being applied by education committees elsewhere in the country, too, and Railways Minister Uchida Nobunari responded with a promise to provide free Ise pilgrimage for all schoolchildren. It was after all ‘vital for final year primary school pupils to worship at Ise, and there articulate their gratitude for the national polity (kokutai)’.62 Ultimately, the government rejected as too costly the idea of free school trips to Ise for all, but ministers did grant a 20 per cent reduction in fares for all school parties heading to Ise.63 This proved an immense boost to schools in Tokyo and elsewhere. In 1936, 85 per cent of Tokyo schools were sending children –​76,000 in total –​to Ise. By 1940, about one million schoolchildren from across Japan were visiting Ise; the number approximated to almost one in three of all Ise pilgrims.64

Ujiyamada in the Early Twentieth Century At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kansai Railway and the Sangū Railway were running direct trains from Osaka, Kyoto and Nagoya to Ujiyamada. In 1907, both companies were merged and nationalized. The National Railway Company (Kokuyū tetsudō) shortly thereafter opened up lines east from Ujiyamada through

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to Futami and Toba on the coast. In 1918, National Rail introduced an overnight service from Tokyo to Toba; these were fast comfortable trains fitted out with sleeping compartments. But the greater innovation was in the private sector. In the late 1920s, entrepreneurs created two new private railway companies, with an eye to the huge numbers of pilgrims anticipated for the events of 1929. The Ise Electric Railway Company (Ise den) was founded in 1926, and the Pilgrims’ Express Railway (Sankyū for short) the following year. Ise Electric sought custom from pilgrims in Gifu and the Hokuriku district of Japan, and by 1930 was running two express trains, Hatsumi and Kamiji, from Kuwana, north of Mie Prefecture, down to Daijingū Mae Station; this was a new Ise Electric terminal constructed a stone’s throw from the Outer Shrine. The Sankyū Railway, meanwhile, targeted pilgrims from Kobe and Osaka. It opened a line from Uehonmachi Station in Osaka to Ujiyamada in 1930. The trains it ran were fast and offered special compartments for families and small groups. While the National Rail expresses did Osaka-​Ujiyamada in three hours and ten minutes, the ‘super fast Sankyū expresses’ required just two hours and one minute. In 1936, Sankyū bought up Ise Electric, and then began a prolonged period of keen competition with National Rail. Both companies offered cut-​price fares, free lunch boxes and souvenir coupons in a relentless bid for the custom of pilgrim-​passengers. Transport within Ujiyamada was also evolving. Miyagawa Streetcars ran alongside the Imperial Road from the Outer Shrine through Kuratayama to the Inner Shrine, and beyond to Futami on the coast. In 1925, streetcar tracks were extended to the foot of Mount Asama where they connected with the Asama cable car, whose gradient was ‘the steepest in Asia and the second steepest on earth’.65 In 1931, the bus network extending from Yamada was invigorated, so that the major sites of Ujiyamada were all accessible like never before –​and cheaply so. Pilgrims typically alighted at Daijingū Mae or Yamada Station. The Mie Prefecture Product Display Pavilion awaited them there. They would walk to the Outer Shrine, and then take a bus or streetcar –​or perhaps even walk again –​along the Imperial Road to the museums and gardens of Kuratayama. In Kuratayama, there stood now not only the museums built by the Shin’enkai, but also a new shrine dedicated to Yamato-​hime. As we saw in Chapter 1, Yamato-​hime was the legendary princess who had toured the provinces with Amaterasu in search of a suitable site for her enshrinement. Yamato-​hime Shrine, which was completed in 1923, features in all guidebooks of the pre-​war years as a must-​see site. Pilgrims who proceeded to the Inner Shrine in the early Shōwa years found it in the process of change. In 1920, the aforementioned Obiya Denzaburō built Josetsuen Park, which, he claimed, was visited by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims ever year. It occupied an area of 40,000 square metres, and accommodated a large hall for pilgrims to rest and drink tea, as well as a VIP lodge.66 There was also now the Ujibashi Park, a recreational area of some 25,000 square metres, by Uji Bridge.67 Several score dwellings had been demolished to create this new open space in early Shōwa, which featured rest facilities for a thousand pilgrims. Guidebooks of the 1920s and 1930s beckoned pilgrims along the old pilgrims’ path as well. This was the path that threaded its way from the Outer Shrine through the Furuichi pleasure quarters to the Inner Shrine. It was renowned for

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its steep inclines and narrow girth, but major roadworks in the 1920s levelled it out and expanded it sufficiently to allow buses through. In the 1930s, the pleasure district was no longer what it once was, but ‘the shadow it had cast in an earlier age’ was still evident.68 Bizen’ya and Sugimotoya, the two greatest teahouses, had both reopened after difficult times and were staging performances of traditional Ise dance and music. The 1932 pamphlet O-​Ise mairi no shiori reports that they were the only places left, but that Furuichi was ‘well worth a visit for a sense of the Ise pilgrimage in former times’; a group of fifty could enjoy Ise ondo dances for five yen. Also, inns like the Ryōguchiya, a former teahouse, and the sprawling Gojūni Hotel welcomed parties of schoolchildren; and Daiyasu Hotel was still flourishing in the 1930s. In fact, however, Furuichi was drawing only a small portion of the few pilgrims who chose to stay over in Ujiyamada. The advent of the railway meant more pilgrims did the pilgrimage in a day; for those needing a bed for the night, the vast Unitachi and Takachiho Inns adjacent to Yamada Station were far more convenient. Others stayed in the modern tourist resorts of Futami or Toba. In the 1930s, all Ujiyamada’s sites, sacred as well as secular, were accessible and affordable. In 1932, a pilgrim could take a streetcar from the Outer Shrine to the Inner Shrine and on to Mount Asama, transfer to the cable car and board a bus for a tour of the mountain top, before ending with a visit to Futami, all for 1.50 yen. The round trip took just five hours and forty minutes. Taxis were available, too: a car took five pilgrims on a tour of the most important sites in Ujiyamada and on to Futami and back; all for six yen in just three hours.69 Access to Ujiyamada, and transport around the city, were improving constantly, but there had been no major rethinking of city spaces since the dissolution of the Shin’enkai back in 1912. In spring 1929, however, just before the sengū of that year, Ise Mayor Fukuchi Yoshiyuki launched a committee to explore the feasibility of transforming Ujiyamada into what he called ‘a Grand Divine Capital’. The outcome of the committee’s deliberations over the next twelve months was published as Dai Shinto seichi keikaku an, which translates inelegantly, but accurately enough, as ‘Draft Proposal for Constructing a Major Divine Capital as a Sacred Centre’.70 The Inner and Outer Shrines would each have landscaped ‘outer precincts’, inspired, it seems, by the design of the Meiji Shrine just completed in 1926. Kuratayama would finally get the racecourse and art gallery proposed by the Shin’enkai back in the Meiji period; there would be a martial arts hall, too, and new facilities for pilgrims’ refreshments, a youth hall and an educational facility. Quality spaces (fūchi chiku) and spaces of scenic beauty (bikan chiku) would be identified and protected. These were new concepts, first applied to the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo.71 Mayor Fukuchi also wanted a radical rethinking and refurbishing of Ujiyamada’s road network. There was a provision in his plan for a ‘sanitised pleasure quarters’, and Ujiyamada would get its first underground sewage system.72 There are echoes here of Ōta Kosaburō’s Shin’enkai project, and Mayor Fukuchi acknowledged his debts, lauding Ōta for his dedication and his legacy. While Ōta had been reliant on voluntary donations, Fukuchi sought state support. In February 1933, he set off to Tokyo to present his plans to Prime Minister Saitō Makoto and Home Minister Yamamoto Tatsuo.73 In Tokyo, Fukuchi argued that Ujiyamada

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City comprised ‘a sacred site without compare in the realm’. For two millennia, Ise had been the object of worship by the imperial family and imperial subjects; now was the time for its rebirth as a Grand Divine Capital, a sacred city Japan might boast of to the entire world. For Fukuchi, this was ‘the most significant and pressing issue, given the circumstances which Japan confronted’.74 Fukuchi’s Tokyo mission was a resounding success. Prime Minister Saitō was suitably impressed, declaring his ‘sympathy with the spirit of the plan’ and his readiness to explore how the plan might become policy.75 Fukuchi’s proposal was subsequently debated in both Houses of the Diet and won approval. It was in 1936, a full three years later, that the government made its first move. In February, it identified multiple ‘conservation zones’ within Ujiyamada. In all, twenty-​nine sites  –​occupying a total area of 4,000 hectares  –​earned the ‘quality space’ designation. Miyagawa, Yamada, Kuratayama, Uji, Futami and Mount Asama were the most prominent among them. Subsequently, the government designated further sites of scenic beauty, which meant, in practice, the imposition of restrictions on the height of new buildings, and the colours that might be used to paint the external walls of Ujiyamada buildings.76 In autumn of the same year, the home minister constituted a committee to refine Mayor Fukuchi’s plans. The committee comprised the Ujiyamada mayor, the Ise Shrine chief priest, the Mie prefectural governor, as well as the undersecretaries of the Finance, Imperial Household and Railway Ministries. For a full two years they deliberated, before coming up with an outline, which led eventually in 1940 to the passing of a Special City Planning Law Related to the Ise Shrines (Jingū kankei tokubetsu toshi keikaku hō).77 This Special City Planning Law envisaged the Grand Divine Capital materializing in two phases. The first would be completed in time for the 1949 sengū, and a budget of eighteen million yen was approved for this phase. The smaller sum of twelve million was set aside for a subsequent second phase. The Special City Planning Law departed somewhat from Fukuchi’s vision of 1929, but it, nonetheless, heralded a significant spatial transformation of Ujiyamada. Major works would take place at the Outer Shrine. The commercial quarter there would be set back a further 200 metres from the shrine entrance. Yamada Station would itself be relocated 500 metres away to open up new uncluttered spaces to welcome pilgrims. The Imperial Road would be widened, with broad grass verges laid on either side. A new road would co-​join the Outer Shrine directly with the Inner Shrine. The plans for refurbishing Kuratayama were scaled back –​the racecourse and art gallery plans were scrapped –​but major extension works would be carried out to the Chōkokan museum. Access to the Inner Shrine entrance would be overhauled, too. Oharai Machi, the commercial quarter there, would be set back 200 metres from the shrine entrance in order to open up the space around Uji Bridge. Major works by Uji Bridge and at the head of the Isuzu River would solve the perennial problem of the Isuzu River overflowing into Oharai Machi. Plans for the underground sewage works would go ahead.78 In March 1941, the Ujiyamada mayor welcomed Home Minister Hiranuma Kiichirō to his city, and hosted a formal ceremony to launch the work sanctioned by the Special City Planning Law of the previous year. Work at the head of the

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Isuzu River began immediately thereafter, notwithstanding the economic and other pressures attendant on Japan’s waging of total war with China.79 By the end of that year, of course, Japan had declared war on the United States and Britain, and as Japan’s fortunes in the war quickly turned, plans to transform Ujiyamada into a Divine Capital appeared ever more unrealistic. In 1944, the Special City Planning Law was abandoned. The law, in which not only Ujiyamada, but also the central government had invested so much, left very little to posterity. War was to blame.

Ise at War No pilgrim crossing the Uji Bridge into the Inner Shrine precinct could miss the Cannon Barrel Tower (hōshintō), presented to the shrine by Tōgō Heihachirō, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, after the Russo-​Japanese war of 1904–​ 5. Fashioned out of the barrel of a cannon captured from a Russian warship, it stood in the sacred garden just to the left of the bridge, its tip visible above the treetops. At the foot of the tower were cannon-​rounds from another Russian naval vessel. Across Uji Bridge to the right, alongside the main path to the Inner Shrine compound, were more cannon, a howitzer and some small arms. These were spoils of the Sino-​Japanese war of 1894–​5. Nearby was a display of weaponry and other spoils of the Russo-​Japanese conflict (Figure 9.3). That the Ise Shrines developed a close connection with the Imperial Army and Navy, and with the prosecution of war itself, is hardly a cause for surprise. War is a national undertaking and Ise was, alongside Yasukuni Shrine and the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, the greatest of the nation’s sacred sites. The connection was evident in permanent displays of military hardware, but there was also a dynamic, ritual dimension. The emperor dispatched envoys to Ise to announce the declaration of war against China in 1894 and against Russia a decade later; imperial envoys returned to Ise later to report Japan’s victories to the Sun Goddess. The Meiji emperor commemorated his army’s victory over Russia by heading to Ise in person in 1905. In 1910, envoys informed the Sun Goddess of the annexation of Korea, in 1914 of the outbreak of war with Germany and in 1920 of the restoration of peace.80 In the Shōwa era, Ise’s war connection inevitably deepened. An imperial envoy took to Ise tidings of the Marco Polo Bridge incident in July 1937.81 What had been ‘reports’ rendered to Amaterasu of incidents became, in the following year, ‘prayers for the everlasting success of the imperial military, and the resurgence of national strength’. Hereafter, shrine priests changed the wording of many prayers recited at major Ise rites to include pleas for divine assistance on the battlefield. When Japan declared war on the United States and Britain in December 1941, the Sun Goddess was kept informed. In December 1942, the Shōwa emperor made a personal pilgrimage to Ise, dressed in the uniform of the commander-​in-​chief of the Imperial Armed Forces.82 According to the Asahi shinbun, he prayed that Japan might swiftly achieve its military goals, establish security in East Asia and so contribute to world peace. Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki, who accompanied the emperor, observed that the emperor’s presence at Ise in wartime was entirely

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Figure 9.3.  The spoils of war at the Inner Shrine.

Source: Naikū shin’en no gunki, in Shinto no fūkei (undated postcard collection, author’s possession).

without historical precedent; Tōjō was suitably moved.83 In June 1942, the war had turned decisively against Japan with the Battle of Midway, followed by the loss of the Solomon Islands in December. The emperor’s pilgrimage was a sign –​ if nothing else –​of how dim the prospects of victory now seemed. Emperor and nation turned to Ise in desperate times. It was to be some while, however, before war impacted directly on Ujiyamada. In the summer of 1944 the Mariana Islands fell to the US Army, placing the Japanese mainland within the range of B29 bombers. The first B29 was spotted in the skies above Ujiyamada in January 1945. The first bombs fell on the city a week later. There were no casualties, and no damage was inflicted on the shrine buildings.84 In February, bombs were dropped on Kuratayama, but the only outcome of significance was a growing sense of dread. Air raid sirens sounded throughout Ujiyamada daily thereafter. In June, incendiary bombs were dropped on Kobe Steel’s Ujiyamada plant, but nowhere else.85 Then on 29 July the dreaded bombing raid came. B29s dropped 1,000 incendiary bombs on Ujiyamada City, destroying nearly 6,000 homes –​one-​sixth of the city’s total –​killing twenty-​two people and injuring forty-​nine. The Chōkokan museum and its storehouse were destroyed; the damage extended to Jingū Kōgakkan, a university for University for priests and teachers across the road. Also hit were the Uji timber yard, where thousands of cypress trees were being treated for the 1949 sengū, and the Furuichi pleasure quarters. But the Inner and Outer Shrines and peripheral shrine buildings escaped

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damage.86 Whether the Americans intentionally avoided the shrines is unclear. Even so, the bombing of Ujiyamada prompted in the emperor himself a sense of deep crisis. On 31 July he declared to Interior Minister Kido Kōichi there was little choice for him now but to take the Ise mirror –​along with the sword enshrined at the Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya –​to a place of refuge. ‘In extreme circumstances, I may have to protect them myself, sharing whatever fate awaits them.’ The emperor was contemplating fleeing to the Shinshū region of central Japan, it seems.87 As it transpired, Ise was spared further assault and no such measures were called for. When on 15 August 1945, the emperor informed the nation of Japan’s defeat, it came as an almighty shock to the priests of the Ise Shrines. They heard the emperor’s broadcast, choking on tears. None of them had ‘dreamed for a moment’ that Japan might be defeated.88 On 6 September, the emperor sent an envoy to Ise to inform his ancestor Amaterasu of the end of hostilities.89 This mission marked the start of Ise’s post-​war. The following day, the Office for Kami Affairs (Jingiin) ordered Ise priests to bury the cannon, howitzers and other hardware that the shrine had displayed since the 1890s. They were material proof of Ise’s intimacy with the war effort, and so threatened its very survival in the new post-​war era; it was vital to ensure they were invisible to anyone entering the shrines’ gardens.90 Responding to instructions issued just a week later, priests now dug up the hardware, cut it into small pieces and removed it from the shrine.91 Thus were the Ise Shrines primed for a new post-​war age of peace. In October, the emperor told Home Minister Kido Kōichi of his wish to visit Ise to ‘offer his most sincere apologies to the Sun Goddess’.92 Japan’s American occupiers voiced no objections; indeed, they offered to provide whatever security was needed.93 The emperor’s ‘pilgrimage of apology’ took place on 13 November. The Asahi reported that the emperor ‘expressed [to the Sun Goddess] his determination to work for a new peaceful Japan, and prayed that she might bless his endeavour’.94 The emperor later spoke of Ise and the war to his chamberlain, Kishita Michio. Observing that the weather had been very inclement in the last stages of the war, he commented: ‘This may be an unscientific thought, but that must have been because the Sun Goddess had withdrawn her support [from Japan’s war effort].’ The Sun Goddess, the emperor added, ‘is a kami not of war but of peace. She must have been expressing her anger [at us] for subjecting her to [constant] prayers for victory’.95

Chapter 10 C RISIS AND R E C OVE RY:  I SE’S P O ST- W ​ AR T R ANSF OR M ATION S

The Ise Shrines underwent a transformation in 1945 surely no less dramatic than that in Meiji. Ise had been the state’s most sacred site, Ujiyamada the nation’s Divine Capital and belief in the Ise kami an integral part of what it meant to be Japanese. All this changed with Japan’s defeat in 1945 and the US-​led Occupation that followed. In December 1945, General Headquarters/​Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ) issued the document known to history as the Shinto Directive (Shintō shirei). Its purpose was to dismantle what it called ‘state Shinto’. In the process, GHQ transformed the Ise Shrines, which had previously enjoyed a privileged, meta-​religious status, into a mere private religious charity, and then deprived them of all state patronage and financial support. As GHQ dashed the myth of the Ise kami as imperial ancestress –​the essence of the twentieth-​century Ise cult  –​so pilgrims abandoned Ujiyamada. The Shinto Directive diminished Ise, and its impact is felt to this day, not least because its gist was subsequently enshrined in the Constitution of May 1947. Its influence is there in articles 20 and 89, which legislate a clean break between state and religion. Article 20 guarantees religious freedom, denies religions state patronage and privilege, and bans the state from religious education; article 89 determines that public moneys may not be used to fund religious activities. What, then, were the fortunes of Ise in this new post-​war era of democracy, where religion is dismissed from the public sphere? The sengū of 1953, 1973 and 1993 were key moments in the shrine’s post-​war experience. It will be argued here that each event proved a periodic opportunity for reimagining the shrines and their place in Japanese society. The fashioning of Ise’s relations with the common people, with the imperial institution and, indeed, with the state during the post-​war has been intimately linked to the physical fact of shrine rebuilding. Retrospectively, Ise followed a clear enough trajectory, at least as plotted by the post-​war Shinto establishment. This trajectory has been driven by the establishment’s nostalgia for Ise’s place of glory in prewar Japan. In more theoretical terms, it can be understood as one of the deprivatization of the Ise Shrines and their rites –​a ceaseless contesting, that is, of the private status imposed on Ise by GHQ –​and of Ise’s incremental return to the public sphere. The ‘postwar Shinto establishment’ here refers to a set of distinct but related agents:  (a)  the priest-​administrators of the Ise Shrines, located within the Ise

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Shrine Office (Jingū shichō); (b) the functionaries, many of them priests, who run the Tokyo-​based Jinja Honchō or Association of Shinto Shrines, of which Ise is the member most privileged;1 and (c)  members of the powerful Ise Supporters’ Association (Ise Jingū shikinen sengū hōsankai), where big business, politics and religion have intermingled to promote Ise’s national interests. Apart from the Supporters’ Association, more regional interests like the private Kintetsu Railway have also been directly involved in shaping Ise’s post-​war experience. We also need to keep within our purview the vital role played by print media, namely, the publicity and propaganda of the Shinto establishment and the coverage and critical comment of the national press. As in prewar society, the post-​war print media have played a vital role in the social construction of the Ise Shrines.

1953: Ise and the Ruins of War The Shinto Directive of 1945 set out to sever all connections between the state and Shinto. The directive reduced the modern state’s most sacred site to the status of a private religious charity, one among many.2 The document emerged from negotiations between William K. Bunce, chief of the Religious and Cultural Resources Division at GHQ, and Kishimoto Hideo, employed by GHQ to advise on religious affairs. The cosmopolitan Kishimoto had spent time at Harvard, and he was widely respected as an assistant professor of religions at Tokyo Imperial University. Bunce also dealt with Miyachi Naokazu of Tokyo University’s Shinto research unit, and with Anezaki Masaharu, a religious studies expert retired from Tokyo University. But Kishimoto was Bunce’s sounding board. The Ise Shrines began to feature in Bunce’s ruminations from early November 1945. On 8 November, Ise was debated by Bunce, Kishimoto and a third man called Yoshida Shigeru –​not the prime minister of the same name, but the head of the shrine priests’ National Training Institute (Kōten kōkyūjo).3 The issue at stake was the conceptual place of Ise in Japan’s post-​war democracy. Bunce’s position was clear: Ise would survive, but either as a private charitable institution on a par with Buddhist temples and Christian churches, or as the private property of the Imperial Household and the object of the imperial family’s private worship. In the former case, members of the imperial family and politicians would be free to worship at Ise so long as they did so as private individuals. In the latter case, Ise would be funded by the Imperial Household. Either way, there was to be no place for Ise in the public sphere of post-​war Japan. Yoshida acknowledged the importance of freedom of conscience, and had no quarrel with Bunce over the religious charitable status for Ise. He was insistent, though, that Bunce yield on the question of Ise’s ‘special relationship with the imperial family’. As Yoshida pointed out, Ise’s head of rituals was an imperial prince, and the emperor’s reporting to the Sun Goddess of imperial enthronements and other events was ‘a historical tradition, which had existed since the shrine’s founding’. Bunce met Yoshida’s arguments with silence.4 He surely knew that the practices Yoshida referred to originated in the nineteenth century. Yoshida also

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raised the question of the rebuilding of the Ise Shrines, scheduled to take place in 1949: ‘The costs for the work presently underway are 20 million yen, for which the government has disbursed 12 million; we need another 8 million yen to complete the work.’ To Bunce’s inquiry about raising these moneys from private donations, Yoshida replied it was almost unthinkable.5 Yoshida confessed to Bunce his frustration with officials in the Jingiin (Office for Kami Affairs); it was, in his view, paralysed by factional infighting. Nonetheless, Yoshida reported back to the office’s assistant chief, Iinuma Kazumi, on his meeting with Bunce, in the hope of achieving some consensus in the fractured Shinto community. Iinuma responded by drawing up a document styled ‘Reforming the shrine system:  a digest’ (Jinja seido sasshin yōkō). This digest was subsequently approved by the cabinet and submitted to Bunce. Here was evidence that the Shinto community, centred on the Office for Kami Affairs, was ready to make radical concessions. No longer did it insist on government funding for Ise’s sengū; it would launch a campaign to raise funds. It would dismantle and reconstitute the Ise Shrine Office. And, in the interests of religious freedom, it would no longer compel people across Japan to purchase Ise amulets.6 Iinuma’s hope was that Bunce would meet these concessions with a recognition of Ise’s privileged relationship with the imperial family. His hope was not in vain. What informed the Jingiin-​led position was a misunderstanding. Their view as articulated in the digest was that Ise was not, in fact, a shrine but a mausoleum, the imperial ancestor’s Great Mausoleum. Miyachi Naokazu, the greatest Shinto scholar of the day, and Ashizu Uzuhiko, leader of the Youth Shinto Discussion group and post-​war Shinto’s most influential intellectual, both articulated this mausoleum view of Ise, and insisted Kishimoto stress this position in his discussions with Bunce. Bunce proved amenable but spoke of the consequences. As a mausoleum, Ise would have to survive on the Imperial Household’s very limited budget and would remain for the exclusive use of the imperial family; popular pilgrimage would not be allowed. Bunce appears not to have made this point clear in earlier discussions with Yoshida. This new information shocked Yoshida and Iinuma and led to a dramatic about-​ turn; and it is easy to see why. The US-​led Occupation was open-​ended. If it endured for a generation, the general public would become alienated from the shrine, from the imperial myth and even perhaps from the imperial institution. Iinuma instructed Kishimoto anew to make the case that Ise was not, after all, a mausoleum but a shrine.7 In hindsight, this was surely the right decision. The Ise Shrines duly became a private religious juridical person (shūkyō hōjin) under the Religious Juridical Persons Law of 28 December 1945. They went on to enjoy a vibrant connection with the Japanese people, but without sacrificing the shrines’ privileged connection with the imperial family. This situation first became clear in the internal Ise Shrine Regulations (Jingū kisoku) published in February 1946. These were consequential and must have had GHQ approval. They stipulated that the emperor was responsible for appointing Ise’s chief priest (daigūji); that the head of rituals (saishu) was to be a member of the imperial household and, ‘in order to guarantee continuity’, the office would

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be occupied by an imperial princess; that the rites performed at Ise would be precisely those of prewar Japan; and that, as before the war, the official name for the Ise Shrines would be plain ‘Jingū’. What was entirely new here was the location of the Ise Shrines within Jinja Honchō, the national Association of Shinto Shrines; within this entirely new organization they were to occupy the position of Japan’s ‘supreme sanctuary’ (honsō).8 Jinja Honchō was set up in February 1946, and, like the 80,000 or so shrines across Japan over which it came to exercise authority, it, too, was registered as a religious charity in law. Honsō was a new coinage that chimed with honzan, the term for head-​temples in Buddhism. Ise was, in effect, re-​imagined now as the head shrine of a new national post-​war Shinto network. This was a striking development, since it placed unprecedented obligations on all shrines in Japan to support Ise, not least financially. Ise was now a private religious juridical person, like all Shinto shrines, but unquestionably the most privileged among them; at the same time, Ise enjoyed a connection with the imperial household, unmatched by any other shrine in the land.9 One other aspect of Ise’s post-​war settlement bears mention here. GHQ sanctioned the preservation of Ise’s shrine grounds and their forests as a national park. This came about through an approach made by the shrine authorities to Walter Popham, technical advisor to GHQ’s Civil Information and Education Section. Popham, who was a landscape architect by training, had visited Ise on many occasions and acknowledged the environmental value of the shrine forests and the cultural worth of the shrine architecture. It was Popham who proposed the national park to GHQ, and at the end of 1946, a vast area of the Shima peninsula extending from the Ise Shrines in the north to the Pacific in the south –​some 75,000 hectares in all –​was designated a national park. Ise-​Shima National Park was its name.10

The Shinto Establishment and the 1953 Sengū The long sequence of ritual preparations for the sengū planned for 1949 had begun on schedule in early 1941, with the yamaguchi rite performed in Ise for the forest kami. Later that year, the first of the 14,000 cypress trees was felled in the forests of Kiso in central Japan, and the timber was transported to Ujiyamada. Even as Japan waged total war in 1943, Ise priests oversaw the ritual ferrying of the first-​felled trees into the Inner and Outer Shrine compounds. In April 1944, shrine priests purified the ground where the new Inner and Outer Shrine halls would be erected. The next scheduled event in the ritual sequence was the insertion of the pivot posts under the main halls in March of 1948. But GHQ called a halt to the proceedings in December 1945, and it never happened. On 14 December, the day before the publication of the Shinto Directive, the Home Ministry informed the nation that His Majesty desired an indefinite postponement of rebuilding work. As a religious charity, the Ise Shrines were reliant on donations from the public; the emperor was anxious not to impose this burden on his people in the immediate aftermath of defeat.11

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Amaterasu would not be progressing to her new kami hall on 2 October 1949, then, but there were notable developments in that year. October saw the foundation of the Ise Supporters’ Association (Jingū shikinen sengū hōsankai), an entirely new outfit dedicated to raising funds for the sengū at some future date. In November that year, the shrine completed the reconstruction of the Uji Bridge, which was in a dangerously dilapidated state.12 Estimates were made and targets set in 1949, too. The total costs of bringing the shrines’ rebuilding work to completion would be around 500 million yen. The Inner Shrine would be completed –​it was hoped –​in 1954, and the Outer Shrine in 1957. Additional timber was needed as the Uji timber yard had been bombed in 1945; thatch had to be harvested; and there was the challenge of acquiring the gold, lacquer and silk needed for the robes and treasures –​some 2,500 items in all –​that would be gifted to the Sun Goddess. Carpenters, thatchers and craftsmen had to be identified, employed and paid. The Supporters’ Association was a key player in the events that began now to unfold. Its president was Kitashirakawa Fusako, the seventh daughter of the Meiji emperor. She assumed this position on account of her being Ise’s first post-​ war head of rituals. The association’s chairman was the incumbent speaker of the Diet’s House of Councillors, Satō Naotake; House of Councillors representative Tokugawa Muneyoshi doubled as vice chairman and chief trustee. Among other vice-​chairmen were the presidents of the Life Insurance Companies Association and of the Osaka Chamber of Commerce. The long list of trustees included Ise’s assistant chief priest, the chief executive officer of the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations (Keidanren) and the chief administrator of the Japanese Bankers Association.13 The Supporters’ Association established its headquarters in the Ise Shrine Office; its secretariat was placed in the Jinja Honchō office in Tokyo. The association set up regional offices in every prefecture. Shrine priests across Japan were tasked with playing the role of ‘unsung heroes’ to ‘rekindle the flames of Ise faith latent in all Japanese hearts’, and raise cash.14 Jinja Honchō recruited local bureaucrats, businessmen and men of influence to lead the fundraising drive. The Supporters’ Association set different financial targets for different regions of Japan. These targets ranged from 100 million yen for Tokyo to 3.6 million for rural Tottori. Tokyo missed its target, but Tottori far surpassed expectations. Elsewhere, Osaka and Kyoto were expected to contribute 60 and 22 million yen, respectively.15 All in all, the fundraising proved a resounding success. A total of 6.5 million Japanese made financial contribution to the sengū fund and the target of 500  million was reached a lot faster than anticipated. In 1951, the rebuilding schedule was revised, as it became clear that both Inner and Outer Shrine rebuilding might be completed ahead of forecast in 1953. It should be noted in passing that the Supporters’ Association rang alarm bells in some quarters, with the Yomiuri newspaper seeing in its activities evidence of what it called ‘the reverse course’, an ominous return to the ways of prewar Japan.16 So it was that the sequence of rites, interrupted in 1945, resumed in 1952. The laying of thatch began in May that year, and gold ornaments were nailed into the pristine timber of the kami halls in July. The summer of 1953 saw over 100,000 people from across Japan descend on Ise to participate in the pebble-​laying

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ceremony. They carried single white pebbles harvested from the Miyagawa River into the new Inner and Outer Shrine compounds, and laid them on the ground. A  raft of other rites followed, including the insertion of the pivot posts on 24 September. Priests placed offerings on the ground in front of the posts and offered prayers to the kami ‘who reside in the four quarters of the sacred precinct’. The pillar-​striking rite four days later marked the completion of all building work.17 On 2 October 1953 at 8 p.m. –​just four years later than originally planned –​the Sun Goddess finally moved into her new hall. She was escorted by not only the head of rituals and the chief priest, but also Prince Takamatsu no Miya, Deputy Prime Minister Ogata Taketora, cabinet member Andō Masanobu, Grand Chamberlain Matsudaira Yasumasa, leaders of the Upper and Lower Houses of the Diet, and representatives of the National Prefectural Governors’ Association. There was thus already a distinctly public aura to what was, in law, the private rite of a private religious charity.18

Print Media, Propaganda and Critical Comment The Shinto establishment had begun its publicity campaign in earnest in 1951. The Supporters Association and Jinja Honchō co-​hosted a sengū art exhibition at Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo, featuring paintings by major artists like Yokoyama Taikan. The exhibition then toured Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. There was a quite separate ‘Jingū exhibition’ of treasures removed from the shrine in 1929:  robes of silk, swords of steel, and priceless items of lacquer and gold. Ujiyamada businessmen, the chief priest, the city mayor and Mie’s prefectural governor, as well as representatives of the national railway and the new, private Kintetsu Railway, constituted a strategy committee to plan for the deluge of pilgrims expected to descend on Ujiyamada. They launched the ‘Ise caravan’, a huge bus decked out in decorations, which toured the prefectures of central Japan. It parked outside city halls and, with loudspeakers, beckoned people to Ise on pilgrimage. They distributed leaflets, performed Ise dances and solicited funds.19 Essential to the publicity campaign was the written word. The publicity and propaganda of the Shinto establishment –​as well as national press coverage –​ played a vital part in constructing the reality of post-​war Ise. It merits our close attention here. In 1951, the Supporters’ Association produced the clumsily titled ‘59th Regular Rebuilding of the Ise Shrines Pamphlet’ (Dai59kai Jingū shikinen sengū no shiori). It is a fascinating document, whose key terms are ‘faith’ (shinkō) and ‘religion’ (shūkyō). The pamphlet located people’s relationship with Ise as one of free religious faith: ‘The Japanese belief [in Ise] has a long tradition. Faith in the Sun Goddess endures to this day, without change for over a millennium and more.’ The prewar Japanese state had interpreted Ise as ‘non-​religious’, and so distorted ‘the essence of shrine Shinto’. With the Shinto Directive, however, people were finally free to believe in shrines as in any other religion. Shrines were now the object of people’s free expression of faith and, ‘in the light of the principle of the freedom of

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religion, this is only natural and to be welcomed’. The Supporters’ Association –​no doubt with one eye on GHQ –​articulated here a denial of Ise’s prewar status and a clear affirmation of the Shinto Directive. The sengū itself, noted the authors, had been performed since ancient times without change; it endured precisely because ‘it constitutes a religious event . . . inseparable from faith’. The pamphlet’s authors addressed those who possessed no religious faith, too, reminding them of the sengū’s cultural value. Readers were assured that where economies could be made, even with regard to the Sun Goddess’s treasures, they would be. If the 1951 pamphlet denied Ise’s prewar history, a 1953 Ise Shrine Office booklet titled ‘The 59th Regular Rebuilding of the Ise Shrines Explained’ (Dai59kai Jingū shikinen sengū yōkai) struck a very different note. The booklet cited the Nihon shoki myths to argue that Ise’s history cannot be understood in terms of individual faith; rather, its history was kami-​determined. The legend of the shrine’s foundation was itself ‘the root of our national polity (kokutai), headed by the unbroken line of emperors’.20 The Ise Shrines were worshipped by the imperial court; the nation as a whole venerated, too, but national veneration was not a matter of individual faith. It was, rather, a consequence of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, being the great ancestor of all Japanese; her virtues were boundless and she guarded all of creation with loving care. This was why, explained the authors, all Japanese, regardless of individual faith, were duty-​bound to play their part and donate to the rebuilding fund. The 1951 pamphlet and the 1953 booklet had countrywide circulation; their purpose was to raise funds and awareness. The success of the fundraising campaign suggests that, in combination, their very different approaches were effective. What of the national press, though, whose principal role was not to propagate, but to report, comment and interrogate? What was the Ise reality as constructed by papers like the Yomiuri, the Asahi and the Mainichi in 1953? Press interest in Ise peaked around 2 October, and the Asahi coverage was distinctive. Its 2 October morning edition carried a short article on page 7, titled ‘Vicennial sengū tonight’. It was hardly informative; it stated simply that ‘the first rite of progress since Ise became a private charity’ would begin at 8 p.m., before events conclude at 10 p.m. The evening edition carried an aerial photograph of Uji Bridge at the Inner Shrine, with the caption: ‘Bustle on Uji Bridge: over ten thousand people cross.’ The article said nothing of the sengyo rite of progress, offered no explanation and avoided reference to the Sun Goddess. All this was in line with Asahi’s post-​war policy of not prioritizing religious issues, and not highlighting any specific religion.21 The Yomiuri and Mainichi opted for a different approach. They forecast the events of 2 October with an abundance of detail about the imminent progress and the kami involved. The 3 October morning editions of both papers carried stunning photos of the Sun Goddess’s progress, taken with infrared cameras: the Yomiuri on page 7 and the Mainichi on its front page. These were historic photographs, never before permitted. The Mainichi carried the fuller account of events, and a marginally more ‘atmospheric’ tone in referring to the ‘faint babble of the Isuzu River’ and the ‘keen aroma of the new shrine’s timber’. There was a ‘mysterious aura enveloping all’ as the progress began, and ‘faint sobbing’ could be heard from the crowd as people prostrated themselves in prayer.

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The Mainichi informed its readers that the emperor had worshipped Amaterasu from the Tokyo palace, and that the crown prince, presently in Los Angeles, had done the same.22

1973: Ise Restored The Shinto Directive, the Ise Shrine Regulations and the Constitution that followed had bequeathed to the Ise Shrines a hybrid quality. Ise was removed from the public sphere; yet it maintained privileged links to the imperial institution. And there remained an often overlooked ambiguity over the emperor’s own status and role. Under the Constitution, he was no longer head of state, but a ‘symbol of state and of the unity of the people’. He performed certain state functions ‘on behalf of the people’ as a public figure.23 But he was also a private person, with a right to exercise his religious freedom. There was thus an ambiguity over his engagement in (religious) rites relating to Ise, which the Shinto establishment would exploit. When he faced Ise, prostrating himself in much publicized worship of his ancestor, the Sun Goddess, was he merely acting as a private citizen, or was he engaging in a public act? The situation was compounded in 1953 by the presence in Ise, noted earlier, of Japan’s deputy prime minister; it gave to the event a distinctly public quality. In the aftermath of the 1953 progress, the Shinto establishment began to explore ways of solving the tensions between the public and private character of the shrine and its rites, now referred to as the ‘Ise problem’ (Jingū mondai). Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichirō seemed to offer the possibility of a solution when, in 1956, he set up a committee to consider revising the Religious Charity Law. The law had been passed in 1951, but it had proved less than fit for purpose, not least because of the large number of new and dubious religions claiming tax-​free charitable status. The Shinto establishment saw Hatoyama’s committee as a chance to make the case for a new understanding of the Ise Shrines. Representatives argued that Ise’s post-​war status as a religious charity was a denial of its inherently public character, and that it should be changed. They found little sympathy among other committee members, however, and so switched strategy.24 In 1957, they turned to Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke for help. Five years had passed since the San Francisco Treaty and the end of the Occupation; the Shinto Directive was now over a decade old. It was surely time, they argued, to reassess Ise’s legal status. Kishi was well disposed to the Ise Shrines. On New Year 1958, he had embarked on a very public Ise pilgrimage. True, Hatoyama Ichirō in 1955 and then Ishibashi Tanzan in 1957 had set the post-​war precedent for Ise pilgrimage by prime ministers, but as the Asahi noted, Kishi’s visit was of a different order: ‘Notwithstanding the advance notice that this would be an unofficial visit, Kishi headed for Ise with a party of more than sixty, in a convoy of more than twenty cars; it was a grand undertaking.’ Arriving in Ise, ‘he carved his way through the throngs of people [at the Inner Shrine] with a big grin on his face’.25 Kishi did not, by the way, initiate the now-​established practice of prime ministers making New Year pilgrimages to Ise. That began in 1965 with

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Satō Eisaku. After Satō, all Japanese prime ministers, whatever their political hue, have visited Ise at New Year. The fact remains that Kishi’s 1958 visit was a challenge to the private status that the Shinto Directive had imposed on Ise, and this marked him out as a Shinto ally. In 1958, Education Minister Matsunaga Tō warmed the hearts of Shintoists everywhere when he declared that the government must no longer treat the Ise Shrines as a regular religious charity, but accord them special treatment.26 True to his word, Matsunaga set up a special committee within the Liberal Democratic Party to debate Ise. The Shinto establishment responded with a wide-​ranging proposal of their own, styled Proposal for Reform of the Ise Shrine System (Jingū seido kaisei an). It comprised four main demands:  that the government publicly acknowledge that the sacred mirrors, the one in Ise and its simulacrum enshrined in the imperial palace, are inseparable from the imperial throne; that the emperor’s engagement with Ise rites be regarded as ‘acts in matters of state’; that the government declare the Ise Shrines a sacred site for emperors’ veneration of their great ancestor; and that the shrines’ main buildings and land be ‘returned to the state’ and declared ‘state property for use by the imperial household’.27 The document was penned by the afore-​mentioned Ashizu Uzuhiko, and his purpose was clear: the deprivatization of Ise, its spaces and ritual functions. The incumbent president of the Supporters’ Association, Satō Naohiko, fine-​tuned this proposal, stressing the need for nationalization of shrine buildings and the state production of the emperor’s periodic progresses to Ise, and released it to the media. Early in 1960, Prime Minister Kishi was forced to resign over the US-​Japan Security Treaty crisis, and we shall never know how far he would have gone to meet Shinto demands. Kishi was replaced by Ikeda Hayato, who displayed his own predisposition by heading to Ise on a pilgrimage in August 1960, to inform Amaterasu of the formation of his cabinet. But what could the Shinto establishment realistically expect from a man who came to power determined to stabilize society after the Security Treaty crisis, and usher in high growth? The Shinto establishment recruited Hamachi Bunpei, a Mie Prefecture representative in the Diet, to find out. Hamachi submitted three written questions regarding the Ise Shrines to Prime Minister Ikeda in autumn 1960. He made no direct reference to Ise’s legal status as a private charity, or to the Constitution. The questions he posed were these: 1) I believe that the mirror venerated in Ise was given by the Sun Goddess to her grandson Ninigi, as imperial descendant, and that it is indivisible from the imperial throne. What is the government’s understanding? 2) If the government interprets the [Ise] mirror as the emperor’s mirror, it follows that the [Inner Shrine] is guardian of the mirror [and nothing more]. How might we best understand the relationship between shrine and mirror? 3) It is my opinion that the Imperial Household Agency should issue instructions to the Ise Shrine Office, given its responsibilities as guardian of the [emperor’s] mirror. What is the government’s view [on the relationship between Imperial Household Agency and the Ise Shrines]?28

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Hamachi proposes the mirror is not manufactured by human hands, but crafted by the kami and gifted by the Sun Goddess to Ninigi –​and thereafter to all the Sun Goddess’s descendants, including the incumbent Shōwa emperor. It is on this account a sacred treasure of national, public significance. Hamachi is, of course, testing Ikeda’s faith in the imperial myth here. If Ikeda accepts the mythical account of the mirror’s origins, then it is clearly absurd for it to be entrusted to the care of a private religious charity. Prime Minister Ikeda offered an extraordinary response to these questions in a written statement dated 22 October 1960. The Ise mirror, he wrote, is, indeed, the Yata no kagami mirror, bestowed by the imperial ancestress on her grandson. He quoted at length from the Nihon shoki myths to show his understanding that the mirror, in which the Sun Goddess dwells, had left the imperial palace in the reign of Emperor Sujin, and finally arrived in Ise on the banks of the Isuzu River in the reign of Emperor Suinin. His conclusion was clear. No emperor has ever given the mirror to the Ise Shrines; emperors have simply requested shrine priests venerate it. The mirror is forever one with the imperial throne, and –​religious charity or not –​Ise is not free to deny the mirror’s true character and, say, dispose of it at will. Ikeda concluded that even under the post-​war Constitution, shrine priests have to consult with the Imperial Household Agency on ‘all matters of consequence’ affecting the Ise Shrines.29 Ikeda’s statement was historic, and was duly welcomed by the Shinto establishment. Jinja shinpō, the establishment’s weekly newspaper, praised Ikeda fulsomely. His statement had both ‘rendered [the government’s] obligations clear’ and dismissed popular views and wicked theories about Ise once and for all. ‘Our joy is heartfelt.’30 Ashizu warned that the path to Ise’s deprivatization was still long, but welcomed Ikeda’s statement as a ‘clearing of the dark clouds’ obscuring the kokutai. This rejoicing is easy to understand. After all, the prime minister of democratic Japan was here reproducing, and so reauthorizing, the imperial myth of the emperor’s unbroken descent from the Sun Goddess. The emperor’s authority, Ikeda seemed to imply, derived from the myths and not from ‘the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power’. Ikeda appeared entirely sympathetic with the Shinto establishment in its aim to deprivatize Ise, but, in the end, he neither backed up his statement by revising Ise’s legal status nor did he take steps to nationalize its buildings or its ritual performances. His statement, for all its impact, left contradictions aplenty for subsequent administrations to address.

Ise’s ‘True Guise’: Aspects of Production and Preparation Hamachi’s testing of Ikeda was the latest phase in what the Shinto establishment came to refer to as the campaign to ‘make Ise’s true guise manifest’ (shinshi kengen). The ‘true guise’ referred to Ise’s prewar status, when it existed beyond the realm of religion and occupied the centre of the public sphere.31 The campaign did not end with the publication of Ikeda’s statement; indeed, it continues to the present day. It had a clear enough impact on the staging of the 1973 sengū. Ikeda had insisted

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the shrine consult the imperial court about ‘significant matters’. Nothing was more significant than the sengū, and so it was that, in March 1964, Ise Chief Priest Bōjō Toshinaga approached the Imperial Household Agency, seeking the emperor’s permission to start preparations. The agency duly conveyed to the chief priest the emperor’s permission.32 This was the start of a new post-​war intimacy between emperor and shrine, which endures to the present. In 1966, the emperor and empress donated 100,000 yen to the rebuilding fund in the first of a series of eight annual contributions. Then, shortly before the sengyo rite in September of 1973, the emperor received Ise’s chief priest in audience in the palace. The chief priest had with him a selection of the treasures of silk, gold and lacquer that were shortly to adorn the Sun Goddess’s new sanctuary. This ‘imperial viewing’ (tenran) of Ise’s treasures established a new post-​war precedent. The new relationship was in evidence in the sengyo rite, too. The emperor worshipped the Sun Goddess from inside the imperial palace as before, but he was now represented in Ise by not only a personal envoy, but also his second son, Prince Hitachi no Miya. On the morning of 3 October, the prince presented gifts to the Sun Goddess on his father’s behalf. Later that month, the chief priest returned to the palace for a second audience, where he informed the emperor of the successful completion of the Sun Goddess’s move. In spring the following year, the emperor and empress embarked on a post-​sengū Ise pilgrimage. This pilgrimage was especially noteworthy because, for the first time in post-​war Japan, the emperor travelled with the sword and the jewel. Along with the mirror, they made up the three treasures of the imperial regalia. Jinja shinpō commented with pride that this new development was clear evidence of the ‘sacred nature of the everlasting imperial line’.33 The new imperial quality to the 1973 sengū rites was evident in both its beginning (the emperor’s granting of permission) and its end (the imperial pilgrimage to Ise). Whether the emperor was doing something other than exercise his constitutional right to freedom of religion is debatable. What is clear is that the events were staged in such a way as to enable the Shinto establishment to interpret his actions as being of far greater significance than a private act of worship. To their position we must return shortly. We should note here that the inherently public, as opposed to private, quality of the events of October 1973 was evident in the presence of cabinet ministers. The cabinet secretary and the finance minister both participated in the sengyo progress at the Outer Shrine on 5 October. The failure of the ‘true guise’ movement to effect government funding for Ise and its rites was a major setback for the Shinto establishment. Ikeda Hayato and his successor, Satō Eisaku, explored various avenues, but to no avail. Without constitutional reform, the shrine would remain reliant on donations from the public. The financial challenge in the run-​up to 1973 was significantly greater than twenty years earlier, when most of the timber had already been procured before the war. The sum needed for 1973 was, in the 1960s, estimated at three billion yen. The Shinto establishment responded to this challenge by overhauling and reconstituting the Supporters’ Association. What was new about the reconstituted association, which acquired charitable status in 1966, was its intimacy with big

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business. The man appointed association president was the incumbent president of the Japan Chamber of Commerce; vice presidents included the president of the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations (Keidanren), the head of the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and director of the Central Bank for Agriculture and Forestry. Consultants included senior members of the Japan Business Federation (Keizai dōyūkai) and entrepreneurs of national renown like Matsushita Kōnosuke, the founder of Panasonic. The trustees represented all corners of the business world between them: the Association of Japanese Department Stores, the Private Railways Management Association and the Automobile Industry Association.34 We have here an extraordinary alliance between the secular, public world of big business and the private religious realm of the Ise Shrines. The Supporters Association established its Central Headquarters in the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, and Regional Headquarters in Jinja Honchō. The association set up bureaus in prefectural shrine offices run by Jinja Honchō. In all cases, bar three, they were run by the heads of local Chambers of Commence; the three exceptions known to this author were Fukushima, Shiga and Fukuoka, where the local Supporters’ Association was run personally by prefectural governors. Such was the national network charged with raising three billion yen. As recalled by one local association member, fundraising got off to a slow start. The man in question wrote of his fifty visits to a single company before securing a donation; other companies he had visited fifteen or twenty times, but got nothing at all.35 The dollar shock and other economic problems made times hard for businesses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Price and wage inflation meant that the two billion target grew to 4.2 billion. Nonetheless, that target was eventually met in the face of what one Shinto writer called ‘an absence of interest at large in the spiritual life’.36 Fundraising developed in tandem with a new amulet initiative (Figure 10.1). The idea was to divert income from amulet sales directly to the purchase of the 14,000 cypress trees needed for the rebuilding. Jinja Honchō first raised the price of amulets and then, to invigorate sales, launched in 1968 a three-​year plan. It selected five prefectures and instructed them to innovate for three years; in year four, another five prefectures would be selected. The plan proved an extraordinary success. Owing largely to the tireless efforts of local shrine priests, some eight million amulets were sold across Japan in the twelve months before the rebuilding of 1973.37 Amulets constituted, in fact, the single greatest source of Ise income, but they were also an essential means of keeping alive –​or, indeed, establishing anew –​ the linkage between Ise and the general public. Amulets alone were, of course, insufficient. As twenty years before, print media had a vital role to play.

Print Media The key text in the run-​up to 1973 was The True Meaning of the Shikinen Sengū (Ise Jingū shikinen sengū no hongi), first printed and distributed across Japan by the Supporters’ Association in 1966. This booklet begins by extolling national virtues:

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Figure 10.1  Ise amulets. Source: Author’s possession.

Japan is indeed a land of the kami. The Japanese have a keen sense of being descendants of the kami. Amaterasu Ōmikami is the origin of Japan and of the Japanese. The ethnic creed or the national will  –​namely Japanese veneration for the supreme and absolute kami Amaterasu –​flows forever naturally, deeply and quietly in the depths of the Japanese ethnic heart; it flows as a traditional conviction and sentiment.

Japan, The true meaning argued, was unique on account of the ‘supreme and absolute’ kami Amaterasu. This kami, the Sun Goddess, had been ‘worshipped personally by emperors since time immemorial’. Emperors revered the kami’s ‘boundless heart’ and prayed for the peace of the people and their flourishing. The Japanese people and Amaterasu were joined not by individual free choice; rather, the connection was an innate one that defined what it meant to be Japanese. The authors betrayed a nostalgia for prewar times in insisting there was ‘not the slightest

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change to the fact that Amaterasu is the Japanese people’s ancestor. Moreover, Ise’s rites are precisely those of prewar Japan.’ The sengū was the ‘great key’ to sustaining Japanese traditional culture, and it was incumbent on all Japanese to donate. No longer, then, does the Supporters’ Association profess itself content with Ise’s status as a religious charity; it insists here on the non-​negotiably public nature of Ise and its rites. This booklet was not the full extent of Shinto establishment publicity. There was a softer sell, too, as in the special Ise issue published by Heibonsha in its lavishly illustrated monthly Taiyō (Sun), in New Year 1969. Renowned photographer Watanabe Yoshio took the stunning photos, which embed the shrines in the natural environment. The text, penned by Okada Yoneo of Jinja Honchō, connects the shrine and its meanings not to the environment but to the imperial institution. Ise rites venerate the ancestor of the imperial family; the emperor is responsible for their performance; and shrine priests enact the emperor’s commands in ritual matters. The emperor offers thanks to the Sun Goddess, but ‘makes no reference to himself in his prayers’. He prays uniquely for the security of the people and the stability of their economic life.38 This establishment view of Ise and its sengū did not exist in isolation from the media; it was indeed contested by the national press. In the run-​up to October 1973, the press exhibited far greater interest in Ise than twenty years before. The three big dailies, Yomiuri, Asahi and Mainichi, carried multiple articles interrogating the meanings of Ise, its history and its rites. All the dailies sponsored symposia, too, which offered diverse and intriguing perspectives on the Ise Shrines. The Asahi asked architectural commentator Kawazoe Noboru, Ise priest Sakurai Katsunoshin and ancient history expert Takatori Masao to shed light on ‘Ise’s many veiled mysteries’. ‘To return to the old days of “only the imperial ancestor” is utterly stupid . . . We need the support not of the emperor but of the Japanese people’, proposed one symposium contributor. The Yomiuri engaged philosopher Ueyama Shunpei, religious history expert Murakami Shigeyoshi and historian Ishida Ichirō who recalled ‘state Shinto’ and warned of a revival of prewar values in post-​war society. The Mainichi commentators dwelt on Ise’s ancient history and warned of the need to distinguish Ise as it emerged under state Shinto from Ise as a popular pilgrimage site. The Yomiuri and Mainichi also published special editions of their weekly magazines, which placed before their readers both the extraordinary natural beauty of Ise and the exquisite man-​made beauty of the treasures that were to adorn the Inner and Outer Shrine halls.39 If one can detect in these features a wariness about Ise’s increasing prominence in public life, a keen pride in Ise’s cultural value is evident, too. Both aspects are apparent in the national dailies’ coverage of the events of 2 October. Most noteworthy in this regard was the Asahi, which had literally and figuratively turned its back on Ise in 1953. Its front page on 3 October 1973 carried an article titled ‘The kami’s sacred body: heading for the new sanctuary’. The headline used the honorific go-​shintai to refer to the kami, but the article itself chose the more neutral shintai. Twenty years before, the Asahi had made no reference at all to the kami of the Inner Shrine. The Asahi now used honorific

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verb forms to inform readers that the kami completed its move from the old sanctuary ‘in a rite known as sengyo’ on the night of 2 October. On page 22 the reader encountered a photograph of the kami procession making its solemn way through the night, with the caption ‘The kami body enveloped in the screen of silk, heading for the new kami hall’.40 Two articles accompanied the image. One narrated ‘the subtly moving veil’, ‘the sighs that escaped in the depth of night’ and ‘the ancient age, approaching only to depart again’. The second noted the emperor had worshipped Ise from afar. In brief, Asahi coverage was radically different from twenty years before, and indistinguishable now from that of the Yomiuri and Mainichi.41 There was clearly a gap between the propaganda of the Shinto establishment, as evident in The true meaning and the Taiyō special on one hand, and the often critical reportage of the print media on the other. The Shinto establishment was concerned by the media’s tone. A Jinja shinpō editorial lamented that the media deployed historians, cultural commentators and others to stress that the sengū was little more than a popular festival. The paper’s editor insisted, however, that Ise was a site of both imperial ancestral rites and what he called ‘popular religious belief in the Sun Goddess as our national ancestor’.42

Ise in 1993: Topography, Marketing and Media We have been observing the incremental transformation of post-​war Ise in aspects of ritual production and in Shinto establishment campaigns and publicity. The national media, too, adjusted its position on Ise, and in so doing played its part in shifting Ise’s social reality. For a more rounded understanding of post-​war Ise as ‘a discursive space’ –​a space subject to constant negotiation over meaning –​we need to reflect on Ise as a geographical location, and take heed of the physical changes it has undergone. Distinctive changes were effected in Ise’s topography in 1993, but they were the most recent in a succession that began already in 1953. The key agents here were not the Shinto establishment, but local, and more regional, entrepreneurs and, of course, the pilgrims themselves. Map 4 shows the city of Ise with the Outer Shrine to the north and the Inner Shrine to the south. The two sites were originally connected by the Sangū kaidō, the narrow undulating path that threaded from Yamada via Furuichi to Uji. This was the road the Meiji emperor himself had travelled. At the very end of the Meiji period, as we saw, the Shin’enkai built the Imperial (Miyuki) Road, which by-​ passed Furuichi connecting Yamada and Uji via the Kuratayama museum site. In the 1930s, the central government then approved a plan to build a third connecting road as part of its Divine Capital initiative, but war intervened and it was not until the 1950s, ahead of the 1953 sengū, that this road was finally built. Its sponsor was Mikimoto Kōkichi, the Ise entrepreneur who made his fortune in pearl cultivation, and it is known, fittingly, today as the Mikimoto Road. To facilitate pilgrims’ access from further afield, the Japan Road Corporation also built Japan’s first-​ever toll road in 1953. The Sangū Toll Road, as it was known, ran from Matsusaka City

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Map 4  New transport routes in postwar Ise

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south into Yamada. Matsusaka was itself linked, of course, to Yokkaichi and to the great city of Nagoya. Twenty years later, in time for the 1973 rebuilding, Ise’s topography shifted further when Mie Prefecture constructed the Nansei Bypass. The bypass ran from Matsusaka directly to the Inner Shrine, skirting not only Ise City but also the Outer Shrine. Access by car and bus to the Inner Shrine was now vastly improved. One outcome, as we shall see, was that Inner Shrine pilgrims increased exponentially, while those to the Outer Shrine stagnated. A second outcome was perhaps unforeseen. The Nansei Bypass spilled pilgrims out into the bus stops, taxi ranks, car parks and coach parks newly created south of Uji Bridge. No more did pilgrims need to pass through the commercial district straddling the Sangū Road that descends south to Uji Bridge. By the end of the 1970s, it was clear that the commercial district, known as Oharai Machi, was in serious difficulties. Young entrepreneurs in Oharai Machi responded with a radical reimagining of the commercial quarter. Ideas were debated throughout the 1980s, but real work began only with the passing of the Ise City Town Preservation Act in 1989. The act provided funding to renovate buildings in the quarter; the buildings were to have traditional gables characteristic of Ise. The aim was to effect a transformation on Oharai Machi in time for the 1993 sengū. The outcome of their endeavours is best appreciated visually. Figure 10.2a shows Oharai Machi as it was in the 1970s. There is some distinctive kiritsuma architecture here: buildings with gabled roofs with access under the gable. Clusters of telegraph poles and knots of telegraph wires –​and the cars –​compromise what residual charm the buildings have. Figure 10.2b shows the same quarter transformed in 1993. The telegraph poles and wires have been buried; the road has become a stone-​laid pedestrian walkway with not a car in sight; and all the buildings have been refashioned in Ise’s front-​gabled roof style. The Oharai Machi renovation was accompanied by the development of a new site in the same architectural mode. Okage Yokochō, which occupies land adjacent to Oharai Machi, accommodates some forty stores selling food and traditional craft products. It was funded by the now-​notorious Hamada Masutani, president of the Akafuku confections company.43 So successful has this renovation project been that Ise priests have complained that some pilgrims never make it to the Inner Shrine; they spend time ambling around the shops and savouring the fare on sale, before moving on to other secular attractions nearby. Oharai Machi and Okage Yokochō remain, to this day, a signal commercial success. The re-​imagining of Ise’s secular spaces began in the immediate aftermath of the war; it progressed in twenty-​year intervals, each sengū prompting further topographical changes. Statistics suggest something of the impact these changes had. Pilgrim numbers plummeted in the immediate post-​war years to below 500,000 per annum, but in 1953 they jumped to 2.5 million. In 1973, that number increased to five million and in 1993 to 5.5 million. Statistics disclose that pilgrims were coming in ever greater numbers to the Inner Shrine, even as Outer Shrine pilgrim numbers stagnated. It comes as a surprise to learn that, for as long as records were kept, more Japanese had visited the Outer Shrine annually than the Inner. The trend turned in 1953 with the building of the Mikimoto Road and the

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Figure 10.2  Oharai Machi (a) before and (b) after renovation. Source: Isebito (Nakamura Ken’ichi collection).

Sangū Toll Road. In 1973, when the Nansei Bypass was completed, the Inner Shrine welcomed five million pilgrims, as compared to 3.5 million at the Outer. Twenty years on, the gap had grown further still:44 5.5 million visited the Inner Shrine, and only 2.8 million the Outer Shrine.45 In 1993, as we saw, there was the renovation of not only Oharai Machi, but also the new Ise Expressway. The expressway fed traffic into the Mikimoto Road, and on to the Inner Shrine. Mie Prefecture statistics reveal something else as well. In 1993, fifteen million people visited Ise Shima National Park –​three times the number of those entering the Inner Shrine precinct. That number soared to nineteen million the following year. Vast numbers of people were heading to Ise, but even vaster numbers were travelling straight past Ise into the national park. This finds an explanation in the progressive investment in Ise-​Shima National Park by the Kintetsu Railway. Kintetsu began to invest in the 1970s, first by laying twin tracks on the Yamada-​Toba and Toba-​Shima lines (see Map 4). Express trains could now run from Osaka, Kyoto and Nagaoya, through Ise, to Toba and Kashikojima in the south of the peninsula. What awaited the tourist there were the Kashikojima Country Club, Kashikojima Sports Land, Shima Marine Land and the Nemu no Sato complex, all new resorts built by Kintetsu. Twenty years on Japan was suffering from the after-​effects of the bubble, but Kintetsu continued to invest. Surveys revealed people were looking for something new, so Kintetsu joined forces with Mie Prefecture and invested some 800 million yen in the creation of Spain Village, a new amusement park inspired by Spanish culture. It featured reproductions of Spanish houses, restaurants and churches, a theatre staging performances of flamenco dancing, and a museum of Spanish history and culture –​along with roller coasters and other attractions. Kintetsu also built a Japanese-​style hotel in what it called ‘prime resort Kashikojima’.46 These Kintetsu-​inspired developments drew more and more people to Ise, and beyond. They had negative effects, too. Futami was once a must-​see site for pilgrims, renowned for the twinned rocks off its shore. As we have seen, in the

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Meiji period the Shin’enkai built the magnificent Hinjitsukan Inn there, which was patronized by the imperial family. When streetcar tracks were extended out to Futami in late Meiji, Futami’s popularity grew. The resort thrived in the first few decades of the twentieth century, too, but its fortunes changed after the war. The Kintetsu express services took passengers from Ise to Toba, but they bypassed Futami, spelling the start of the site’s demise. In 1993 a new ‘Warring States period village’ opened nearby, with a reproduction of Azuchi Castle as its chief attraction. It was later reconfigured as Ise Azuchi Momoyama Cultural Village or, more popularly, ‘chonmage world Ise’, but this appears to have done little to reinvigorate the once thriving resort town of Futami.

Marketing Ploys In 1993, some 5.5 million Japanese visited Ise; this was a new record. People were drawn by the Ise Shrines, by the greater facility of travel and by the new more secular attractions that lay beyond Ise. The role of publicity played a vital part, even if, as ever, that part defies quantification. The Shinto establishment exploited the lessons of twenty years earlier, but it deployed new strategies, too. The Supporters’ Association was again key in raising funds and awareness; once again, it drew its power from its ability to straddle the worlds of religion, economics and politics. The costs of the sengū were estimated this time at thirty-​two billion yen, twenty billion of which would come from the shrine’s own funds, notably, amulet sales. The campaign was launched in difficult times of recession, caused by the strong yen. Economic difficulties endured into the early 1990s, and yet the Supporters’ Association met its targets with time to spare. Shinto establishment publicity at this time was dominated by fears for Japanese society. Priests and Supporters’ Association representatives dwelt on ‘the extreme devastation of the people’s spiritual life’, and on the threat to Japan’s ‘immemorial tradition and culture’ by waves of new technology.47 For the Shinto establishment, the Ise Shrine, especially at the moment of its rebuilding, offered redemption for society. This is how Nijō Tanemoto, Ise chief priest, perceived the problem and its solution in 1986: The traditional spirit of the people (minzoku) has been pushed to the brink of stagnation and chaos, in a tidal flow that began with defeat in war and culminated in rapid economic growth. However, Ise’s shrine rites are preserved in their pristine, ancient form, securing the unmovable foundation of Japan’s traditional spirit.48

Ise and its rites were key to overcoming Japan’s woes, then; and of those rites, the shrine rebuilding was the greatest. The chief priest’s words cited here are taken from the preface to a publication that was a lynchpin of the Supporters’ Association campaign, a strikingly illustrated book, called Jingū: dai61kai jingū shikinen sengū o hikaete (Ise: On the eve of the 61st shikinen sengū). Twenty thousand copies were printed and distributed across Japan.

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The discourse in Jingū remained emperor-​centred, but a greater accommodation of the ordinary citizen is evident. The Sun Goddess, we learn, was not only the great ancestor of the imperial family, but also the ancestor of all Japanese. The shrine was not a site ‘so solemn as to be unapproachable to ordinary Japanese’. After all, it was long known affectionately as ‘old Ise’ (O-​Ise san). ‘People feel a familiarity about the place, and a nostalgia for it.’49 One striking feature of Jingū’s discourse was its use of multiple tropes intended to pull at the reader’s emotions. They include kokoro no furusato, ‘homeland of the Japanese heart’, a phrase from a poem by novelist Yoshikawa Eiji written on his visit to Ise in 1952. It featured prominently in the 1990s campaign, and remains a much-​used trope to this day. The adjectives sugasugashii (pure), mizumizushii (fresh) and kōgōshii (awe-​inspiring) had been prominent in press coverage of the shrine in the 1920s, describing the emotional impact of the shrine, its buildings or the shrine grounds. In 1993 they resurfaced, and remain much deployed today.50 Another trope was that of Ise’s unchanging substance. Jingū informs its readers the shrine is ‘unchanging over a millennium’, ‘immemorial’, ‘forever new and without change’ and ‘a symbol of eternity’.51 Spelt out here was a dynamic public role for the shrine. Jingū’s authors saw shrine rebuilding as the trigger for Japan’s revival:  ‘May Japan experience a rejuvenation; may it restore its youth, and develop for evermore!’ ‘Revival’ was integral to the new strategy deployed by the Shinto establishment ahead of 1993. There was evident a keen new interest in marketing techniques from the late 1980s, which coincided with a new understanding in Europe and the United States of the role of marketing in the ‘selling’ of religion. The Shinto establishment duly invented a logo, a slogan and a cartoon character, and created what they called ‘image songs’. These were stock techniques. The logo seen here in Figure 10.3 locates the Inner Shrine within the rising sun. As Ise rises again, so does the sun and, with it, the Japanese spirit. Such, at least, was the import of the slogan attached to the logo: Yomigaeru, Nihon no kokoro, go-​sengū (Revival: the Japanese heart, the great sengū). Slogan and symbol were deployed extensively in the fundraising campaign. The cartoon character was created for the Shinto establishment by manga artist Makino Keiichi, and found inspiration in the roosters that roam freely around the Inner Shrine. His name was Ise kokko (Ise doodle-​do; Figure  10.4), and his purpose was to generate interest among the younger generation. The Kintetsu Department Store sold an assortment of Ise kokko goods, but the rooster acquired his renown by appearing in the Toshiba EMI video, Ise kokko no Ise mairi (Ise doodle-do’s pilgrimage). This video deployed the latest movie technology, combining the cartoon character with live actors, and was extremely well made. It switched effortlessly from one scene to the next, avoiding narrative ‘sag’. Ise doodle-do took the young viewer on a tour of the Inner and Outer Shrines, introducing many of the rites that would culminate in the Sun Goddess’s progress in October 1993. The video featured two catchy songs as well: Yūkyū (Eternity) and Kokoro no furusato (Home of the Japanese heart). Ise amulets were, of course, themselves an early form of branding. They looked distinct; they bore the distinctive name Jingū taima, and they played a vital role

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Figure 10.3  The Ise logo and slogan.

Figure 10.4  Ise doodle-​do.

Source: Mizugaki, 168 (1994), p. 44.

in selling Ise to people across Japan. In the 1980s there was a new dissemination drive. In 1987, Jinja Honchō (responsible for amulet manufacture and distribution) launched a campaign to get amulets into ten million Japanese homes per year. The burden of distribution fell, as always, on local shrine priests, and the obstacles in their path were numerous. According to the Shinto press, they included ‘accelerated urbanisation and the flight of parishioners from shrines’, ‘the growth of [inaccessible] apartment blocks and housing estates’, ‘the absence of kami shelves

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(kamidana) in new apartments’ and people’s ‘general lack of amulet awareness’.52 The Shinto establishment responded to these challenges by distributing free kami shelves, and advertising amulets on posters and in pamphlets. Statistics suggest this was effective. In 1993 and 1994, some 9.5 million amulets were manufactured in Ise and dispatched to regional shrine offices, which passed quotas on to local shrine priests, who were to play the dominant role in selling them on to parishioners.53

Media and Performance Once again, Ise Shrine discourse was not generated in isolation. It was vying for attention with the national dailies  –​not to mention a plethora of weekly magazine specials and popular books. In the early 1990s, Japan was consuming more newspapers than anywhere else on the planet. Two of the three best-​selling newspapers in the world were Japanese: the Yomiuri and the Asahi. Here I focus on the Asahi newspaper, which is of especial interest since its approach to Ise shifted yet again. In 1993, the Asahi published three times as many articles on Ise as it did in 1973. These articles were replete with information on the shrines and their history, but the paper hosted no symposia, and it failed to expose its readers to the multiplicity of voices of twenty years earlier. Asahi discourse had moved on. In 1973, the paper had written of the Ise kami with the irreverent, anonymous moniker shintai. Now in 1993, the Asahi spoke of the kami with a new reverence as go-​shintai (where go-​is an honorific prefix). The paper also gave the Ise kami their proper names, as here: ‘Amaterasu Ōkami, regarded as the ancestor of the imperial family’; ‘the Inner Shrine of Amaterasu Ōkami and the Outer Shrine of Toyuke Ōkami’. Back in 1973, there was no place in Asahi discourse for kami names. Now, too, the paper stressed the imperial quality of the sengū: ‘Rebuilding is carried out on instructions from the emperor, who makes contributions from his own purse’; Ise ‘became a religious charity in law, but preparations commence, nonetheless, with the emperor’s instructions, and the principle remains that the schedule of events is determined by the emperor’. Asahi discourse intriguingly allied itself now with that of the Shinto establishment, borrowing directly from the Ise lexicon. The paper insisted, for example, that the Ise Shrine’s correct name was Jingū, a point made time and again by the Ise authorities. For the Asahi ‘Ise Jingū’ was incorrect; the proper name was plain ‘Jingū’. When the Asahi told its readers in 1993 that the rebuilding was a rite of rebirth in which ‘Jingū was reborn and Antiquity resurrected’, or again that the rebuilding was ‘a rite of rebirth and tradition that recreated Antiquity in the present’, it was reproducing the shrine’s own discourse. Perhaps the clearest evidence of a shift in the Asahi position was to be found in the photograph of the Sun Goddess’s progress carried on its front page (Figure 10.5). The point is that in 1973 a similar photograph was carried on page 22; in 1993, the Sun Goddess was front-​page news in the Asahi. It is easier to explain the fact of these changes than it is to account for the reasons behind them. The sociologist John Richardson insists media discourse

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Figure 10.5  The Sun Goddess’s progress.

Source: 20nenburi ni sengyo no gi in Asahi shinbun, 3 October 1993.

be understood in its social context, and it is presumably the case that the Asahi reporting in 1993 was determined, to some degree, by the activities in the early 1990s of radical groups of both left and right.54 In 1990, shortly before the emperor and empress made their first pilgrimage to Ise following the enthronement rites of the previous year, the leftwing Chūkaku faction fired three mortar rounds into the precinct of the Outer Shrine. It was, they said, ‘a preemptive strike’ against shrine and emperor ahead of the 1993 sengū. At the same time, the Asahi was engaged in a bitter dispute with the leader of a radical rightwing group, Kaze no Kai. The Asahi had published a satirical piece on the group, mis-​transcribing the character kaze (meaning ‘wind’) as nomi or ‘lice’. The gravity of the issue was evident in October 1993 when Kaze no Kai’s leader Nomura Shūsuke committed suicide in the Asahi headquarters in Tokyo.55 Whatever the explanation, the fact is that by 1993 the Asahi had abandoned the position it adopted in the immediate post-​war of ‘not focusing on specific religious groups’. Ise mattered to the Asahi in the 1990s. This is clearer still when we compare its coverage to that of the Yomiuri and Mainichi. In the first four days of October 1993, when media interest in the Ise Shrines was at its keenest, the Asahi published nine articles with a total of 5,146 words, the Yomiuri had eight articles amounting to 4,143 words and the Mainichi three articles at 1,023 words. Articles in all papers referred to Ise’s kami with the honorific go-​shintai, but the Asahi alone referred to the kami by name as Amaterasu.

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What is intriguing about the print media as a whole is what it did not cover in 1993, namely, a number of developments in the production of the sengū, subtle as ever but important, nonetheless. The Shinto establishment noted them with pride, in forums such as its weekly paper Jinja shinpō.56 In 1985, for the first time in the post-​war period, the emperor instructed the chief priest to commence preparations for the sengū eight years ahead. Twenty years earlier, the chief priest had requested permission, which the emperor had duly granted; this time, the emperor took the initiative. Again, as twenty years before, the emperor made annual donations to the building fund, but this time the emperor was not taking his cue from the Supporters’ Association campaign; his donation was rather the prompt for their campaign to begin. These were both moments of theatre that located the emperor as the author of the sengū, which, of course, he was not. The Shōwa emperor died in 1989 while sengū preparations were under way, but his son, the Heisei emperor, was similarly involved. He continued the annual payments begun by his father. On 2 October 1993, he, like his father twenty years before, prostrated himself at the very moment the Sun Goddess embarked on her solemn progress to her new shrine. On that day in Ise, he was represented by his second son, Takashina no Miya, as well as by his elder sister, Ikeda Atsuko, Ise’s incumbent head of rituals. He subsequently received the chief priest in audience in October after the main events were over, and he and the empress continued the tradition of imperial progresses to Ise in spring the year after rebuilding. The press showed no interest in the subtle shifts in the relationship between shrine and imperial family. Nor did they record the presence of the cabinet secretary and the finance minister at the Inner Shrine on 2 October. Twenty years before, the cabinet secretary and finance minister were present, but at the Outer Shrine. These changes are of consequence since they represent the continuity of a trend we have been observing since 1945:  the increasing incursion of the Ise Shrines into the public sphere of post-​war Japan. And that trend took a major leap forward in 2013, when Abe Shinzō became the first prime minister in the post-​war to participate in the Sun Goddess’s progress. The public, political quality of those rites was clearer now than it had ever been since 1929, the heyday of state Shinto.

Conclusion P HASE S OF R E DEVE LOP M E N T

The impressions of a typical visitor to Ise (or to any other significant site of pilgrimage or tourism) are filtered through multilayered narratives about what he or she is supposed to experience. What visitors see is not simply what is there to see; their gaze is guided by a complicated amalgam of ideas and anticipations that are only partly of their own making. A visitor’s itinerary through Ise’s many sites follows not only a physical map of the place, but also, in equal measure, an ‘emotional map’ that determines both what is seen and what is felt as significant.1 Moreover, Ise’s landscape has been constantly modified over the centuries to conform to new narratives, while the most obvious traces of older narratives have been erased or forgotten. ‘What is there to see’ consists of many layers, deposited by practices in earlier ages. Our aim in this history has been to present a stratigraphic survey of the most important of these layers and to reconstruct their social contexts. As we noted in the Introduction, Ise’s current emotional map is by no means the product of a single author or institution. Tour operators, guidebook publishers, media companies, local businesses and transport corporations (among others) disseminate narratives that may either diverge from or overlap with those of Ise’s priests and other religious actors. In the run-​up to the 2013 sengū, commercial guidebooks spoke of Ise as a place of healing, a site where one could retrieve one’s ‘true heart’ in a setting of sacred, timeless nature. The shrines and, not least, their natural setting were advertised as places of self-​realization, ‘power spots’ where one might reconnect with ancient wisdom. Religious actors likewise emphasized Ise’s changeless essence, but tended to talk less of personal spirituality and more of cultural values on a communal, ethnic or national level. Both groups exoticized Ise as a space set apart from the realm of everyday experience, a place where one might ‘hear the whispering of the gods from the depth of the forest’.2 This contemporary Ise narrative may strike one as unsophisticated and predictable, but even so, it has its own stratigraphy. It contains some elements with long histories and others that are very recent. The idea of Ise as eternal and timeless, a site of sacred geography that floats in a dimension of purity beyond ‘karmic’ decay, was a central theme of medieval Ise lore. The notion that Ise is the divine focus of a national community came into its own in the nineteenth century, drawing on the older understanding that Ise’s kami is the divine lord of Japan –​an

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idea that began to spread in the eleventh century. The ideal of self-​realization through nature, finally, emerged first in the late twentieth century and was applied to Ise only after it had gained popularity elsewhere as a novel interpretation of Shinto. On closer inspection, then, even the unassuming prose of guidebooks, pamphlets and photo-​albums discloses a rich mix of Ise narratives from all stages of the site’s development, subsumed in a new discourse that can perhaps be described as partly modern, in its stress on national identity, and partly postmodern, in its emphasis on recovering one’s own ‘original’ personal essence. This discourse is interesting not only for what it co-​opts, but also for what it obscures. There is, for example, little trace in modern popular narratives of the violent streak that the Ise kami revealed in classical times; of the medieval notion of Ise as the earthly palace of the World Buddha; or of Ise’s close links with the military in pre-​war Japan. To appreciate this layering of narratives, it is useful to begin with an analysis of the oldest strata and work one’s way up. Ise’s narratives are informed by the broader cultures of storytelling in different historical periods; this alone explains why the theme of nature, for example, emerged in the late twentieth century and not before. To explain fully the sequence of Ise narratives that have informed the shrines’ meanings and practices across the centuries, one would have to write a history of everything, drowning out Ise in the process. In this book, we have therefore not attempted to trace the origins of all the ideas that have been adopted by Ise agents in the course of the shrines’ history. Narratives are, at bottom, attempts at communication by agents with specific agendas, all acting in particular social contexts. We zoom in on the agents who did the narration, as well as the people they addressed. Throughout, we have sought to identify the shifting networks of people who have made their living at or from the shrines, served as their patrons, or otherwise had a significant impact on the shaping of Ise’s landscape and mindscape. Our main focus has not been on the shrines’ theology, their deities or their rituals, but on the frequent shifts in these networks of agents. We understand the frequent reimaginings of the shrines as results of these shifts. What picture emerges when we map out the most transformative breaks in Ise’s long history? Looking back on our findings, we propose the following periodization: 1. Seventh to tenth century: imperial isolation The cult of Amaterasu at Ise is initiated, or at the very least transformed beyond recognition, by Emperor Tenmu and his widow, Empress Jitō, between 673 and 698. The main agent of this cult is the imperial line, represented in Ise by the abstinence priestess, whose compound in Taki grows into a large institution with well over a hundred officials in the early eighth century. In the course of the ninth century, an ‘Office of the Great Shrines’ (Daijingūji) dominated by Ōnakatomi court priests takes over administrative matters; by the early tenth century, ‘heads of [Ise] rituals’ (saishu), also from the Ōnakatomi lineage, have won authority over the Daijingūji. The priests, maidens and craftsmen of the shrines, mostly of the Watarai and Arakida lineages, fall under the jurisdiction

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of these Ōnakatomi offices. The shrines are funded through the allocation of taxes, raised on designated lands and channelled through the court bureaucracy. 2. Eleventh to thirteenth century: garden estates In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Watarai and Arakida priests find ways to challenge the authority of the Ōnakatomi, first by acquiring rights to marginal land (misono and mikuriya, ‘gardens’) where crops are cultivated for use as shrine offerings, and later by expanding this loophole into a system of priest-​managed commended estates. Soliciting land donations from, among others, Kantō warriors occasions the creation of new narratives and practices that draw on Buddhist and Yin-​Yang cosmologies. A striking new theme is the notion of Ise as the palace of King Yama, who judges the dead and determines their next rebirth. This early Kantō patronage lays the groundwork for the active support of Ise by the Kamakura bakufu. Court taxes dwindle rapidly, and the economic basis of the various shrine communities shifts to income from land rights. The Watarai, Arakida and Ōnakatomi are successful in making this transition, while the compound of the abstinence priestess goes into terminal decline. 3. Twelfth to fourteenth century: temples and esotericism In the thirteenth century, major temple complexes establish outposts in Ise; the Mongol invasions, in particular, attract Buddhist investment to Ise as the home of Japan’s protector deity. Monastics based at these temples become a significant presence in the larger shrine area. They apply to Ise a Buddhist discourse about Amaterasu that originated at court in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This triggers a vogue of Ise esotericism in which the Watarai and Arakida priests participate actively. Ise’s new temples (or the lineages that owned the temples) acquire shrine lands, competing with the many branches of Watarai, Arakida and Ōnakatomi priests. Attempts by bakufu and court to restore shrine lands fail, and this failure inspires priests to call for a ‘return to the Origin’. The ensuing crisis motivates Watarai (and, to a lesser degree, Arakida and perhaps Ōnakatomi) priests to establish their own lineages of esoteric lore that they now, for the first time, refer to as Shinto. Those lineages, however, lose their relevance and disintegrate in the course of the fourteenth century. 4. Fourteenth to sixteenth century: the rise of pilgrimage In the 1330s Ise is caught up in the war between the Southern Court in Yoshino and the Ashikaga bakufu. The victorious Ashikaga shoguns stage grand pilgrimages to Ise from the 1390s onwards, interacting with the shrines through ‘masters of prayer rites’ (oshi). Some of these oshi are Watarai and Arakida priests, but many are not. In the fifteenth century, conflicts arise between non-​ priestly oshi and the shrine priests, in which the former gain the upper hand. Oshi and Buddhist temples provide Ise-​related services to warriors and, by the late fifteenth century, to Buddhist practitioners and commoners. Relations between oshi and pilgrims (danna) are based on contracts, which typically grant an oshi the monopoly on Ise-​related services to his danna in return for

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a financial loan. Market towns called Yamada and Uji spring up in front of the Outer and the Inner Shrines, run by oshi councils and militias that do not hesitate to target even the shrine precincts. Income from danna contracts, prayer fees and other pilgrimage services replaces land rights as the mainstay of Ise’s economy. While the towns flourish, the shrines fall into almost total ruin. 5. Seventeenth century to 1868: a national cultural centre In the seventeenth century, the Edo bakufu incorporates the restored Ise Shrines into the new order. The bakufu takes over the funding of the shrines, including the sengū. This is inspired not by a recognition of Ise’s ancient imperial origins, but rather by the precedent set by the Kamakura and Muromachi shoguns, who included Ise in their pantheon of warrior kami. Ise is envisioned at least by the bakufu as part of a trinity of shogunal protector deities, together with Hachiman and the deified Tokugawa founder, Ieyasu = Tōshō Daigongen. The town councils, run by an oshi elite, remain in place, dominating the priests economically and politically. The Buddhist temples, however, are sidelined and excluded from the pilgrimage business by 1675. In the new sectarian setting of the seventeenth century, Ise comes to be seen as a site of Shinto, ergo not Buddhism. A boom in pilgrimage practices in general, and the Ise pilgrimage in particular, allows Yamada, Uji and, not least, the Furuichi pleasure quarters to grow into a contiguous religious, cultural and economic centre of national renown. 6. 1868–​1912: the emperor’s mausoleum In 1869, the Meiji emperor sets out on an epoch-​making progress to Ise. This event, first mooted by advisors to his father, Emperor Kōmei, six years earlier, signals the heightened significance of Ise and its kami to the modern, emperor-​ centred nation state. It initiates a chain reaction of radical reforms at the shrines. The state and its bureaucrats emerge now as the principal determinants of Ise’s fortunes, and the age of the oshi is over. The oshi are banned, and the countrywide pilgrimage networks they had constructed collapse. The hereditary shrine priests of the Arakida, Watarai and other lineages are dismissed and replaced by state appointees. No longer will Ise accommodate itself to the private prayers and sensual pleasures of common pilgrims; no longer is it a place of miracles. Ise is now the mausoleum for the emperor’s great ancestor, Amaterasu Ōmikami. In this dynamic process of constructing Ise’s modern meanings, the physical appearance of Yamada and Uji and, indeed, the Ise Shrines themselves is transformed. Local entrepreneurs play a defining role in this endeavour. 7. 1912–​1945: imperial discourse and the modern pilgrim Pre-​war Ise witnesses an intensification of numerous trends established during the Meiji transformation, rather than striking new developments. New agents appear on the scene, but they do so within the state framework established at the start of the Meiji period. And, if pilgrim numbers alone are anything to go by, Ise’s popularity among Japanese of all ages, backgrounds and means soars to unprecedented heights. A new state-​determined discourse emerges that finds in the emperor’s Ise veneration proof of the incomparably sacred nature of the

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imperial institution. State educators, journalists and Ise’s modern priesthood emerge as the new agents who deliver this discourse with a variety of techniques, many new and some old: textbooks of the modern school education system, the national newspaper media and Ise Shrine propaganda in the form of pamphlets and newly configured amulets. When Japan embarks on total war, its leaders turn to the Ise kami for divine assistance, its people for solace. 8. 1945 until the present: Ise privatized No single agent has exerted a greater influence on Ise’s post-​war experience than Japan’s American occupiers. GHQ removes Ise from the dominant position it enjoyed in the public sphere, reducing it to the status of one private religious charity among many. This new, acutely diminished status endures into the twenty-​first century, and much of Ise’s post-​war history is characterized by coordinated resistance to it. The shrines perforce rely, for the first time in their history, on private donations, and this has demanded the emergence of new actors:  private citizens, especially (but by no means exclusively) those elite members of post-​war society who run Japan’s big business. The post-​ war Shinto establishment, led by the umbrella organization Jinja Honchō, has driven the campaign to free Ise from the influence of GHQ reforms and the new constitution. In their endeavours, they have been aided and abetted by generations of conservative politicians, the imperial institution and an essentially conservative media. More recently, both Jinja Honchō and the Ise Shrine Office are actively co-​opting alternative views on shrines and Shinto that are catching the imagination of the public. The notion that Shinto is an ancient religion of nature worship supremely relevant to modern times has emerged as a new narrative about the shrines and, not least, their forests. Reflecting on this history, we notice that Ise went through a number of distinct phases, each characterized by different networks of people and founded on different economic models. As a general trend, the agents who were involved in shaping Ise became steadily more diverse and addressed an increasingly broad public. The narratives that emerged in each of these phases were products of the networks and economic models that they helped to sustain. At the same time, Ise also had to accommodate the changing discursive environment. Tales of Amaterasu’s ability to kill emperors made sense in phase one, but were incongruous with later models, and were thus either abandoned or reconfigured. The image of Amaterasu as a valiant warrior deity with the power to expel the invading Mongols, or defeat domestic enemies, can be understood as a later incarnation of that same motif, reworked by a new set of agents who addressed a new group of patrons. The notion of Ise as King Yama’s palace was effective in phase two and survived into phases three and four. There is no obvious reason why it should have been less effective in the Edo period (phase five), but within the sectarian setting of that age, when Ise was redefined as a site of Shinto, agents were obliged to construct new narratives. In modern times, a narrative that represents Ise in terms of Japan’s national essence (kokutai) was a perfect fit for the state-​run Ise of Meiji, the pre-​war

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period and wartime. In a post-​war setting where Ise relies on private donations, however, this notion was increasingly offset by new narratives that appeal to concerns that are less overtly political. For an institution the size of Ise, clinging to an ideology that fails to engage broadly is not an option. Ise agents are now actively embracing the increasingly dominant narrative about Shinto that sees the religion in terms of a ‘return to nature’. This is entirely predictable and, arguably, inevitable: it represents another effort to accommodate a new discursive environment. The fact that this recent concern with nature and spirituality can easily be combined with culturalist, ethnic and even nationalist discourses makes it easier to implement. New agents created not only new narratives, but also new landscapes. Ise occupied the same site for all of its history and has quite likely (although we cannot really be certain) displayed remarkable continuity in its architectural style.3 Even so, as a ritual space the shrines underwent radical changes in every one of the phases listed above. Classical Ise was a closed space of ritual purity, an isolated ‘hazard zone’ inhabited and managed by a community of kami maidens, priests and craftsmen, but off limits to all others. Medieval temples and oshi created new ritual spaces for their patrons: temple halls built within the shrine grounds or in their direct vicinity, dedicated rooms for kagura rites within sprawling oshi compounds and newly created sacred sites such as the Heavenly Rock-​Cave behind the Outer Shrine. From the late medieval through the early modern periods, the area adjacent to the Inner Shrine (now the very core of the ‘sacred forest’) was occupied by a labyrinth of small shrine booths, run by so-​called shrine keepers (miyamori) noisily vying for the donations of pilgrims. In this space, no Edo-​period visitor could possibly have listened for ‘the whispering of the gods’. Ise’s modern agents, especially, implemented a relentless sequence of spatial transformations unprecedented in their scope and legacy. Within little more than a generation, the Meiji state –​the main agent in Ise’s modern history –​effected the removal of those shrine booths, and of the last traces of Buddhism. State bureaucrats enclosed the shrines in fourfold fences to inspire a new sense of awe and discipline common pilgrims. The shrine grounds were entirely reimagined as modern, open, manicured spaces designed to inspire in pilgrims new sentiments of purity, order and, indeed, the sacred. Entirely new spaces were opened up, as at the Kuratayama museum site; new roads and new systems of transport –​steam train, streetcar and bus –​transformed the pilgrims’ experience. In the post-​war, too, the changes to Ise’s shrine-​scape have been striking: the Mikimoto Road and the Nansei Bypass are especially significant since, between them, they not only facilitate access to Ise from across Japan, but also direct pilgrims away from the Outer Shrine to the Inner Shrine. The Inner Shrine has itself been subject to a radical makeover in the 1990s, with the creation of Oharai Machi and Okage Yokochō. At the time of writing, the redesign of the area in front of the Outer Shrine is underway: the pilgrims’ path to the shrine has been refurbished and a new sengū museum erected adjacent to the Meiji-​period Magatama Lake. When we look back at Ise’s thirteen centuries of history from a social perspective, we can now recognize how this site functioned as the nub of a

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sequence of networks, each with its own economic structure. These networks often overlapped in time, and their agents did not relinquish their share in Ise without a fight. However, they could not prevent others reinvesting Ise’s ‘capital’ and building up new structures of patronage. Time and again, established agents were overwhelmed by new competitors and either went dormant or extinct. Such a fate was suffered, in turn, by the Ōnakatomi court priests, the Watarai and Arakida priestly communities, Buddhist kanjin mendicants, and the oshi. At times, heavy-​handed state intervention forced groups of agents out of business, as happened with the mendicants in 1675 and the oshi in 1871. In the latter case, the lack of an alternative network caused a serious slump in pilgrim numbers and so in the fortunes of Yamada and Uji. The situation would have been even more serious if at least some oshi had not found ways to continue their business in new guises. At the time of writing, Ise’s divine capital shows no sign of losing its value. As we have seen, the 2013 sengū attracted large investments by many actors, as well as unprecedented numbers of visitors. Ise also seems to be gaining political traction, as a site of national ritual free of the ideological controversies that mar other sites, notably, the Yasukuni Shrine. Ise’s latest re-​signification, as a symbol of Japan’s ancient culture of harmony with nature, is proving extremely effective in addressing diverse audiences and serving multiple agendas at the same time. It evokes both nostalgia and environmental idealism, while leaving plenty of space for religious, spiritual, ethnic and nationalist interpretations. Perhaps most significantly, turning Ise into a timeless symbol of Japanese harmony with nature depoliticizes the site and thus, paradoxically, makes it more attractive as a stage for political gestures. In the summer of 2015, Prime Minister Abe announced that the 2016 Summit of Industrialized Countries would be held in a resort near Ise, so as ‘to let the world leaders experience and enjoy Japan’s natural beauty, rich culture and tradition there’.4 In an official statement Abe explained that this site was chosen because it is Japan’s furusato or ‘ancestral home’, with at its centre ‘the Ise Shrines, which have spun a thread of everlasting history’.5 On 26 May 2016, he duly led the leaders of the G7, including US President Obama and Chancellor Merkel of Germany, to the Inner Shrine, where they planted trees in the Shin’en garden, entered the main shrine precinct and watched a video at the Pilgrims’ Rest Area (sanshūden). The Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the excursion as a ‘visit’ (hōmon), a secular ‘welcoming event’ (kangei gyōji).6 The media focus was on the tree planting ceremony, while any acts of worship that took place within the shrine precinct were passed over in silence. There was once again a striking absence of debate about the possible constitutional implications of Ise re-​entering the public stage. This event offers further evidence that in the hands of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, Ise’s divine capital is entering a new cycle of development.

NOTES Introduction 1. On Ise’s architecture, its changing conceptualization and its evolution, see Hvass 1998 and Inoue 2013. 2. Other lesser shrines belonging to the Ise complex may be rebuilt or, at least, repaired in conjunction with the sengū proceedings, as funds allow. 3. Jingū Shichō 2013. 4. Over 60 per cent of visitors are in Ise City for an average of only four hours, and return home or continue their travel the same day. Of the 40 per cent who spend the night in the Ise area, only one in six stay in the city itself. Most prefer hotels in nearby coastal resorts such as Toba and Kashikojima. The fact that most visitors leave Ise before 6 p.m. greatly diminishes the shrines’ economic impact on the city (Ise Shi 2014). 5. In 1973, shrine officials announced that the emperor contributed one million yen per year; after this, questions about the amount became taboo. 6. Shūkan Daiyamondo, 4 April 2016: 28–​9. 7. Rots 2013: 347–​8. 8. ARC press release, 23 May 2014. 9. Rambelli 2014: 235. 10. In a book titled Shintō no chikara (The power of Shinto), Jinja Honchō President Tanaka Tsunekiyo describes the sengū as a ‘prime example’ of Japan’s ‘culture of growing trees’ and elaborates on the significance of shrine groves. He also refers to power spots as a positive opportunity to attract young people to shrines and as an alternative to prevalent ‘prejudices’ against pre-​war ‘state Shinto’ (Tanaka 2011: 6, 20).

Chapter 1  1. Tsuda Sōkichi was perhaps the first to attempt a critical analysis of the foundation myths of the Ise Shrines. See Tsuda 1924: 399ff. Tsuda eventually reached the conclusion that the shrines were founded during the reign of Empress Suiko around the year 600 (Tsuda 1948–​50).  2. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 176.  3. Prominent scholars in the ‘early’ camp are Sakamoto Kōtarō, Tanaka Takashi, Okada Seishi and Tsuruoka Shizuo; the ‘late’ camp includes Tamura Enchō, Ōwa Iwao, Tsukushi Nobuzane and Kawazoe Noboru.  4. Nihon shoki, entry 26.6.672; cf. Aston 1972 (vol. 2): 307.  5. A system of court ranks signalled by way of coloured silk caps.  6. As stated in the preface to the Kojiki (Philippi 1968: 41). Note, however, that there is no corroboration for Tenmu’s initiative outside this preface (cf. Lurie 2001: 309).  7. This is argued, for example by Tamura Enchō 1996.

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8. Man’yōshū 2–​199, translated in Levy 1981: 128–​9, and commented upon in Ebersole 1989: 77. Levy mistranslates itsuki no miya as ‘Shrine of our offerings’. 9. Shaku Nihongi, an authoritative medieval commentary on the Nihon shoki, states that this passage draws on an almost identical entry in the diary of Ato no Chitoko, who accompanied Tenmu in the Jinshin campaign. However, this diary was probably written in the 710s, in preparation for an occasion at which new ranks were conferred, and still post-​dates 672 by four decades. 10. For the mokkan showing Ōku’s name, see Saigū Rekishi Hakubutsukan 1999: 82. 11. The original reading of this district name was Take, which changed to Taki much later. We will stick to Taki throughout this book for reasons of convenience. 12. Izumi Yūji (2006: 53–​74) notes a wall and number of buildings with earth-​fast posts, as well as an assembly of pit-​houses, that are dated to the late Asuka or early Nara period (the decades around 700). 13. Tamura 1996: 229. Nihon shoki uses this or very similar expressions with reference to Princesses Takuhata, Sasage, Iwakuma, Uji, and Sukate. In the entries about Takuhata, Sasage and Uji, ‘shrine’ is written with the character 祠, probably denoting an open-​ air site; the Sukate entry switches to ‘hall’ 宮. 14. Hayashi Kazuma (2001: 41) suggests that some of these names may have belonged to princesses who worshipped kami that were important to the court before Ise rose to prominence. In a similar vein, Okada Seishi (1970) argues that Amaterasu displaced the sun-​deity Takami-​musubi as the kami of Ise, and proposes that early abstinence princesses served this male deity rather than the female Amaterasu; there is, however, no evidence whatsoever of an early cult of Takami-​musubi at Ise. 15. This is an ancient name for the Kumozu River, which enters Ise Bay some thirty kilometres northwest of the Ise Shrine. 16. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 341. 17. It is striking in this regard that according to Nihon shoki, both Iwakuma and Uji were removed from their duties as abstinence princesses after being ‘assaulted’ by imperial princes. 18. On this myth, see also Saitō 1996, ch. 2. Saitō’s main interest is in the process of unknown kami manifesting themselves through tatari curses and oracles. 19. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 152–​4. 20. Tsuda Sōkichi (1948–​50 [vol. 1]: 592), for example, proposed that this myth was the result of the mixing together of different myths at a late stage. 21. The third kami, Yamato Ōkunitama, is also related to Ōmononushi. According to Nihon shoki, Ōkunitama and Ōmononushi are alternative names of Ōkuninushi, the ‘Great master of the land’ (Aston 1972 [vol. 1]: 59). Ōkuninushi relinquished the land of Japan to Amaterasu’s descendants. It was his ‘wondrous spirit’ that put the land in order; when that work was done, Ōkuninushi expressed the wish to settle on Mount Miwa (Aston 1972 [vol. 1]: 61). 22. Breen and Teeuwen 2010: 70–​1. 23. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 158–​9. 24. Philippi 1968: 178–​9. 25. Ibid.: 201–​4. 26. Ibid.: 291–​2. Michael Como (2009: 165) compares this myth with the tale of Takuhata, who, as we saw above, was ‘pregnant’ with a stone. If one chooses to see these two tales as comparable, both may be interpreted as tales where a male sun-​ deity impregnates a maiden who then gives birth to a stone/​jewel.

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27.  In one Nihon shoki episode, the Miwa deity cracked thunder at Emperor Yūryaku, who had ordered his capture. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 347. 28. Aston 1972 (vol. 2): 408. 29. Gina L. Barnes (2007, 2014) goes much further than Como in positing that an early cult of the Queen Mother of the West, which, she argues, thrived between the late-​ second and mid-​fourth centuries, formed the ancient matrix that later produced the figure of Amaterasu. 30. For example, Matsumae 1978; Akima 1993; Teeuwen 2012. 31. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 176. 32. Ibid.: 177. 33. In the oldest extant Chinese ritual code, Datang Kaiyuanli (fascicles 70 and 73), zhushen and sheji (the gods of the soil) are mentioned together as the objects of worship at lower levels of the administration. Zhushen here likely refers to the tutelary or ancestral deities of prominent local lineages. Imperial worship of zhushen deities was never part of the Chinese court ceremonial. 34. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 113. 35. Ibid.: 119 (Iware) and 120 (Shiki). 36. Ibid: 237. 37. Isolated occurrences of the words jingi or tenjin chigi are found in the chapters on Suizei, Keikō, Keitai, Kinmei, Suiko, Jomei, Kōtoku and Tenji. Many of these occurrences are in formulaic oaths: defeated enemies, allies or court vassals vow loyalty to the emperor and call down the wrath of the jingi onto themselves and their descendants if they break that vow. 38. 7.3.674, 6.676, 3.10.676 and 2.1.681. On one other occasion, imperial worship of the jingi was called off at the last moment because of a death at court (678, spring). A fifth round of offerings was presented to shosha, the ‘various shrines’, rather than jingi (23.1.675). 39. Cf. Nishimiya 2004: 29–​32. 40. Tenji 9 (9.3.670); Aston 1972 (vol. 2): 293. 41. The first mention of the title of the head of the Jingikan (jingihaku) is in the Nihon shoki chapter on Keitai (2.1), fifteen generations before Jitō. This is a typical example of the technique of camouflaging novelties by inserting token anachronisms in the chronicles of earlier reigns. Likewise, there is one isolated mention of the Kami-​ tsukasa in the Suinin chapter (3.8.Suinin 26), twenty-​nine generations before Tenmu. 42. Okada 1970: 349–​52. 43. Naoki 2009: 10. 44. Tanaka 1985: 33–​41. 45. This overview is based on Hozumi 2013 and Yamanaka 2010, 2016. 46. Hozumi 2013: 43–​4, 101–​5. Fujikata survived into medieval times as Anotsu. 47. Hozumi 2013: 86; Yamanaka 2010: 14. 48. Demonstrating the difficulty of interpreting archaeological finds, Hozumi sees scope for some continuity between this cultic site and the later Inner Shrine, while Yamanaka (2010: 14; 2016: 21) does not. 49. Yamanaka (2016: 30–​1) argues that pottery finds in minor kofun in Taki and Watarai indicate that these areas became monarchical tribute lands (miyake) in the early seventh century. There is no evidence, however, that this led to increased activity beyond the Miyagawa before the end of that century. 50. Philippi 1968: 137–​8, 142–​3. 51. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 78–​9.

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52.  The list of shrines attached to Engi shiki (Procedures of the Engi period, 927) mentions Azaka as the only ‘major’ shrine with ‘principal deities’ south of Tado in Kuwana (furthest north in Ise Province), with the exception of the largest shrines of the Ise complex. 53. Kōtaijingū gishikichō (804), the Protocols of Inner Shrine ritual discussed in detail in the next chapter; and Yamato-​hime no mikoto seiki, a medieval text (thirteenth century?) that appears to draw on early materials. Saruta-​hiko remains present in Ise City in the form of Saruta-​hiko Shrine, located near the Inner Shrine; later, a lesser group of Ise priests (the Uji-​tsuchigimi) would claim him as their distant ancestor. This shrine is not listed in Engi shiki, and its origins are unknown. 54. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 205; Philippi 1968: 238. 55. Aston 1972 (vol. 2): 376–​7. 56. Ebersole 1989: 197–​201. 57. Ooms 2009: 32. 58. Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 76. 59. See Mishina 1971: 111–​60. 60. Man’yōshū 2–​167. 61. Aston 1972 (vol. 2): 384. Ōku was the sister of Prince Ōtsu, who was executed to make place for Kusakabe; it appears that Ōtsu tried to escape to Ise when he was first accused of treason. Kawazoe Noboru (2007: 323–​6) sees this as an explanation for Ōku’s return from Ise. He does not, however, explain why no new abstinence princess was appointed to replace her. 62. Aston 1972 (vol. 2): 406. 63. Tamura 1996: 181–​5. 64. This oracle appears to ask that silk thread (akahiki no ito) produced by Ise’s two ‘kami districts’ be exempted from that year’s tax relief, and compensated for by a corresponding exemption from taxes in the following year. This silk thread figures as an important offering in later descriptions of the tsukinami ritual (see Chapter 2). In the autumn of the same year (692), the governor of Ise Province presented ‘two auspicious stalks of rice’ to the court, perhaps in gratitude for Jitō’s favours. 65. In the twelfth month of 692, tribute from Silla was sent to a similar list of shrines, again headed by Ise: Ise, Sumiyoshi, Kii, Ōyamato and Unadari. 66. Shoku Nihongi, entry 29.12.698. 67. Tanaka 1985: 124–​31. 68. A character meaning ‘storehouse’ has been added (in a different hand) in a Shoku Nihongi manuscript kept at Ise Bunko, but this is generally regarded as a later interpolation. An identical entry without this character in Ruiju kokushi effectively rules out a copying error in this passage. 69. The same is argued in Tsukushi 1962, ch. 2. 70. Sakurai 1991: 79–​93. This hypothesis would explain the reference to a ‘hall of abstinence at Ise in Watarai’ in Hitomaro’s 696 poem (quoted earlier), two years before the removal of the ‘Great Shrine of Taki’ to that district. 71. Kawazoe 2007: 336. 72. The exception is a much-​debated note in Kojiki, confirming the presence of ‘Toyuuke’ in Watarai by 712 (Philippi 1968: 140). See Sakurai 1991: 79–​93. 73. For example, Kamata 2004, ch. 2. 74. On epidemics, see Farris 2009.

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Chapter 2 1. Such a view is expressed by the Shintō taikei edition of these texts, whose editors concur with Arakida Tsunetada, an Ise priest who wrote commentaries on the two gishikichō in the 1770s: ‘The empire holds on to ancient times without change in all things; in matters of the kami, following ancient precedents is especially crucial . . . This is why [Emperor Kanmu] made up his mind to establish the procedures of the Ise Shrines.’ Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 12. 2. See Teeuwen and Rambelli 2003, ‘Introduction’; Satō 2003. 3. Ruijū kokushi, entry 22.6.816. 4. The oldest core of this record consists of documents collected by the Inner Shrine negi Arakida Norio (fl. 913). Its final editor was Arakida Nobumoto, who acted as Inner Shrine negi from 1029 to 1078. 5. Indeed, we read that some days after Moroe’s announcement, the emperor was visited in his dream by a ‘precious maiden’ who revealed that the ‘original ground’ (honji) from which ‘the sun disc’ (Amaterasu) arises is none other than Mahāvairocana. This oracle reflects the notion that kami are ‘traces’ (suijaku) of buddhas, a notion that spread only in the ninth century, and must therefore be regarded as apocryphal. 6. Tanaka 1985, ch. 5. Tanaka is referring to the rebellion of Fujiwara no Hirotsugu in 740. 7. On Shōmu and Hachiman, see Scheid 2014. 8. Shoku Nihongi, entry 25.9.769. 9. Shoku Nihongi, entry 23.11.765. Translation from Bowring 2005: 96. 10. Shoku Nihongi, entry 18.9.767. 11. Daijingū shozōjiki, entry 3.10.767; Shoku Nihongi, entry 16.8.767. 12. Shoku Nihongi, entry 23.7.766. 13. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 336. 14. Rambelli 2007: 151; Como 2006: 135. 15. Takatori 1979: 150ff. 16. For details on the decline of jingi ritual in the eighth century (exemplified by the grand ceremony of kinensai), see Breen and Teeuwen 2010: 35. 17. Some scholars have argued that Kanmu engineered, or at least completed, Ise’s transformation into a ‘state kami’. Nishi Yōko (1980: 174), for example, proposes that references in Shoku Nihongi to Ise as a ‘Great Shrine’ (daijingū) that towers over all ‘other shrines’ (shosha) were planted in earlier chapters of this national history at the time of its final redaction during Kanmu’s reign. 18. Of course, the protocol does not reveal how earlier versions of Ise may have looked. Maruyama Shigeru (2001), for example, proposes that the earliest design of the shrines (in the seventh century) may have looked more like a Chinese mausoleum. The complete lack of archaeological data has inspired a wide range of speculative theories. 19. These terms appear for the first time in Daijingū shozōjiki, entry 6.852. 20. Before the establishment of the Daijingūji Office, the provincial governor of Ise (who sometimes doubled as head of the Saigūryō) collected taxes from and policed the shrine districts. The Daijingūji originated in the 770s, and gradually replaced the Ise governor as the administrative authority of the shrine districts in the ninth century. 21. For a balanced overview of the evidence, see Nishi 1980: 159–​65. 22. Nihon shoki, Aston 1972 (vol. 2), 408.

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Notes to Pages 38–46

23. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 127. The donation of Iino (first for one generation, and permanently in 897) is recorded in Ruijū kokushi, entries 13.3.889 and 11.9.897. 24. The number of 152 is based on Engi shiki (927); the number 338 on Shinshō kyakuchoku fushō (806). The latter gives a total number of 944 kanbe for Ise Province as a whole (i.e. the shrine districts plus the 152 Ise kanbe in other districts within that province). Kumata 1980: 272–​80. 25. First variant; Aston 1972 (vol. 1): 76. 26. Daijingū shozōjiki, Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 340–​2. 27. A document preserved at the Shōsōin in Nara and (tentatively) dated to c. 762 records an order for gilded ornaments to be used for rebuilding the Inner Shrine. Daijingū shozōjiki records sengū in 690, 709, 729, 747 and 766. Fukuyama Toshio (1976: 361) and Tanaka Takashi (1985) offer various arguments for late or early datings; decisive proof, however, is lacking. In the light of our conclusions in Chapter 1, 709 or 729 appear at least possible. 28. Tamura 1996: 220ff. 29. Fukuyama 1976: 4. 30. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 33. 31. Cf. Kawazoe 2007: 336. This myth describes how Amaterasu was lured from hiding with the help of a mirror that was attached to a sacred tree (see Breen and Teeuwen 2010, ch. 4). However, this tale was related to Ise’s pivot post only in medieval times (e.g. in Gochinza hongi). 32. Murei 1999, ch. 7. 33. There were, in fact, two Takihara Shrines, the second known as Narabi no Miya. Some sources count Takihara as two shrines and count five auxiliary shrines at the Inner Shrine. 34. Shoku Nihongi, entry 6.8.772. 35. Twenty-​five of these were ‘registered’ (kanchō ni nosuru); fifteen were not. The registered shrines received court offerings and had priests called hafuri; they were later known as sessha. The non-​registered shrines figure in later records as massha. 36. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 193. 37. An influential proponent of this theory was the Meiji-​period Ise theologian Mikannagi Kiyonao. 38. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 120–​1. 39. Sakurai 1991: 155. 40. Presumably, this Outer Shrine rule also applied to the ōmonoimi of the Inner Shrine. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 239. 41. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 102. 42. Teeuwen 1996: 27–​9. An entry dated 873 in Daijingū shozōjiki mentions that Ame no Koyane, Ame no Mitōshi and Ame no Murakumo, ancestors of the Nakatomi, Arakida and Watarai priests, accompanied the ‘Great Shrine’ of Amaterasu when it ‘descended from heaven’ (Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 360). This mythical reference seems out of place in the context of a Takihara priest’s plea for reappointment, and was most likely added when this record was re-​edited in the eleventh century. 43. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1979: 348ff. 44. The mikannagi no monoimi was responsible for purification rites, which were repeated several times in the course of the day’s procedures. The main tasks of the sugadachi no monoimi were to cut trees and sticks on the shrine mountain and start the cultivation of rice at the shrines’ rice field.

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45. No details are offered on the procedure for this rite, or on the uses of these implements; later sources such as Kōtaijingū nenjū gyōji make no more mention of them. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1980: 261–​2. 46. This may well be in reference to Amaterasu’s leaving the Rock-​Cave of Heaven, but no early sources make the connection. 47. Nihon kōki, entry 6.812. 48. On this ritual and its history, see Ellwood 1970, and Breen and Teeuwen 2010, ch. 5. 49. Ellwood 1970, ch. 4. 50. See Nihon shoki, entries 5.12.673 (Tenmu 2) and 21.9.676 (Tenmu 5). 51. During kanname, the shrine precinct was decorated with sheaves of freshly harvested rice. 52. Okada Shōji 1994: 26–​7. The latter decree is recorded in Ruijū sandai kyaku 19. Okada identifies the kami worshipped by the emperor in the jinkonjiki and niiname rituals as Amaterasu, but Amaterasu’s name is not mentioned in this context until medieval times. See Nakao 1996. 53. Okada Seishi 1970: 344. 54. Ryō no gige, section ‘Rice fields’ (denryō). 55. Seiji yōryaku, quoted in Okada Shōji 1994: 14. 56. Nakao 1996: 116. 57. Takamori 1999. 58. Miyake 2003.

Chapter 3 1. Daijingū shozōjiki, entry 19.6.1031. The two other main sources on this incident are the court diaries Shōyūki and Sakeiki. 2. Okada Shōji analyses this incident in Okada 1994, ch. 8. 3. Shōyūki, entry 29.3.1032. 4. Shōyūki, entry 12.8.1031. See Breen and Teeuwen 2010: 139–​40, 150. 5. Sakeiki, entry 19.11.1034. 6. For a similar interpretation of the oracle incident, see Muraoka 1976: 57–​61. 7. Nihon kiryaku, entry 29.12.1030. 8. Shōyūki, entry 9.12.1017. 9. The districts added were, in chronological order, Inabe, Mie, Anō, Asake and Iitaka. 10. This account is based mainly on Muraoka 1976; Tanahashi 1983, ch. 7; and Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2), ch. 3. 11. Hayakawa 2000: 65–​88. 12. In such cases, donors were often reduced to estate managers (gesu) under a priest proprietor. 13. The number would eventually stabilize at twenty in 1304, after which it remained unchanged until Meiji. 14. Shunki, quoted in Muraoka 1976: 58. Since 845, the responsibility for tax collection in the shrine districts had been shared between the heads of Daijingūji and Saigūryō (bypassing the provincial governor). In subsequent decades the Saigūryō was squeezed out. 15. This nationwide tax was first introduced to fund the sengū of 1076–​8 (Kojima 1985: 6).

250

Notes to Pages 60–70

16. Daijingū shozōjiki. Similar early terms were o-​kitōshi and o-​inorishi. 17. Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan 1999 (vol. 6): 357–​8. On this text, see Teeuwen 2003. 18. Teeuwen 2003: 119–​22. 19. Tenshō Daijin giki reflects an esoteric discourse in which gender is used to illustrate the idea of the ultimate unity of opposites, with male and female fading into each other. Yet the general cluster of divinities identified with Amaterasu is largely male, and ‘he’ seems less misleading in this context than ‘she’ or ‘it’. 20. See Hayami 1975: 234–​61; Hirasawa 2008. 21. See Chapter 4, note 3. 22. For a full translation and analysis of this text, see Teeuwen and Van der Veere 1998. 23. Azuma kagami, entry 11.9.1180. 24. Azuma kagami, entry 12.10.1181. 25. Azuma kagami, entry 8.2.1182. 26. Moerman 2005: 21–​2. 27. Chōkan kanmon (1163–​64). The question of whether Ise and Kumano were identical (dōtai) or not arose when Kumano priests argued that officials who had violated Kumano land holdings had committed ‘great sacrilege’, a capital crime that ritsuryō law reserved for those who violated the Great Shrines of Ise. Opinion was divided; the fact that the perpetrators were exiled rather than executed suggests that the Kumano view was ultimately rejected. See Takahashi 1994: 66–​73. 28. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2): 2. 29. Azuma kagami, entries 22.3.1221 and 7.8.1221. 30. This is clear from an entry (30.3.1185) in Gyokuyō, the diary of Kujō Kanezane. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2): 164. 31. Tōdaiji shuto sankei Ise Daijingū ki (1186). 32. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2): 167–​8. 33. On these temples, see Hagiwara 1985: 233–​9. In fact, the oldest Arakida temple (Tamiyadera) may have predated the first Ōnakatomi temple (Rentaiji). The hōraku rites of 1186 took place at Jōmyōji (a Watarai temple) and Tengakuji (Arakida). 34. This is mentioned, among other places, in the Nakatomi harae kunge colophon. 35. These motifs figure most outspokenly in Tsūkai’s Daijingū sankeiki (1287). See Itō 2011: 563–​85; in English, Itō 2006–​7: 56–​8. Iitaka is the area around modern-​day Matsusaka. 36. Tōdaiji shuto sankei Ise Daijingū ki, tsuiki. On cults of such jewels or relics in this period, see Rupert 2000. 37. Abe 1989: 123ff. 38. Abe 2006–​7: 98–​111. 39. On the dynamics of this realm of secret transmissions, see Stone 1999; Scheid and Teeuwen 2006. 40. The three treasures are the three regalia known from Nihon shoki and other classical texts. In this contemplation they are identified as seal, sword and mirror. The ten treasures feature prominently in Sendai kuji hongi (ninth century?). On the role of both sets of treasures in esoteric ritual and lore, see Kadoya 2006. 41. Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan 1999 (vol. 6): 451. 42. This is based on a pun: Dainihonkoku 大日本国 can be read either as ‘the great land of Japan’ (Dai-​Nihon-​koku) or as ‘the Original Land of Mahāvairocana’ (Dainichi-​ honkoku). An early instance of this pun, much quoted in later Ise literature, can be

Notes to Pages 70–79

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found in Seison’s Fuhō san’yōshō (1060), which argued that Japan is the land where Mahāvairocana appeared in the guise of Amaterasu. 43. On the mandala as an underlying structure of medieval Japanese religion, see Bodiford 2006: 174–​5. 44. Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan 1999 (vol. 6): 453. 45. Ibid.: 455. 46. See Uejima 2004. 47. Itō Satoshi, ‘Kaidai’, in Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan 1999 (vol. 6): 541. Itō is not convinced that the speakers of the question-​and-​answer dialogue can be identified with certainty as Shūkaku and Shōken. On the copyings, see Abe 2005–​6. 48. This has been pointed out by Satō Hiroo, e.g. in Satō 2000, ch. 4; in English, see Satō 2003.

Chapter 4 1. For example, Kubota 1959. 2. Kojima 1985: 132. In his diary, Tsūkai sankeiki (Tsūkai’s pilgrimage record), Tsūkai wrote that in 1275, he received permission to appoint 216 junior (gusō) and six senior monks (ajari) to the two Hōrakusha founded earlier that same year. 3. In Chapter 3 we saw that in 1278, Tenshō Daijin giki was branded as a transmission of the Ōnakatomi saishu. Murei Hitoshi (2000: 180) argues that this proves that this text originated within Ōnakatomi circles, but it may also reflect a much later Ōnakatomi attempt to claim it as Hōrakuji/​Hōrakusha shōgyō. 4. The same Nobutsune was also closely involved with the 1272 pilgrimage of Enshō of Tōdaiji, and even wrote a preface to a work of Buddhist theology by that monk (Kondō 1959a). 5. This shrine, located across the Mimususogawa stream, was the nearest point to the main hall of the Inner Shrine that was open to monks. Its modern name is Kazahinomi Shrine. Its status was raised to that of auxiliary shrine (betsugū) in 1293, in reward for its efficacy in defending Japan against the Mongols. In Chapter 3 it appears as Kaze no Yashiro. 6. Kondō 1959b: 14. 7. A spectacular account of Eison’s appeal to Hachiman at this shrine-​temple complex can be found in the second fascicle of Hachiman gudōkun (c. 1308–​18). 8. Kongō busshi Eison kanjin gakushō ki. See Goepper 1993: 99. 9. An image of Aizen Myōō, carved on Eison’s request as early as 1247, is identified with Amaterasu in a late seventeenth-​century record of Eison’s activities (Saidai chokushi Kōshō Bosatsu gyōjitsu nenpu); Itō Satoshi (2011: 610) argues that this Edo-​period record reflects a long-​standing association of this image with Ise at Saidaiji, possibly since the days of Eison. 10. Itō 2011, ch. 4. 11. Andreeva 2010 includes a full translation of Miwa Daimyōjin engi. Scholars have long read this as a reference to one of Eison’s visits to Ise, but more recently, Itō Satoshi (2011: 618) has convincingly argued that the Eison disciple and Kōshōji abbot Sen’yu is a more likely candidate. 12. Grapard 1998; Teeuwen 2013: 61–​2.

252

Notes to Pages 80–88

Tsūkai sankeiki, Hanawa 1924–​25 (vol. 3 ge, Jingibu): 767–​8. Hanawa 1924–​25: 768. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2): 156. Kaizu 1994: 127–​37. In medieval times, the daijingūji continued to perform ritual functions; his main role, however, was to organize and collect funds for interim sengū. In contrast, regular sengū were the responsibility of the saishu, who now also communicated directly with the negi (notably of the Inner Shrine) on all matters of political and economic importance (Yamauchi 2006). 18. Nishiyama 1977: 33–​52. 19. Kaizu 1994: 138. 20. Kaizu 1994: 73. The 1301 tokusei occurred against the background of Emperor Chenzong’s renewed demands for Japan’s submission to the Mongol empire in 1299. 21. In the mid-​thirteenth century, the yakubukumai was undermined by a growing number of tax exemptions. Also, the fact that on an increasing number of estates the actual collection of this tax was delegated to jitō stewards reduced the amount that actually reached the shrines. Hiraizumi 2006: 114–​15. 22. For example, Kamata 2003: 78–​82. 23. Kimura 2001: 45. 24. In between these regular sengū, there were interim sengū at the Outer Shrine in 1252, 1253, 1255, 1258, 1261, 1264 and 1267; in 1271, 1274, 1280, 1284 and 1285; and in 1288, 1296, 1297 and 1299. 25. At the Inner Shrine, there were regular sengū in 1247, 1266 and 1285. Interim sengū took place in 1248, 1254 and 1260; 1279 and 1283; 1290, 1292, 1297 and 1304. 26. At both shrines, negi were numbered in order of seniority and hierarchy. 27. Hiraizumi 2006: 279–​81. 28. For more details on Yukitada, Shinmei hisho and Daoism, see Teeuwen 2015. 29. Yukitada’s reinstatement, on orders of the retired emperor, was not unopposed: a certain Watarai Kunifusa forwarded an official protest. Kamakura ibun 7.1287 (16310), quoted in Hiraizumi 2006: 279. 30. Abe 2005: 749. 31. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 204. 32. Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan 2005 (vol. 8): 557; Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 205. 33. Ibid. 34. Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan 1999 (vol. 6): 394. Kubota Osamu (1959: 39), Murei Hitoshi (2000: 343ff.) and Ogawa Toyoo (2003: 184–​5) all arrive at the conclusion that the initiand (‘I’) must have been Yukitada. 35. Murei 2000, chs 3 and 4. 36. Ogawa 2003 and 2005. 37. Girardot 1983. 38. Ogawa 2005. The Laozi quotations in Tenchi reikaku hisho derive from Yuanwu xinyao (Yuanwu’s Essence of the mind), a didactic work by the Song-​period Chan master Yuanwu Keqin that was imported to Japan in 1241 by Enni Ben’en. For more on Yukitada, Enni, and the relationship between Zen and Ise, see Ogawa 2005 and Teeuwen 2015. 39. For example, Takahashi 1994: 60. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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40. Most strikingly, some such terms occur in Zō Ise nisho daijingū hōki hongi (Record of the precious foundation of the two Ise Shrines), a text that was first copied by Yukitada in 1277, well before his dismissal. Okada Shōji (1980) argues, however, that Yukitada added to this text in a new copying in 1296. 41. Azuma kagami, entry 6.3.1181. Yoshichika, a minor figure from the saishu lineage, had marital relations with the Hatano, a warrior lineage whose lands bordered the Ōba garden estate (Hiraizumi 1988). 42. For an analysis, see Teeuwen 1996: 30ff. 43. Daidō hongi is now lost, but its account of the Outer Shrine’s founding is quoted in Jingū zōreishū (Miscellaneous precedents of the Ise Shrines), a record compiled between 1202 and 1210, probably by the Daijingūji. 44. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 223–​4. 45. Ibid.: 5. 46. The genealogy that connected Toyuke with Ninigi in Ise texts went from Ame no Minakanushi, via Takami-​musubi, to Ninigi’s mother, Yorozuhatatoyoaki-​tsu-​hime. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 4. 47. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 28. 48. Ibid.: 240. Gochinza denki carries a colophon that ends with the text’s copying by Yukitada in 1295, the very year he turned sixty. That this text limits access to under-​ sixties in this very year suggests that Yukitada inserted this prescription, and has been used as an argument for his authorship of this and related ‘secret’ texts, notably Gochinza hongi and shidaiki. 49. Teeuwen 2006b: 173. 50. Sofū Sen’yōkai 1923: 218–​54. 51. For an annotated translation of this sutra, see Astley-​Kristensen 1991. 52. Kadoya 1992. I depend on this article also for much of the argument below. 53. Tenshō daijin kuketsu was compiled by Kakujō, a disciple of Sen’yu of Kōshōji (see note 11). Itō Satoshi (2011: 637) argues that Kakujō spread these diagrams further by inserting them into yet another secret text (Nichiiki hongi, ‘Record on the origin of Japan’). 54. Yamamoto 1994: 55–​87. 55. This is recorded in Naoshige harae shō, a fifteenth-​century work on Ise-​style purification. Lack of confirmation in court documents leaves doubts as to the historicity of this claim. On the other hand, this work shows that in Ise, Tsuneyoshi was ascribed a central role in the development of purification rites. 56. Teeuwen and Van der Veere 1998: 54. 57. Ibid.: 38. 58. Kūkai quotes his verse in his Shōryōshū; other quotations from that same work occur in other parts of Kunge/​Kige. 59. Teeuwen and Van der Veere 1998: 54. 60. Tani 1983: 254. The source in question carries the bland title Oharae-​bon (Book of purification). According to Ruijū jingi hongen (1320), this spell serves to ‘open the Rock-​Cave of Heaven’; Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 565. 61. This is a quotation from Yamato-​hime no mikoto seiki; Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 480. 62. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 486–​90. 63. Ibid.: 561. 64. Ibid.: 446.

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Notes to Pages 97–108

65. In fact, the rather unnatural reading shintō is recorded for the first time in 1419, as an esoterically charged alternative for the more straightforward jindō. It seems reasonable to assume that this esoterization of the reading of this compound post-​ dates Ruijū jingi hongen, although we have no evidence as to what reading was in actual use in Ieyuki’s time and environment. Teeuwen 2002; Kadoya 2009. 66. Ieyuki had earlier compiled a work with the title Shintō kan’yō (Abbreviated essentials of Shinto, 1317). In this text, however, the term shintō features only in the title. 67. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 555. On the conceptualization of Shinto, see Teeuwen 2007. 68. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 565–​6. 69. The documents of this case are collected in Kōji satabumi. See Teeuwen 1996: 58–​73; Hiraizumi 2006: 283–​90. 70. For an extensive study of this body of thought, see Stone 2003. 71. Rambelli 2009. 72. For a representative example, see Klein 1998; for an overview, see Itō 2011, ch. 2.

Chapter 5 1. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2): 258–​9. 2. Gekū negi meyasu an, reproduced in Jingū Shikan Kinnō Kenshōkai 1934 and Ise Shi 2007 (vol. 2): 229. 3. As mentioned earlier, Ruijū jingi hongen (1320) had been presented to Go-​Uda and Go-​Daigo in 1321 (rather than in 1332, as Ise Shi 2007–​13 [vol. 2] argues on p. 231). 4. Wajima 1965: 149–​150. 5. Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1991: 43. 6. Teeuwen 1996: 162. 7. Ng 2011. 8. Varley 1980: 20. 9. Ibid.: 218. 10. Ibid.: 266. 11. Conlan 2011: 64. 12. Nishikawa 1993. 13. Varley 1980: 61. 14. On Jihen, see Sueki 2006–​7: 361–​70. On the broader development from jindō to Shinto by way of Ieyuki, Jihen, Ryōhen and Yoshida Kanetomo, see Teeuwen 2007: 386–​96. 15. Nottoshi satabumi, Hanawa 1959 (vol. 1, Jingibu): 342. 16. Nishida 1960: 60–​4. On this conflict, see p. 137 in this book. 17. See Imatani and Yamamura 1992. 18. According to Kanmon gyoki (quoted in Ōnishi 1960: 284). 19. Hagiwara 1975. 20. Naganuma 2005: 19. 21. Goodman 1994. 22. Korō kujitsuden, Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1993: 254. 23. Hanawa 1959 (vol. 29, Zatsubu): 481. 24. On the great significance of this myth in medieval lore, see Breen and Teeuwen 2010, ch. 4.

Notes to Pages 108–118

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25. Yasutomi ki, quoted in Nishiyama 1989: 209. 26. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2): 548–​50 collects early references to the Kokuya (initially known as Kaze no Miya Myōkei-​in). 27. Ujitsune shinjiki, quoted in Iida 1991: 20–​5. 28. Schneider 2008: 81–​95. 29. Nishiyama 1987: 44–​9. 30. Funasugi 1998: 1–​22. 31. We have encountered this term earlier in a very different sense in Chapter 4. In the Kamakura period, jinin still retained its older meaning of ‘private service people’ –​ that is, farmers and other inhabitants of shrine lands whose taxes and corvée duties were reserved for a shrine, and who were exempt from public (i.e. court) taxation and legislation. Even in fifteenth-​century Ise, the word was still used in that meaning in some contexts, but when used in contrast to jin’yakunin or jigenin, it referred to members of the Watarai and Arakida priestly lineages who held ranks and were eligible for shrine appointments. 32. Higaki Sadatsugu waki (1609?), quoted in Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2): 435. 33. Nishigaki 1979: 82–​6. 34. Ibid.: 86. This success did not last long. In a 1464 document, a shrine official states bluntly that ‘although Iino and Taki are in principle shrine districts, they have in recent years been turned into a fief of the [Kitabatake] governor’. Even the remaining Watarai District was constantly threatened. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2): 448. 35. Naganuma 2005: 23–​4. 36. Nishiyama 1987: 111ff. 37. Suzuki 2003: 54–​63. 38. Nishiyama 1987: 170ff. 39. These events are described in much detail in Gekū korakan kyūki and Naikū korakan kyūki, both included in the collection Zoku Gunsho Ruijū. 40. This is reported in Sanetaka kōki (entry 23.1.1487); Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 2): 484. 41. Yamauchi 2006: 3, 7. Two Ōnakatomi branches vied for the position of saishu: the Tsuchimikado and the Iwade. Each had its close allies at the Inner Shrine: the Arakida branches of the Awano and Fujinami, respectively. In the end, the Iwade/​ Fujinami coalition prevailed. The fact that Ujitsune belonged to this faction must have made him even more critical of the current saishu and the Awano-​lineage first negi in 1431. 42. Ujitsune shinjiki, entry 17.6.1435. 43. Kanshō 3nen zō Naikū ki, quoted in Inagaki 2006: 297. 44. Kojima 1985, ch. 5. 45. Hanawa 1924–​25 (vol. 1 ge, Jingibu): 639. The situation at the Inner Shrine was no better. Here, the main hall was destroyed by a typhoon in 1500. A temporary hall was completed only in 1521, and this hall was not replaced until 1575. 46. On Kanetomo and the Saijōsho, see Scheid 2001, and Breen and Teeuwen 2010: 47–​52. 47. Kennai ki, quoted in Ōnishi 1960: 339. In 1452, the Inner Shrine priests appealed to the court to have this shrine pulled down (Ujitsune-​kyō hikitsuke), but were not heard. It has survived until this day and is presently known as Himukai Jinja. 48. Entoku ki, Hanawa 1924–​25 (vol. 1 ge, Jingibu): 695. On this incident, see Scheid 2001: 57–​61. 49. Entoku ki, Hanawa 1924–​25 (vol. 1 ge, Jingibu): 696. 50. Gohōkōin Masaie ki, entry 17.6.1491.

256

Notes to Pages 119–125

51. Souyri 2001: 181–​2. 52. The Kita and Enokikura compounds also included temples, run by ordained sons of these oshi houses. Funasugi 1998: 8. 53. A veritable ‘village’ of such massha shrine booths (most striking at the Inner Shrine) took form in the course of the sixteenth century, somewhat later than the Outer Shrine Rock-​Cave and the Inner Shrine Kokuya. The massha complexes feature prominently on the 1649 maps shown in the next chapter (Figure 6.1). 54. In the course of the sixteenth century, methods were devised to make this less costly. For one copper (mon), one could buy between 10 and 12 lead tokens called ‘pigeon eyes’ (hato no me). In this way, one could make one’s way past many miyamori for the price of a single copper. Such tokens were banned in 1685. Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 431. 55. Ujitsune-​kyō hikitsuke, quoted in Wakita 2003: 86. 56. Kanmon gyoki entry 25.5.1438, quoted in Seta 1985: 290–​3. This shrine is still extant, under the name of Takamatsu Shinmei Jinja.

Chapter 6 1. The Keikōin was moved to Uji at some time during the Keichō years (1596–​1615). It gained its name by imperial edict in 1551. 2. The frequent flash floods mentioned in the sources are a clear sign that the shrine mountains upriver from the Inner Shrine (Kamijiyama) were denuded, serving as a source of timber and fuel for the growing number of oshi compounds rather than as a sacred forest set aside for shrine use. 3. A 1577 letter sent by Fróis to the Society of Jesus in Portugal, quoted in Lamers 1998: 278. 4. Lamers 1998: 337. 5. McMullin 1984, part 3. 6. Documents relating to these events are collected in Mie Ken 1987–​2008 (vol. Kinsei 1): 158–​62. 7. A koku was 180 litres of rice. In his haste, even this gesture turned out to be slipshod: Nobukatsu had to reissue the grant document because he had forgotten the saishu, and for decades after this, the negi and the saishu would continue to quarrel over the question of whether the 500 koku due to the saishu were to be taken out of the original 2,500, or from somewhere else. Mie Ken 1987–​2008 (vol. Kinsei 1): 351–​2. 8. Tenshō 13nen gosengū ki, Jingū Shichō 1992–​3 (vol. 4): 545ff. 9. It appears that most of the additional funding supplied by Hideyoshi was misappropriated; what reached Ise just about covered carpenters’ wages. Hamajima 2013: 100–​8. 10. Hamajima (2013: 141) mentions a number of points on which the architecture of the 1585 main hall may have differed from earlier practice. Most striking is the repositioning of the treasure halls, which were placed adjacent to the main hall, rather than behind it. 11. Hamajima 2013: 103. 12. Jingū Shichō 1992-​93 (vol. 4): 545. 13. Ibid. According to Tenshō 13nen gosengū ki, the amount spent on the Inner Shrine’s main hall was 3,041 kanmon; 1 kanmon corresponded to 2 koku. Another 964.7

Notes to Pages 125–134

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

257

kanmon was spent on Aramatsuri Shrine and other minor buildings. The funding came from a range of sources, including Nobunaga’s donation and money collected by the Keikōin. The total amount donated by Hideyoshi is not known. Hamajima 2013: 104–​5. Wakita 1991: 103. An additional 450 koku was reserved for Takihara Shrine. Moreover, in 1633 Iemitsu transferred the salterns of Futami (six villages, totalling 2,200 koku) from Toba domain to the shrines. In contrast to the five villages west of the Miyagawa River, these villages were administrated by the Yamada and Uji councils, rather than by the shrines themselves. Mie Ken 1987–​2008 (vol. Kinsei 2): 752. Hideyoshi’s vermilion-​seal document was directed to three councils: Yamada, Uji and Ōminato. Ōminato was soon incorporated in Yamada, leaving the councils of Yamada and Uji in formal charge. Tsukamoto 2002: 1–​15. Sanbō egōsho shikitari teihō (Procedures of the Yamada meeting hall), in Mie Ken 1987–​2008 (vol. Kinsei 3): 133. The shrine domain remained ‘unsurveyed and untaxed’ until the Ise reforms of 5.1871, which abolished the special status of what was then Watarai District in Watarai Prefecture and introduced taxation there (Miyachi 1988: 436). Ōnishi 1960: 432–​4. Nomura 2006: 25–​31; Sonehara 2008: 64–​74 and 2014: 64–​7. Mie Ken 1987–​2008 (vol. Kinsei 2): 904. For this report, see Teeuwen 1996: 406–​11. On Iemitsu’s direct involvement, see Nomura 2006. Enpō 2nen Sakai Uta-​no-​kami, Kira Kōzuke-​no-​suke, Hayashi Daigaku-​no-​kami sono hoka ryōgū yūretsu kōron (manuscript), Jingū Bunko 1–​872. See Teeuwen 1996: 292–​ 93. Kira Kōzuke-​no-​suke Yoshinaka is famous as the daimyo who was killed in the Akō vendetta of 1703. Ieyasu’s alleged ancestor Nitta Yoshisada (1301–​38). Ieyasu’s grandfather Matsudaira Kiyoyasu (1511–​35). Yōfuku ki, Taira and Abe 1972: 87–​8. Yōfuku ki, Taira and Abe 1972: 100. Fourteenth-​century copies of Zō Ise nisho daijingū hōki hongi as well as Gochinza denki, shidaiki and hongi had been preserved in the Outer Shrine archives, but Yamato-​hime no mikoto seiki was lost. Nobuyoshi recovered this text only in 1669 when he was allowed to copy a medieval manuscript kept at Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto, thanks to an introduction from the Confucian Shinto scholar Yamazaki Ansai. After this discovery, both Nobuyoshi and Ansai frequently referred to the ‘five books of Shinto’ as an ancient canon of the Shinto teaching. Kondō 1986: 54–​67; Teeuwen 1996: 259–​60. Baskind and Bowring 2015. Grapard 1992: 153. Kanetomo, in his turn, drew on sources from the early fourteenth century, notably Kuji hongi gengi (1332) by his ancestor Jihen. Jihen, however, wrote about the relationship between the ‘three lands’, arguing that Japan as the country of the gods is the root from which China (branches) and India (fruit) sprout forth. It was Kanetomo who first rewrote this earlier argument about the ‘three lands’ into a rather different one about the ‘three teachings’, a Chinese concept originally referring to Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism rather than Shinto. On this ‘interiorization’ of Buddhism and the shift from reliance on ‘proxy-​practice’ to a new notion of subjectivity, especially within the Shin sect, see Amstutz 2012.

258

Notes to Pages 134–142

Yōfuku ki, Taira and Abe 1972: 101–​2. See Hayashi and Swanson 1994, and Groemer 2007. Inoue 2007: 61. Ibid.: 59–​74. Already in the 1630s, Ikeda Mitsumasa and Hoshina Masayuki had donated lands within their domains to their Ise oshi. Mie Ken 1987–​2008 (vol. Kinsei 1): 803, 806. 36. Breen and Teeuwen 2010: 94–​8. 37. The Kokuya burnt down in a fire that destroyed the entire Inner Shrine precinct in 1658. The Yamada magistrate denied the temple permission to rebuild, citing that its yamabushi polluted the purification site on the bank of the Isuzu River by throwing the ashes from the goma rituals that they performed into the river. Ambivalence towards this Buddhist presence within the shrine precincts was already surfacing at this time. Ōnishi 1960: 518. 38. Tsukamoto 2010: 17–​18. 39. Tanido 2011. 40. Consecutive Yamada magistrates referred these cases to the Supreme Judicial Council (Hyōjōsho) in Edo, because they touched on matters of principle and had broad implications. For a detailed discussion, see Teeuwen 1996: 263–​94. 41. Teeuwen 1996: 281–​2. 42. Ōnishi 1960: 688–​91. 43. Ibid.: 460–​1. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Chapter 7 1. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 3): 116–​17. 2. Ibid.: 120–​1, 123. 3. Ibid.: 136. 4. For details, see ibid.: 104–​5 and Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 186–​7. 5. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 3): 110–​12; Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 188–​9. 6. On this, see Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 116–​21. 7. Ibid.: 123. 8. Nishi 1999: 20–​3. 9. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 3): 572 and Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 675. These figures presumably include establishments in the new pleasure quarters that had grown adjacent to Furuichi in Jōmyōji and in Nakano Jizō. On these developments, see Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 678–​9. 10. Matsuki 1932: 3–​4. 11. Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 672–​3. 12. See the list provided by Chieda 2012: 159 and Nomura 1976: 95–​6. 13. On the incident and its fallout, see Matsuki 1932: 442–​50. The play is still performed today. 14. For their Ise adventures, see Jippensha 2007: 82–​131. Yaji and Kita were especially looking forward to Furuichi’s Chizukaya and Kashiwaya teahouses (Jippensha 2007: 80–​1). The novel has been translated into English as Shank’s mare by Thomas Satchell (Jippensha 1960).

Notes to Pages 142–149

259

15. Thus proclaims the authoritative Shinsen kokin yakusha taizen, a directory of celebrated kabuki actors, past and present, published in 1750 (Ise Shi 2007–​13 [vol. 3]: 690). 16. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 3): 699. 17. Nishi 1999: 23–​25. Tenaka insisted that only members of his party might be privy to this diary entry. Far more typical is the entry by the Ise pilgrim from Gunma in 1830, who wrote in his diary simply, ‘Night of ninth: headed alone to Furuichi. Returned to Mikkaichi’s [next] morning’ (Ogawa 1994: 218). 18. Katakura 1992. 19. Ise sangū kondate dōchūki (Tanigawa 1988: 610). 20. Kiyohara 1993: 123. 21. Kai 2015: 33. Baien misremembers Saigyō in the first verse he cites; he is mistaken in the second verse, too, since Saigyō wrote it not in Ise but on a visit to the Kamo Shrines in Kyoto. 22. Kai 2015: 34. 23. Kiyokawa 1993: 120. 24. The diary has been published in full, with a commentary by Kawai Higashi in Kyōdo shisō, the journal of Ise’s local history society (Kawai 1974). 25. Kawai 1974: 30–​1. 26. For its pioneering character, see the editorial comment in Jingū Shichō 1923: 32. 27. Jingū Shichō 1923: 714–​15. 28. Ibid. 29. Fuyō 1766: 115–​16. 30. Ibid.: 103. 31. Ibid.: 115–​16. 32. Akisato and Shitomi 1944: 137. 33. Ibid.: 174–​8. 34. Ibid.: 179. 35. Ibid.: 179–​80. 36. On the rediscovery of medieval Ise theories, see Saitō 2011: 209–​12 and Saitō 2016: 152–​9. 37. Those disputes and their outcomes are discussed in Teeuwen 1996: 282–​94. 38. Also see above, Chapter 6. 39. See Teeuwen 1996: 331. 40. On Hashimura, see, e.g. Teeuwen 1996: 348–​51. 41. It is interesting to note that Yaji and Kita, the protagonists of Jippensha’s novel, Tōkaidōchū hizakurige, are quick to identify Kunitokotachi as the kami of the Outer Shrine, which they refer to as Toyoke Daijingū (Jippensha 2007 [vol. 2]: 122). 42. On Norinaga’s take on the Outer Shrine kami, see especially Teeuwen, 1996: 354–​9. 43. Teeuwen 1996: 368–​73. 44. Ōnishi 1960: 719–​33 neatly summarizes the issues at stake here. 45. See the brief references in Ōnishi 1960: 732–​3. 46. On the variety of oshi mansions and their strategic distribution through Yamada, see Itō 2003: 339–​47. 47. On Mori’s Ise pilgrimage see Bunka 4nen meisho koseki sankei oboegaki, in Tōkyō To Setagaya Ku Kyōiku Iinkai 1984: 177–​85. 48. Tōkyō To Setagaya Ku Kyōiku Iinkai 1984: 178–​9. 49. Kudamatsu 2004: 227–​31.

260

Notes to Pages 149–153

50. See Kōgakkan Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo (vol. 4), 1986: 56. 51. Kudamatsu 2004: 324. 52. In the early years of the Edo period, the family head employed a Buddhist monk from the Myōkyōji temple in Yamada as his agent (Noda 1960: 24). 53. Kudamatsu 2004: 301–​4. 54. Ibid.: 314. 55. Ibid.: 311–​12. 56. Kobayashi 1954: 490. Hisaoyu was, in fact, the poet and scholar also known as Arakida Hisaoyu. Born into an Outer Shrine oshi family, he was later adopted into the Uji Asōguchi family. To his patrons in the provinces, he was known as Uji Asōguchi Dayū. 57. Kobayashi 1954: 490. 58. It is not especially notable that Ise oshi should be working Buddhist territory. After all, the greatest monzeki temples in the realm –​Rinnōji in Nikkō, Kajūji, Ninnaji and Nishi Honganji, among many others in Kyoto –​were all served by one or other oshi from Ise. 59. Kobayashi 1954. 60. On Hisaoyu’s poetry journals from his Shinano travels, see Teeuwen 1997. 61. Kobayashi 1954: 489–​90. 62. Ibid.: 491–​3. 63. Ibid.: 496. 64. Kōgakkan Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo 1986 (vol. 2): 51–​2. 65. Ibid. (vol. 5): 81–​2. The head of the main Mikkaichi branch served as hereditary alderman on the Yamada town council. 66. Kōgakkan Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo 1986 (vol. 5): 81. 67. Kusama 2002: 103–​4. 68. For details of festivities, see ibid.: 105–​7. 69. Kusama 2002: 105. 70. For statistical information on the Haruki, see Kōgakkan Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo 1986 (vol. 5): 69–​70; for the Yamamoto, see Kōgakkan Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo 1980 (vol. 1): 2, 9, 23, 44 and 111–​12. 71. On the Fujinami and Higaki families, see, respectively, Kōgakkan Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo 1980 (vol. 1): 2, 22–​3, 44, 110–​11, and Kōgakkan Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo 1986 (vol. 5): 52. 72. Shinjō 1982: 761–​3. 73. It is unclear how widespread Shinmei shrines were in the Edo period. The question taxed the folklorist Okada Yoneo, but he was only able to cite statistics for the 1930s, which confirmed the existence of over 18,000 such shrines. He seems to imply a similar number existed pre-​Meiji (Okada 1960: 97–​103). Shinmei shrines were the subjects of frequent lawsuits in Edo Japan. Invariably, however, these suits related to new shrines erected by local priests (or fraudsters) seeking to cash in on popular enthusiasm for Ise. For an examination of several Shinmei incidents, see Ōnishi 1960: 403–​17. 74. Chamberlain 2007: 395–​8. 75. On Ōyama, see the fine study by Barbara Ambros (Ambros 2008). 76. On Ōmura, see Shinjō 1982: 1189; on Matsumae, see Shinjō 1982: 1200–​1. 77. Onodera 1995 and 2005. The classic work on Ise kō by Sakurai Tokutarō (1962) focuses on Meiji and the modern period. Other studies by Inoue Yorihisa (1940), Okada Yoneo (1952) and Shinjō Tsunezō (1982) shed light on Ise kō diffusion, but not on their functioning in specific locales.

Notes to Pages 153–157

261

78. Higashi Futami had pious associations serving other pilgrimage sites, too: Hiromine, Gion, Sumiyoshi and Ebisu, but all were subordinate to the Ise kō (Onodera 1995: 86). 79. Onodera 1995: 87. The Ajiro were an influential Yamada-​based oshi house serving as aldermen on the town council. They had agents working in seven provinces across central Japan, distributing a total of 47,000 amulets a year (Kōgakkan Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo 1982 [vol. 2]: 92). 80. On Ise oshi and okuwa festivals, see Yanagita 1911 and Kimura 2007. The eighteenth-​century scholar Amano Sadakage mocked the stupidity of those who believed in the Ise hoe’s numinous powers (Kimura 2007: 31). 81. Onodera 1995: 87–​8. 82. The pilgrims set off from Higashi Futami by boat for Osaka, from where they walked to Ise. The round trip took a fortnight. 83. The 300 kan not spent was later returned to the coffers of the kō (Onodera 1995: 93). These seem extraordinarily large sums (approximately six kan corresponded to one ryō); it is unclear whether these were the savings of a single kō or multiple kō. 84. Shinjō Tsunezō (1988: 784–​5) points out that while the well-​to-​do dominated membership of early modern pious associations, ‘on occasion’ peasants of low status participated too. 85. Miyamoto 2013: 146–​7. 86. Inoue 1940: 278–​9. 87. Miyamoto 2013: 143. 88. Inoue 1955: 38. 89. Inoue 1940: 283. 90. Jingū Shichō 1923: 390–​1. There are two fine studies in English of mass pilgrimages to Ise: Davis 1992 and Nenzi 2006. 91. The figure of 3,750,000 was calculated by Motoori Norinaga in his Tamakatsuma. Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 37. 92. Jingū Shichō 1923: 407. 93. Inoue 1955: 99. 94. Ibid. 95. Jingū Shichō 1923: 441–​84. 96. Ibid.: 441. 97. See, for example, two other collections of stories relating to the 1770s: Meiwa zoku go shin’iki (Jingū Shichō 1923: 418–​27) and Nukemairi zen’aku kyōkun kagami (Jingū Shichō 1923: 485–​93). The former was compiled by Watarai Jūzen and published in both Yamada and Kyoto. The author of the latter text, a Kyoto resident called Natsuki Rin, is interestingly dismissive of the miracle stories. 98. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 3): 536–​7. 99. Jingū Shichō 1923: 495. 100. Thus observed the dispassionate author of Ukiyo no arisama (The character of the floating world), cited in Yasumaru 1970: 308–​9. The author reports that more than a million people were in Ise for the 1829 sengū (Yasumaru 1970: 322–​3). 101. There were occasional records of amulets falling in 1771, but the scale in 1830 was altogether different. 102. Jingū Shichō 1923: 501. 103. Ibid.: 516. 104. Ibid.: 519. The Bunsei shin’iki carries a helpful illustration of a cockerel with an amulet in its mouth.

262

Notes to Pages 157–169

105. Jingū Shichō 1923: 529–​30. 106. The emissaries were known as reiheishi or ‘bearers of regular tribute’. As mentioned in Chapter 6, the bakufu required the court to send emissaries also to the Tōshōgū, Tokugawa Ieyasu’s mausoleum in Nikkō. 107. Kōmei saw himself as replicating the acts of Emperor Go-​Uda, who, in 1281, had dispatched emissaries to Ise to pray for the expulsion of the Mongol armies. See Chapter 4. 108. Takeda Hideaki 1996: 10–​16. 109. Kōmei refers to the ritual activity in his diary as ‘top secret’ (gokuhi). 110. Fujii 1944: 37; Takeda Hideaki 1996: 19–​20. 111. On Iemochi’s progress to Kyoto, his audience with the emperor and the emperor’s progress to Kamo and Iwashimizu, see Breen 2011: 56–​63. 112. Ishin Shiryō Hensankai 1983: 540–​2. 113. Ibid.: 549–​52. 114. Fujieda 1988: 57–​8. 115. Ibid.: 60. 116. Ibid.: 66–​7. 117. Ibid.: 59.

Chapter 8 1. Arakawa 1987: 106. 2. On Meiji’s Ise pilgrimage, see Arakawa 1987: 104–​10, and Breen 2011: 27–​30. 3. For the vital role of these ideologues from Tsuwano domain, see Takeda 1996, Chapters 5 and 6, and Breen 2011: 194–​201. 4. See above, pp. 160–1. 5. On these later pilgrimages, see Arakawa 1988: 116–​29. 6. See above, p. 161. 7. Breen 2000: 231–​8. 8. For a most dramatic manifestation of this vandalism in Shiga, see Breen and Teeuwen 2010: 108–​15. 9. For an important new appraisal of the purge of Buddhism from the imperial court in Meiji, see Takagi 2011. 10. Hashimoto Saneyana had been in Ise in 1863 as an emissary of Emperor Kōmei. See Chapter 7, pp. 160–1. 11. Kawano 2016: 198–​201. 12. Ibid.: 197–​8. 13. Miki 1966: 237–​40. 14. Ibid. 15. For the full text of this saisei itchi declaration, see Miyachi 1988: 437. 16. Miyachi 1988: 437. 17. Miki 1966: 302–​8. 18. Miyachi 1988: 443. 19. Ibid.: 449. For details of the modern kanname rite and its performance in the court in Tokyo and in Ise, see the extended account in Jingū Shichō 1929: 300–​40. See Chapter 2 for the kanname rite as performed in classical Ise.

Notes to Pages 169–173

263

20. Miyachi 1988: 457. The date was first fixed at 17 September in the solar calendar introduced in 1873. As Ise priests protested, this was, in fact, a month earlier than the kanname as performed under the old lunisolar calendar. This meant that the first fruits of the rice harvest had yet to ripen. From 1879, the rite was performed, and the national holiday observed, on 17 October. 21. Magofuku was, interestingly, unhappy that Ise priests were required to perform niiname. In his dairy, he wrote that ‘the kanname is the niiname; the performance [in Ise] of the court’s niiname might be intended as an act of respect, but in reality it is [an unnecessary] doubling up’ (Nakanishi 1998: 533). 22. Nakanishi 1993: 18–​23. 23. On the offices, their ritual functions and hosophobia in premodern Ise rites, see Chapter 2. See also Sakamoto 1965: 233–​8. 24. Akisato and Shitomi 1944: 358–​9. On this guidebook, see above, Chapter 7, p. 145. 25. Jingū Shichō 1895 (vol. 4): 43. 26. The practice of dismantling the old kami hall began with the sengū of 1869. The wood was then used in the manufacture of the new Ise amulets. 27. Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 50–​2. 28. See the discussion of byō and sōbyō in Inoue 2012. 29. Okubo 1972: 279. Mori committed his alleged act of disrespect at the Outer Shrine. He was admonished by priests, and then declined to pay his respects at the Inner Shrine. 30. See, e.g. Yomiuri shinbun, 19 February 1889 and Ise shinbun, 19 February 1929. 31. For an example of the former, see Ise daibyō okage mairi dōchūki of 1890; for the latter, Kōtō shōgakka yō kōmin dokuhon (1895). 32. Ise shinbun, 21 October 1907. Note that in the view of Kume Kunitake, esteemed professor of history at Tokyo Imperial University, ‘the Ise Great Shrine is not a mausoleum’. He proffered this view in his 1891 essay ‘Shintō wa saiten no kozoku’ (Shinto is an outmoded custom of Heaven worship), for the publication of which he was forced to resign his university post. 33. Matsuki 1987: 153. 34. Mie Prefecture –​which absorbed Watarai Prefecture in 1876 –​was slow to provide relief for the redundant oshi and their agents. In 1880, the prefecture finally made a disbursement to each oshi of 30 yen, which was equivalent to 600 kilos of rice. On the abolition of the oshi, see Breen 2013: 360–​1 and 380, note 38. 35. Kashima 1998: 17. 36. Mie Ken 1987: 357–​8. 37. Ibid.: 357–​8. Ise shinbun, 29 January 1888 produced a similar statistical estimate. 38. Amulets and propaganda are discussed in detail below, but a brief comment must suffice here with regard to kagura. A significant portion of oshi income had come from their performance of kagura for pilgrims. Many –​though not all –​oshi inns accommodated kagura halls. The ban on oshi meant an end to this practice. In 1873 and 1875, respectively, the Inner and Outer Shrines established their own kagura halls, which performed an entirely different style of kagura for the modern pilgrim. For a brief discussion of early Meiji kagura developments, see Yano 1987: 380–​1. 39. Sakamoto 1987: 28–​9. 40. Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 461. 41. Nishikawa 1988: 33.

264

Notes to Pages 174–178

42. All amulets contained a sliver of cypress wood known as nusakushi. In the Meiji period, the nusakushi were manufactured out of timber from the kami halls dismantled after the sengū rite. See above n. 26. On the nusakushi, see also Breen 2010. 43. It is perhaps worth recalling that pre-​Meiji amulets were not merely ‘purifiers’. Miraculous powers were attributed to them, too. See Chapter 7. 44. Urata Nagatami, Jingū taima hōshi shiki, cited in Ujiyamada Shiyakusho 1988 (vol. 1): 462–​4. 45. Jingū Shichō, Ben taima hōshi shiki nankitsu, cited in Toki 2004: 294. 46. ‘Nara ken ni okeru taima mondai’, cited in Yasumaru and Miyachi 1988: 184–​6. 47. See the selection of documents in Yasumaru and Miyachi 1988: 185–​93. 48. Miyachi 1988: 474. 49. On the creation of these new Ise-​oriented institutions, see Sakamoto Ken’ichi 1987: 192–​209 and Nishikawa 1988: 192–​243. For Urata’s role, see especially Miki 1966: 284–​95. 50. For a brief and all-​too-​rare study of the Daidō hongi, see Kōno 1962: 189–​95. 51. Kōno 1962: 192. 52. On the campaign, its fortunes and its fall, see Maxey 2014: 93–​139. On the Buddhist role in the campaign’s demise, see especially Krämer 2015. 53. The theological support for this position was provided by Urata in Daidō hongi. See Hara 2008: 169. 54. On the issues at stake here, see Hara 2008: 155–​81. 55. Hara 2008: 180–​1. 56. Maxey 2014: 154–​63. 57. Miyachi 1988: 481. Senge Takatomi resigned as Izumo chief priest and founded Izumo Taishakyō at the same time. 58. Jingū Shichō 1929: 715. 59. Okada Hiroshi 1987: 321–​2. 60. The first statistics for amulet manufacture in Meiji date to 1884, the year of Kashima’s arrival. Kashima was presumably responsible for ensuring records were kept. It seems that 4.7 million amulets were manufactured in that year, but it is not clear how many were actually sold (Suzuki 1987: 363). 61. Jingū Shichō 1929: 715–​16 and Okada Hiroshi 1987: 322–​5. 62. Note that there had been non-​oshi innkeepers in pre-​Meiji Yamada and Uji. The severe restrictions on their activities were lifted in Meiji, and some thrived, although they were typically small in scale. Over time, other entrepreneurs entered the Ise innkeeping business, too (Taniguchi 2013). 63. Ise shinbun, 25 November 1880 and 2 December 1880. 64. Ise shinbun, 1 March 1887. 65. Yamazaki 1897. Interestingly, the Mikkaichi Inn acquired a new quasi-​public role in the mid-​Meiji years. The Shin’enkai (see below) held meetings there; the Ujiyamada Hoteliers Association, the Sangū Railway Company, the Miyagawa Electric Railway Company and the Mie Bank all held AGMs on Mikkaichi premises. 66. Mikkaichi 1903 calendar (author’s possession). 67. On the pre-​Meiji flourishing of the Fukushima house, see, for example, the statistics in Kōgakkan Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo 1982 (vol. 2): 48–​9. 68. On the Meiji fortunes of the Fukushima house, see Breen 2013: 363–​4.

Notes to Pages 178–188

265

69. These organizations styled themselves kō, which resonated with the pious associations of Edo Japan. They were uniquely commercial undertakings, however, that had nothing to do with religion. On the creation of Isshin kō, see Inoue 1976: 48–​50; on Shinsei kō, see Inoue 1976: 52–​66. 70. Inoue 1976: 61–​3. 71. Ise Rōnin 1890: 119–​20. 72. Ise shinbun, 26 September 1897 and 26 April 1898. 73. Ise shinbun, 1 January 1897. 74. It was also the scene of the mass murder referred to in Chapter 7. 75. Ise shinbun, 5 April 1889. 76. Ise shinbun, 27 May 1889. 77. Ise shinbun, 29 January 1899. 78. Ise shinbun, 23 April 1896. 79. Ibid. 80. Fujii 1911: 4–​5. 81. Ibid.: 140–​3. 82. Ibid.: 29–​30. The Hinjitsukan is no longer a working inn, but has recently been restored and recognized as a national Important Cultural Property. 83. Ise shinbun, 1 March and 12 June 1887; Fujii 1911: 30. 84. Taniguchi 2016: 209. 85. Fujii 1911: 218–​21. See also Taniguchi 2016: 214. 86. Prince Arisugawa was, from 1883, Ise’s Tokyo-​resident head of rituals. 87. Fujii 1911: 216–​17. 88. Takagi 2006: 31–​2. 89. Yamazaki 1897: 86–​7. 90. Ibid.: 37–​9. 91. It was only in 1955 that the city boundaries were expanded to make Ise City. 92. For full details, see Kuratayama keikaku mitsumori junjo (Estimates and plans for the development of Kuratayama) in Fujii 1911: 103–​8. 93. Fujii 1911: 333–​4, 338–​40. 94. Ibid.: 432. 95. On the challenges of financing the Kuratayama project, see Taniguchi 2016: 220–​1. 96. Fujii 1911: 7, 12. 97. See, for example, the catalogue Chōkokan annai chinretsuhin mokuroku, 1908. 98. On visitors’ experience of the Chōkokan in the early twentieth century, see Takagi 2016: 245–​6. 99. On the Imperial Road project, see Taniguchi 2016: 225–​33. 100. Ise shinbun, 29 August 1907.

Chapter 9 1. State Shinto, according to Shimazono Susumu (2010: 143–​4), had its ‘period of permeation’ (shintōki) in the years 1910–​31, and entered its ‘fascist period’ between 1931 and 1945. 2. The Shinkaden stands adjacent to the kyūchū sanden, the palace’s shrine complex. The three interconnected sanctuaries of the kyūchū sanden accommodate the Sun Goddess (centre), the imperial ancestors (left), and the kami of heaven and earth (right).

266

Notes to Pages 188–199

3. Asahi shinbun, 3 October 1929. 4. Jingū Shichō 1929: 670. 5. Miyachi and Sakamoto 1929: 98. 6. Ibid.: 111–​12. 7. Kunaichō 1965: 76–​7. 8. Ibid.: 802. 9. Asahi shinbun, 27 March 1909. 10. Taura 2016: 24. 11. Asahi shinbun, 20 September 1929. 12. For a striking illustration of the military presence, see the journal Rekishi shashin, November 1929: 5 13. Saida 1930: 140–​1. 14. Hoshino 1930: 48. 15. Kakei 1929: 23, 39, 41. 16. Ōsaka Asahi shinbun, 2 October 1929. 17. The only precedents, as Taura points out, were the enthronement rites of the Shōwa emperor in 1928 –​conducted just a year earlier -​and those of his father in 1915 (Taura 2016: 255). 18. Ritual beats, resonance and reverberation are terms deployed in a seminal article by Ben-​Amos and Ben-​Ari (1995). 19. Ōsaka Asahi shinbun, 4 October 1929. 20. Asahi shinbun, 3 October 1929. 21. Sekai gahō 1929: 11. 22. The role for shrines and schools was stipulated by government in the document Jingū shikinen sengū ni kansuru shokeikaku (Plans for the shikinen sengū). On this document and its provenance, see Taura 2016: 261–​3. 23. Taura 2016: 261. 24. Ōsaka Kokugakuin Daigaku 1929. 25. Ōsaka Asahi shinbun, 3 October 1929. 26. Taura 2016: 262–​3. 27. See, for example, Yamashita 1981. 28. Asahi shinbun, 2 October 1929. 29. Ibid. 30. Those predecessors were Shōgaku Nihon rekishi (1904) and Jinjō shōgaku Nihon rekishi (1910). 31. Kaigo 1978 (Rekishi 2): 622–​3. 32. Ibid. (Rekishi 3): 127–​9. 33. Ibid. (Kokugo 4): 125. 34. Ibid. (Kokugo 4): 126. 35. Ibid. (Shūshin 3): 149–​50. 36. Ibid. (Shūshin 3): 155. 37. Ibid. (Shūshin 3): 192. 38. Ibid. (Shūshin 3): 329–​30. 39. Okada 1960: 95–​7; 133–​48. 40. See, e.g. Ashizu 2009: 102–​20. See also Shimazono’s critique of this position (Shimazono 2010: 84–​9). For an English discussion, see Maxey 2014, ­chapter 5. In 1913, the government moved the Religions Bureau to the Education Ministry, thus reinforcing the institutional distinction between religions and shrines; the latter remained under Home Ministry jurisdiction.

Notes to Pages 199–206

267

41. Okada 1960: 185–​6. 42. It was here in the Worship Centre that Hōsaikai ritualists invented, performed and then actively promoted Shinto weddings (shinzen kekkonshiki). They were inspired by the new rites created for the wedding in 1900 of Crown Prince Yoshihito and Kujō Sadako, who were married in the presence of the Sun Goddess at the kashikodokoro shrine in the Tokyo palace (Okada 1960: 166–​8). 43. Okada 1960: 174–​5. 44. Ibid.: 186–​99. 45. Suzuki 1988: 363–​4, and Nishikawa 1987: 38–​9. 46. On regulations pertaining to amulet dimensions and costs, see Ichimatsu 1920: 99–​ 101 and Okada 1960: 180–​6. 47. Ichimatsu 1920: 106–​7. 48. Ibid.: 108–​10. The report also briefly notes the resistance of Christians, but cites no specific examples. 49. Yakushiji 1916: 371–​2 50. Ibid.: 382–​3. Yakushiji is rehearsing here the arguments of Buddhists in Meiji Japan. See Chapter 8. 51. Jingiin 1942: unpaginated. 52. Yano 1988: 372–​4. 53. Ibid.: 373. 54. Kitamura 1929: 43–​4. 55. Ibid.: 44–​5. 56. Ibid.: 49–​51. 57. Ibid.: 52–​4. 58. Obiya 1923: 39–​40. 59. Ibid.: 40–​1. 60. Hashimoto 2013: 30. Momoyama was the Meiji emperor’s burial site; Tama was the place of the Taishō emperor’s interment. 61. Hashimoto 2013: 31. 62. Ibid.: 32–​3. 63. Ibid.: 33–​4. 64. See the table in Takagi 2016: 239. Takagi offers a case study of a school trip to Ise in 1911 by pupils from the Nara Girls Normal School. 65. Jingū Kanbesho 1934: 31. 66. Obiya 1923: 45–​8. Josetsuen Park no longer exists; the Jingū Kaikan building now stands where this park once was. 67. This was also known as Kenkan kōen or Prefectural Park. See Jingū Kanbesho 1934: 22. 68. Sangū Kyōkai 1935: unpaginated. 69. Sangū Kyūkō Dentetsu Kabushiki Kaisha 1932: unpaginated. 70. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 4): 891. For the many discussions and documents that resulted in this Draft Proposal, see Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 4): 881–​90. 71. Imaizumi 2013, ch. 3. 72. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 4): 889–​91. 73. Ibid.: 895–​6. Fukuchi acknowledges his debts to the Shin’enkai in the memorandum he took with him to Tokyo. See Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 4): 896–​7. 74. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 4): 899. 75. Ibid.: 900. 76. Ibid.: 917–​19. 77. Ibid.: 963–​74.

268

Notes to Pages 206–215

78. Echizawa Akira (1997) explains these various plans, their stages and their budgets with admirable clarity. 79. Ise Shi 2007–​13 (vol. 4): 974–​6. 80. Jingū Shichō 2005: 224–​5, 229, 232, 235, 239. 81. Ibid.: 247. 82. Ibid.: 249–​50. 83. Asahi shinbun, 13 December 1942. 84. Sugitani 1987: 670–​2. 85. Ibid.: 685 86. Ibid.: 683, 690–​4. 87. Kido Nikki Kenkyūkai 1966: 1221. 88. Sugitani 1987: 696. 89. Ibid.: 702–​3. 90. Ibid.: 703–​4. 91. Ibid.: 702. 92. Cited in Hara 2008: 154. 93. Sugitani 1987: 712–​13. 94. Asahi shinbun, 14 November 1945. 95. Kishita 1990: 116.

Chapter 10 1. The character chō (‘office’) in shichō and honchō might suggest that these are government bodies, but, of course, they are not; in law, they remain administrative departments of private religious institutions. The character chō is suggestive of the Shinto world’s public ambitions, and indeed of government sympathy. 2. The most detailed account is Ōhara 1993; see also Woodard 1972. Nishida 1986 gives both the original English (219–​24) and the official Japanese translation (201–​ 7). There are some interesting differences between the two versions, not least that the English ‘Grand Shrine of Ise’ is rendered in Japanese as Ise no daibyō or ‘Great Mausoleum of Ise’. 3. The conversation is transcribed in full in Jinja Honchō 1956: 60–​5. See also Kishimoto 1963. 4. Jinja Honchō 1956: 60. 5. Ibid.: 64. 6. Okada 1964: 50–​1. 7. Kishimoto 1963: 247–​50. See also Nishida 1986: 246–​7. 8. Jinja Shinpō Sōkan 60shūnen Kinen Shuppan Iinkai, 2010: 148–​50. 9. A select number of other shrines have continued to enjoy a privileged relationship with the imperial family, though not as privileged as Ise. These are the sixteen shrines designated chokusaisha or ‘imperial rite shrines’. The emperor dispatches to them, on the occasion of their annual rites, a gift-​bearing emissary known as chokushi. Most famous among these shrines are Yasukuni Jinja, which is dedicated to the Japanese war dead, and Meiji Jingū, which enshrines the Meiji emperor. 10. The best account is Mizuuchi and Furuichi 2012. 11. Nogami 1987: 862–​3. 12. Ibid.: 863–​4.

Notes to Pages 215–228 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

269

Okada Yoneo 1987: 917–​18. Jinja shinpō, 21 August 1950. Okada Yoneo 1987: 919–​20. Yomiuri shinbun, 15 November 1951. For a complete inventory of the post-​war rites that preceded the 1953 sengū, see Nogami 1987: 874–​83. 18. The presence of the deputy prime minister was, for some reason, not referred to in print media coverage, but the live NHK radio broadcast of the event makes it quite clear he was there. 19. On these and an array of other publicity events, see Okada Yoneo 1987: 928–​43. 20. A booklet with a similar title (yōkai) and content was published in 1929. 21. Asahi Shinbun 2013: 278. 22. Mainichi shinbun, 3 October 1953. 23. It is, in fact, one of the quirks of the Constitution that the Japanese state has no head. Neither emperor nor prime minister is defined as head of state in the Constitution. 24. Nishida 1986: 279–​81. 25. Asahi shinbun, 4 January 1958. 26. Nishida 1986: 282. 27. Ibid.: 284–​5. 28. Jinja Shinpō Sōkan 60shūnen Kinen Shuppan Iinkai 2010: 156–​7. 29. Ibid.: 157–​8. 30. Jinja shinpō, 29 October 1960. 31. The very expression shinshi kengen has a powerful pre-​war resonance, since it was first deployed as a key term in the so-​called National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign (Kokumin seishin sōdōin) launched by the Konoe cabinet in autumn 1937. There it referred to the true guise of the kokutai, rather than to Ise specifically. 32. Jinja Shinpō Sōkan 60shūnen Kinen Shuppan Iinkai 2010: 162–​3. 33. Jinja shinpō, 4 November 1974. 34. Sakurai 1988: 146–​7, 260–​2. 35. Jinja shinpō, 30 November 1970. 36. Okada 1969: 46. 37. Jinja shinpō, 12 March 1979. 38. Okada 1969: 46. 39. For the former, see the Shūkan Yomiuri special issue Ise to sengū, 5 October 1973. The Mainichi published a special Ise issue of Mainichi gurafu on 2 October 1973. 40. The Yomiuri and Mainichi both carried similar images, as they had done twenty years earlier. 41. With regard to media coverage in general, note that on 2 October there was a live radio broadcast on NHK –​as there had been in 1953. In 1973, for the first time, the events were also broadcast on colour TV. Some 80 per cent of the population owned a colour TV, and NHK was one of six broadcasting companies on-​site filming events. 42. Jinja shinpō, 12 October 1973. 43. Hamada’s notoriety relates to two quite different issues. In 2007 his company was exposed for repackaging and selling out-​of-​date confectionary (Yomiuri shinbun, 12 October 2007). In 2013, Hamada declared that he had no desire to see foreigners in Ise, and that he saw no need for street notices in English (Mainichi shinbun, 29 November 2013). 44. Yano 1988: 372–​4; Sakurai 1988: 273.

270

Notes to Pages 228–241

45. Ise Shi Sangyō Kankōbu Kankō Kikakuka 2012: 1. 46. On these developments, see Miyamoto Matao 2010: 448–​50. 47. Mizugaki 163, 1993: 48–50. 48. Jingū Shichō 1984: 2. 49. Ibid.: 24. 50. See, for example, ibid.: 100. 51. Jingū Shichō 1984: 6, 12, 28, 76, 94, 100. 52. Jinja shinpō, 7 March 1994. 53. On the challenges of amulet distribution, see Breen 2010. 54. Richardson 2007, Chapter 1 passim. 55. On this incident and its background, see David Sanger’s article in the New York Times, 20 October 1993. 56. For the observations that follow, I have relied on Jinja Shinpō Sōkan 60shūnen Kinen Shuppan Iinkai 2010: 163–​4.

Conclusion 1. Reader 2006: 41. 2. A typical phrase from the travel guide Tabirie Ise Shima (JTB Publishing, 2007), quoted in Kobayashi 2009. Kobayashi analyses discourses of ‘tourism’ and ‘faith’ in popular publications about the upcoming sengū of 2013. 3. Not a single pre-​Edo image of Ise’s shrine precincts or main halls (that is likely to be anywhere near accurate) is extant. 4. Asahi shinbun, 15 June 2015. 5. http://​www.g7ise-​shimasummit.go.jp. 6. http://​www.mofa.go.jp/​mofaj/​ms/​is_​s/​page4_​002073.html.

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INDEX Figures are denoted by ‘f ’ after page numbers; notes, by ‘n’; notes on the same page are indicated by ‘nn’. Abe Shinzō 安倍晋三 3, 4f, 234, 241 Abe Yasurō 阿部泰郎 68, 71 abstinence compound (imidate 忌館) 47 abstinence hall (itsuki no miya 斎宮, imidono 忌殿) 11, 13, 41, 42, 44, 246n. 70 abstinence priestess or princess (itsuki no miko or saiō 斎王) 13, 18, 19, 27–​8, 29, 38, 44, 52, 55, 72, 97, 188, 236, 237, 244nn. 14, 17, 246n. 61 as buffer between Amaterasu and emperor 57 compound of 24, 27–​8 decline of 81–​2 quarters of 14 rituals by 36, 37, 40–​1, 49, 52 system of 15, 17, 18, 27–​8 see also Ōku (Princess); Taki (Princess); Takuhata (Princess); Toyosuki-​ iri-​bime (Princess); Yamato-​hime (Princess) Aburaya 油屋 142, 143, 179–​80 Age of the Gods 57, 80, 104, 108, 118 Aizen Myōō 愛染明王 (Skt. Rāgarāja) 78, 251n. 9 Akafuku 赤福 5, 6, 227 alderman (oyakata 親方) 115, 139–​40, 146, 177, 260n. 65, 261n. 79 Amaterasu 天照 (Sun Goddess) aramitama 荒御魂 or ‘violent spirit’ of 21, 41 arrival in Ise 9, 11, 19 beds of 38, 43, 48 confrontation with Susanowo 17–​18 and dispatch of Ōku 11, 13–​15, 22, 28, see also Ōku escape of 57, 60, see also oracle crisis of 1031

feminization of 26, 29 food offerings to 2, 27, 28, 35, 42–​6, 48–​ 9, 59, 89, 90, 107, 137, 146 gender of 26, 28, 61 giving of jewels to monks 67–​8, see also wish-​fulfilling jewels grandon of see Ninigi Jitō and 25–​8 journey from Yamato to Ise 19–​20, 90 as kami of peace 209 as leader of the heavenly deities 19–​ 22, 50, 51 location in Ise 2, 19 lured from Rock-​Cave of Heaven 20, 40, 44, 45, 108–​9, 109f, 249n. 46, 253n. 60 as Mahāvairocana 61–​2, 63, 67, see also Mahāvairocana maidens’ contribution to founding of 15–​16, 19 and metalworking 18 mirror of 4, 25, 28, 38, 39, 40–​1, 47, 71, 78, 103, 117, 119, 144, 189, 196, 209, 219–​21, 248n. 31, 250n. 40 naishidokoro mirror of 57, 67, 104, 159, 164, 168 oracle of 55–​6, 58, 61 relocation to Ise 2–​5, 22–​5 role in the descent of the Heavenly Grandson 21–​2, 25–​6, see also Heavenly Grandson and Saruta-​hiko cult 24–​5 as threat to the emperor 22, 25, 50, 52 twin aspects of 19–​22, 50–​1, 52 worship of 11, 12, 13–​15, 18–​22, 24, 27, 38, 42–​3, 61, 169 Amaterasu Great Imperial Shrine 31, 37 see also Inner Shrine

284

Index

Amaterasu Ōkami see Amaterasu (Sun Goddess) Amaterasu Toyoke Subeōnkami 天照豊受 皇大神 144, 145 Ame no Hoakari 天火明 18, 26 Ame no Minakanushi 天御中主 91, 94, 96, 103, 144, 145, 146, 253n. 46 see also Toyuke amulets (taima 大麻) 1, 5, 6, 130, 130f, 154–​7, 176–​8, 213, 222, 223f, 229, 239, 261nn. 101, 104, 263n. 38, 264n. 43, 267n. 46 distribution 136–​7, 149–​52, 173–​5, 177, 198–​201, 230–​2, 261n. 79 Jingū taima 神宮大麻 230–​1 manufacture 152, 173, 178, 198, 199, 231–​2, 263n. 26, 264nn. 42, 60 see also purification amulets (oharai taima) ancient Ise history Amaterasu as leader of the heavenly deities 19–​22 Amaterasu’s relocation to Ise 22–​5, 28 dispatch of imperial princesses to Ise 11, 13–​15, 22, 26, 28–​9, 246n. 61 Ise’s origination myth 15–​19, see also origination myth of Ise Jinshin coup 10–​11 Jitō’s role in 25–​8, see also Jitō (Empress) origins of Ise 9–​10, 10f Tenmu’s role in 10–​15, see also Tenmu (Emperor) anti-​bakufu activists 158–​61 Arakida 荒木田 lineage 45, 66, 77, 82, 168, 236, 238, 255n. 31 priests 55, 58, 59, 60, 63, 72, 77, 78, 79, 98, 101, 104, 105, 106, 109, 112, 116, 237, 241, 248n. 42 Arakida Nobutsune 荒木田延季 77, 251n. 4 Arakida Ujitsune 荒木田氏常 109–​10, 116, 117, 120, 255n. 41 Aramatsuri Shrine 荒祭宮 41, 42, 61, 257n. 13 Asahi shinbun 朝日新聞 188, 191, 192, 193–​5, 207, 209, 217, 218, 224–​ 5, 232–​4 Ashikaga Takauji 足利尊氏 101–​3

Ashikaga Yoshimitsu 足利義満 106–​7 Association of Ise Worshippers (Ise Jingū sūkeikai 伊勢神宮崇敬会) 2 Association of Shinto Shrines see Jinja Honchō Atsuta Shrine 熱田神宮 25, 102, 104, 159, 209 auxiliary shrines (betsugū 別宮) 41–​3, 251n. 5 Azaka 阿射加 24, 246n. 52 Azuma kagami 吾妻鏡 63–​4, 65 back houses (shirie 後家) 41, 44, 47 bakufu 幕府 106, 116, 118, 120 Edo 122, 131, 158, 238 Kamakura 63–​4, 65, 67, 72, 76, 80–​3, 97, 101, 237 Muromachi 117, 129 temple certification system 134 Tokugawa 128, 159, 164, 187 beds (miyuka 御床) 38, 43, 48 besson 別尊 78 Bikisho 鼻帰書 (Book of returning to the Origin) 92 Bizen’ya 備前屋 140, 141, 143, 164, 180, 184, 205 see also teahouses (chaya) Brahmā 32, 61–​3, 96 Buddha Mahāvairocana see Mahāvairocana Buddhism 32–​6, 52, 72, 97, 98, 105, 123, 133–​4, 136–​8, 166, 167, 184, 198, 214, 238, 240, 257nn. 29, 30, 262n. 9 esoteric 70, 87, 88 establishment in Japan 61–​3, 67 Nichiren 日蓮 (hokke 法華) 134 Shin 真 174, 175, 200–​1 taboo on 33, 61, 62, 75 Buddhist canons 11, 12, 77, 87 Buddhist rituals 32, 136 Buddhist vocabulary 33, 61, 62 Bunce, William K. 212–​13 Bunsei shin’iki 文政神異記 (Collection of miracle stories in the Bunsei era) 157, 261n. 104 cadastral surveys 126–​8 Cannon Barrel Tower (hōshintō 砲身塔) 196, 207 cap-​ranks 11, 12, 27

Index China 11, 18, 20, 29, 52, 61, 88, 117, 193, 196, 200, 201, 207, 257n. 29 Chōgen 重源 66–​8, 70, 92, 107 Chōkokan 徴古館 museum 183–​4, 206, 208 Chōshū 長州 domain 159, 160, 163, 166 Christianity 134, 149, 175, 198 classical Ise 24, 29, 40, 52, 57, 58, 60, 63, 97, 121, 171, 240, 262n. 19 see also Protocols; Jingikan (Council of Heavenly and Earthly Deities); Ōnakatomi; Saigūryō (Office of the Abstinence Princess) clones of Ise 79, 118, 120 Como, Michael 18, 244n. 26, 245n. 29, 247n. 14 Confucian academy 36, 52 Confucianism 133–​4, 136, 257n. 29 Conlan, Thomas D. 104 cosmology 32 Buddhist 63, 97 Laozi’s 87–​9, 90 non-​Buddhist 86 Yin-​Yang 85 Council of Kami Affairs (Jingikan 神祇官) 163, 168 Council of State (Daijōkan/​Dajōkan 太政 官) 37, 167, 168–​9 court and ancient Ise see ancient Ise history Buddhicization of 34–​5, see also Buddhism cult see jingi cult funding 60, 72, see also yakubukumai tax and Kamakura warriors 63–​5 priests see Jingikan (Council of Heavenly and Earthly Deities); Ōnakatomi; Saigūryō (Office of the Abstinence Princess) rituals and Ise 49–​53 worship of kami 16, 21, 27 Yamato 12, 20, 21, 24 see also imperial court curse(s) 25, 29, 35, 58, 244n. 18 custodial governors (zuryō 受領) 56–​7 Daidō hongi 大同本記 (Record from the Daidō period) 89

285

Daidō hongi 大道本義 (Essence of the Great Way) 175, 253n. 43, 264nn. 50,53 Dai59kai Jingū shikinen sengū no shiori 第 59 回神宮式年遷宮の栞 (59th Regular Rebuilding of the Ise Shrines pamphlet) 216, 217 daigūji 大宮司 (chief priest) 168, 213 Daihannya-​kyō 大般若経 66, 77 Daijingū hongi 大神宮本記 (Records of the Great Shrines) 89–​90 Daijingū Hōrakuji 大神宮法楽寺 (Dharma-​enjoyment temple for the Ise Shrines) 76, 102 Daijingū shozōjiki 大神宮諸雑事記 (Record of miscellaneous matters pertaining to the Ise Shrines) 34, 35, 247n. 19, 248n. 27 daijingūji 大神宮司 (head of the Office of Ise Shrines) 33, 37, 44, 47, 49, 58, 59, 60, 124, 127, 129 Daijingūji head see daijingūji (head of the Office of Ise Shrines) Daijingūji 大神宮司 (Office of the Great [Ise] Shrines) 37, 38, 44, 45, 47, 59, 81 daijōsai 大嘗祭 34–​5, 48–​51 daimyo 136, 137, 151, 158–​9, 160, 257n. 23 dance see kagura (sacred dance) danna contracts (dōja baiken 道者売券) 114, 115, 121, 137, 238 danna 檀那 (patrons) 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 114–​15, 119, 121, 134, 136–​7, 146, 147, 150, 151, 237–​8 Daodejing 道徳経 86 Daoism 87, 88, 98, 257n. 29 Dayū 太夫 105, 106 debt cancellation 81, 112, 123 see also tokusei (virtuous government) declaration to clarify the national polity (kokutai meichō seimei 国体明徴 声明) 203 Deguchi Nobuyoshi 出口延佳 104, 133–​4, 137, 145, 257n. 27 Dependable Club (Shinsei kō 真誠講) 178–​9 Dharma enjoyment see hōraku (Dharma-​ enjoyment) rites; Hōrakusha (branch temples of Dharma-​ enjoyment)

286

Index

Dharma realm 69, 70, 72–​3 Diamond Realm mandala (kongōkai 金剛 界) 70, 78, 86, 89, 94, 98 ‘Divine Capital’ (Shinto 神都) 8, 169, 184–​ 5, 188, 241 Dōkyō 道鏡 34–​6, 52 donations 4, 5, 8, 60, 64, 65, 79, 89, 107, 108, 113, 117, 120–​2, 125–​6, 150, 177, 181, 205, 213, 214, 221, 222, 234, 237, 239, 240, 248n. 23, 257n. 13 Ebersole, Gary 25, 26, 244n. 8, 246n. 56 Edification Ministry (Kyōbushō 教部省) 163, 168, 174, 175 Edo period, Ise in the 98, 103, 111f, 122, 125, 128–​9, 131, 134, 136, 138, 139–​40, 141–​5, 147, 149, 151–​2, 155–​7, 163–​4, 167, 169, 174, 177, 188, 238, 239–​40 see also pilgrims Eison 叡尊 77–​8, 85, 92, 98, 251nn. 7, 9, 11 see also Saidaiji Engi shiki 延喜式 31, 37, 246n. 52, 246n. 53, 248n. 24 Enma-​ten ku 閻魔天供 62, 63 epidemics 15, 16, 18, 28, 29–​30, 36, 120, 246n. 74 esoteric framework of Ise 68–​73, 75–​6, 86, 89 fences itagaki 板垣 38, 42, 171, 197 mizugaki 瑞垣 38, 41, 47, 66, 105, 112, 165 tamagaki 玉垣 38, 39, 41, 42, 47, 165, 171, 172 ‘the first emperor to rule the realm’ (hatsu kuni shirasu sumera-​ mikoto 御肇國天皇) 21 floods 36, 42, 121, 256n. 2 food offerings 2, 27, 28, 35, 42–​6, 48–​9, 59, 89, 90, 137, 146 noshi 熨斗 107 rice 44, 45, 46–​8 rice wine 46, 50 sake 40, 42, 44–​5, 51, 55, 58, 148, 153 salt 40, 44–​5, 46 seafood 24, 44, 46

Fróis, Luís 123 Fujikata 藤潟 22, 24, 245n. 46 Fujiwara-​kyō 藤原京 26–​7 Fujiwara no Kokikoso 藤原古木古曽 55–​7 see also oracle crisis of 1031 Fujiwara no Sukemichi 藤原相通 55–​7, 60 see also oracle crisis of 1031 Fujiwara 藤原 regents 56, 57 see also Ōnakatomi Fukuba Bisei 福羽美静 166, 168, 173 Fukuchi Yoshiyuki 福地由廉 205–​6, 267n. 73 Fukushima 福島 139, 167, 178 Fukuyama Toshio 福山敏男 40, 248n. 27 fundraising 66, 77, 108, 121, 124, 136, 181, 183, 215, 217, 222, 230 see also kanjin (fundraising) Furuichi 古市 111f, 140–​3, 142f, 147, 155, 164–​5, 173, 177, 179–​80, 184, 187, 204–​5, 208, 225, 238, 258nn. 9, 14, 259n. 17 kabuki 142–​3, 259n. 15 sex in see Bizen’ya; teahouses (chaya); tea pourers (chakumi onna) futo-​tamagushi太玉串 branch 44, 45, 47, 55 garden estates (misono 御園 or mikuriya 御 厨) 59, 66, 90, 237, 253n. 41 commended 57, 60, 61, 62, 63 donation of 64, 65 intrusion by warriors 80 management of 59–​60, 80 Maru no Mikuriya 丸御厨 64 General Headquarters (GHQ)/​Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) 211–​14, 217, 239 Gengenshū 元々集 (Compilation of keeping to the Origin) 103 Genpei 源平 war (1180–​85) 72 Gochinza denki 御鎮座伝記 91, 104, 253n. 48, 257n. 27 Gochinza hongi 御鎮座本紀 91, 96, 104, 248n. 31, 253n. 48 Gochinza shidaiki 御鎮座次第記 90, 91, 104 Go-​Daigo 後醍醐 (Emperor) 94, 95, 101–​ 2, 103–​4, 105, 106, 164, 254n. 3 Go-​Ichijō 後一条 (Emperor) 57

Index gonaidokin 御内帑金 (imperial donations) 4 Gongen-​sama 権現様 132 gonnegi 権禰宜 59, 62, 64, 65, 77, 79, 104, 106–​7, 133, 135, 139, 168 Goodman, Janet R. 108 gorin 五輪 (five elements) 92 goshichinichi no mishiho 後七日御修法 rituals 67, 70–​1 Go-​Toba 後鳥羽 (Emperor) 65, 66 Go-​Uda 後宇多院 (Retired Emperor) 94, 95, 254n. 3, 262n. 107 grave mounds (kofun 古墳) 22–​3, 24, 108, 245n. 49 ‘great abstinence child’ (ōmonoimi 大物忌) see ōmonoimi ‘Great Origin of Two-​Shrine Ryōgū Shintō’ 144, 145 ‘great kings’ (ōkimi 大王) 11, 13, 61 Great Mausoleum (daibyō 大廟) 172, 184, 187, 213, 238, 268n. 2 ‘Great Rite’ (taisai 大祭) 169, 189 see also kanname ritual Great Shrine of Taki 多気大神宮 27–​8, 29 Great Teaching (taikyō 大教) 175 guarantor (honke 本家, honjo 本所) 57, 59, 60, 63, 80, 81 guidebooks 143, 144, 156, 169, 172, 179, 182, 184, 185, 204, 235, 236 guides (sendatsu 先達) 108, 114 Gyōki 行基 66–​8 Hachiman 八幡 see Usa Hachiman haji 土師 stoneware 24 hall of abstinence see abstinence hall (imidono) ‘hall of divine food’ (mikedono or mikeden 御饌殿) 42, 46 see also mike hall Hamachi Bunpei 浜地文平 219–​20 Hamaguchi Osachi 浜口雄幸 3, 189, 190f, 191 Hashimoto Saneyana 橋本実梁 160–​1 Hatsuse 泊瀬 11, 13 Hayashi Razan 林羅山 131, 133 head of Ise rituals see saishu (‘head of rituals’) head of the Office of the Ise Shrines (Daijingūji) see daijingūji (head of the Office of Ise Shrines)

287

heavenly and earthly shrines 16, 20, 21, 29, 51 Heavenly Grandson 21, 25, 29, 133, 175 see also Ninigi Heavenly Rock-​Cave see Rock-​Cave of Heaven Heian period 45, 56, 58, 71, 80, 81, 84, 89, 90, 114, 126, 141 Hibiya Daijingū 日比谷大神宮 176, 198 Higashi Futami 東二見 153–​4, 261nn. 78,82 Home Ministry (Naimushō 内務省) 163, 174, 176, 191, 192, 193, 198, 200, 214, 266n. 40 honji suijaku 本地垂跡 62 hōraku 法楽 (Dharma-​enjoyment) rites 66, 76–​7, 95, 250n. 33 Hōrakusha 法楽舍 76–​7, 79, 98, 117, 251nn. 2,3 Hōryūji 法隆寺 39–​40, 184 ichimando-​barai 一万度祓 (‘10,000-​fold purification’) 152 Iga 伊賀 11, 27, 58, 60 Iino 飯野 38, 82, 113, 248n. 23, 255n. 34 Iitaka 飯高 35, 67, 68, 249n. 9, 250n. 35 Ikeda Hayato 池田勇人 219–​21 ikkō 一向 (Shin 真) 123, 134 imidono 忌殿 see abstinence hall (imidono) imi-​hashira 忌柱 (abstinence post) see pivot post imperial court 1, 39, 52, 65, 97, 98, 119, 125, 135, 158, 164, 169, 177, 217, 221, 262n. 9 see also court imperial emissaries 6, 131, 160–​1, 164, 196 imperial illness 25, 30, 46, 50, 52 imperial monk (gojisō 御持僧, 護持僧) 71 imperial priestess see abstinence priestesses impurity 33, 46, 47, 61, 81, 109 see also purity Inner Shrine (Naikū 内宮) accusation of Outer Shrine priests 105–​6 auxiliary shrines of 41–​2, 251n. 5 beads in 23, 23f boundaries 37–​8 compound 2, 2f, 5, 40–​1, 170f, 171, 192, 196, 207 deities in the 38, 41, 42

288

Index

and Saidaiji 西大寺 alliance 77–​9 Hōrakusha in 76–​7 interim sengū in 83 Kokuya Dainichibō rites at 108–​9, 121 location 1–​2, 24, 27 main hall of the 38–​40 mandalas 78 oshi 131, 132, 137, 139, 145, 150, 152 pilgrims’ description of 143–​4 precinct 42, 77, 109, 115, 121, 126f, 168, 192, 207, 228, 258n. 37 priests 43–​5, 77, 105, 131, 255n. 47, see also Arakida, priests protocol of the 31, 33, 37–​42, 47, 49 restoration of 122 ruin of 116–​18, 121 sengyo of 2013 2–​5, 4f shopping area 6 silk production in 44, 51 staff 43 theft in the 39 treasures in the 38–​9 Tsukiyomi Shrine in the 35, 41–​3 Uji–​Yamada war 115–​16 versus Outer Shrine 37, 42–​3, 44, 45, 89, 131, 132, 137, 144–​6 interim sengū (karidono sengū 仮殿遷 宮) 83, 98, 121, 122, 123, 252n. 17, 252nn. 24,25 Ise 伊勢 abroad 147–​54 in ancient Japan 9–​10, 10f, see also ancient Ise history agents of 6–​8, 56, 62, 63, 66, 72–​3, 76–​9, 81, 97–​9, 101, 105, 116, 163, 173, 211–​13, 225, 236, 238–​41 architecture 1–​2, 37–​40, 48, see also Inner Shrine; Outer Shrine Bakumatsu politics in 157–​61 and court rituals 49–​53 economic crises 56–​8, 79–​83 funding for 5, 8, 37, 56–​8, 60 in history and literature curriculum in schools 195–​8, 202 as Japanese identity symbols 1, 7 logo and slogan 230–​1, 231f meanings of 6–​8 miracles in 155–​7

mirror 28, 168, 209, 219, 220, see also mirror as nature symbols 6–​7 as a non-​Buddhist space 33–​6, 52, 98 number of 1 origination myth 15–​19 pilgrimage to see pilgrimage, to Ise political landscape in late classical period 58–​60 protection from foreign invasion 77–​9 protocols of 37–​43 rituals in see ritual/​rituals Shinto transmissions of see Shinto; Shintoization shogunal 129–​32 shrine districts see Iino (shrine district); Taki (shrine district); Watarai (shrine district) Shrine Subsidy (kyōshinkin 供進金) 176–​7 Shrine Takings (shanyūkin 社入金) 177 silks, association with 3, 4, 18, 38–​9, 44, 49, 51, 64, 165, 215, 216, 221, 225, 243n. 5, 246n. 64 staff of 2, 43 ‘true guise’ of 220–​2 at war 207–​9 Ise Bay 1, 72, 102, 139, 140, 190, 244n. 15 Ise churches (Jingū kyōkai 神宮教会) 174 Ise City 1, 5, 6, 227, 243n. 4, 246n. 53, 265n. 91 Ise cult 1, 10, 11, 15, 18, 19–​20, 27, 29, 30, 52, 57, 60, 72, 175, 211 Ise daijingū zoku shin’iki 伊勢大神宮続 神異記 (Compilation of miracle stories) 155 Ise doodle-​do 230, 231f Ise Electric Railway Company (Ise den 伊 勢電) 204 ‘Ise house’ (Iseya 伊勢屋) 149, 153, 154 Ise Jingū shikinen sengū no hongi 伊勢 神宮式年遷宮の本義 (The true meaning of the shikinen sengū) 222–​4 Ise Jingū sūkeikai 伊勢神宮崇敬会 (Association of Ise Worshippers) 2 Ise literature 61, 69, 76, 85, 95, 96, 97, 98–​9, 103–​4, 137, 250n. 42

Index see also Tenshō Daijin giki 天照大神 儀軌 (A ritual manual for [the worship of] Amaterasu) Ise nisho daijingū shinmei hisho 伊勢二所 大神宮神明秘書 see Shinmei hisho (Secret book of the names of the gods of the two Ise Shrines) Ise ondo 伊勢音頭 142–​3, 205 Ise Pilgrimage Handbook (Ise sangū yōran 伊勢参宮要覧) 201–​2 Ise priesthood/​Ise priests 2, 6, 7, 8, 31, 33, 35, 37, 43–​6, 58, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 72, 76, 83, 94, 95, 97, 119, 125, 133, 158, 164, 168, 209, 214, 224, 227, 246n. 53, 247n. 1, 263nn. 20,21 ‘Ise problem’ (Jingū mondai 神宮問題) 218 Ise Protocols of 804 see Protocols, 804 Ise Ritual Ordinance (Jingū saishi rei 神宮 祭祀令) 169 Ise sangū annaiki 伊勢参宮案内記 144–​6, 177, 182 Ise sangū meisho zue 伊勢参宮名所図 絵 (Guide to famous places for pilgrims travelling to Ise) 145, 146, 169 Ise sangū saiken taizen 伊勢参宮細見大 全 144–​6 Ise shinbun 伊勢新聞 172, 177, 184, 263n. 37 Ise Shintō 伊勢神道 79, 98, 133, 175–​6 Ise Shrine College (Jingū kyōin 神宮教院) 174, 175, 176, 198 Ise Shrine Office (Jingū shichō 神宮司庁) 1, 5–​7, 9, 168, 173–​4, 177, 185, 192, 199, 201, 213, 215, 217, 219, 239 see also Jingū shichō (Ise Shrine Office) Ise Shrine Regulations (Jingū kisoku 神宮 規則) 213, 218 Ise shrine temples 34–​6 Ōkasedera 大鹿瀬寺 34, 35 Sesonji 世尊寺 108–​9 Iso 磯 (beach palace) 19 Isuzu River 五十鈴川 15, 19, 23, 24, 27–​8, 40, 42, 106, 118, 182, 195, 206–​7, 217, 220, 258n. 37 itsuki no miko 斎王 see abstinence princesses (itsuki no miko or saiō) Iwashimizu Hachimangū Shrine 石清水八 幡宮 32, 78, 124

289

Izanagi 伊奘諾 41, 42, 90, 91 Izanami 伊奘冉 41, 42, 90, 91 Izawa Shrine 伊雑宮 41, 43, 64 Izumo Shrine 出雲大社 136, 175–​6, 196, 264n. 57 Japan Business Federation (Keidanren 経 団連) 5, 222 jewel(s) 4, 17, 35, 67–​72, 90, 91, 92, 104, 144, 180, 221, 244n. 26, 250n. 36 see also wish-​fulfilling jewels jigenin 地下人 109, 112–​13, 115–​16, 119, 120, 255n. 31 Jihen 慈遍 105, 254n. 14, 257n. 29 jingi 神祇 cult 20–​1, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34–​ 5, 36, 49, 51, 57, 66, 73 jingi rituals 31, 49–​51, 52, 57, 97, 247n. 16 Jingiin 神祇院 (Office for Kami Affairs) 200, 209, 213 Jingikan 神祇官 (Council of Heavenly and Earthly Deities) 21, 26, 33, 35, 37, 38, 46, 48, 49, 57, 58, 59, 60, 86, 88, 94, 105, 118, 135, 245n. 41 Jingū hōsaikai 神宮奉斎会 (Ise Worship Association) 198–​9 Jingū Kōgō 神功皇后 21 Jingūkyō 神宮教 176–​7, 198–​9 Jingū shichō 神宮司庁 (Ise Shrine Office) 1, 168, 170f, 182f, 212, 243n. 3, 256nn. 8,12, 259nn. 26, 27, 261–​2, 263n. 25, 264nn. 45, 58, 264n. 61, 266n. 4, 268n. 80, 270nn. 48, 51 Jingū taima 神宮大麻 230–​1 see also amulets, oharai taima jinin 神人 82, 112, 116, 255n. 31 Jinja Honchō 神社本庁 1, 6–​7, 212, 214, 215, 216, 222, 224, 231, 239, 243n. 10, 268nn. 3, 4 Jinja shinpō 神社新報 220, 221, 225, 234 jinkonjiki 神今食 49, 50, 249n. 52 Jinmu 神武 (Emperor) 17, 20–​1, 145, 160, 196 Jinnō shōtōki 神皇正統記 (Record of the correct lineage of gods and emperors) 103, 104, 105 Jinshin 壬申 coup 10–​11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 21, 26, 28, 29, 244n. 9 jin’yakunin 神役人 112, 255n. 31

290

Index

Jitō 持統 (Empress) 9, 18, 21, 25–​8, 30, 31, 32, 36, 52, 72, 105, 236, 245n. 41 Amaterasu envisioned as imperial deity by 26, 29 enthronement of grandson Monmu by 25–​6, 27, 29 feminization of Amaterasu by 26, 29 promulgation of Kiyomihara-​ryō by 26 tour of Ise by 26–​7, 29 jitō 地頭 (stewards) 80–​1, 252n. 21 Jōgan shiki 貞観式 37 Jōkei 貞慶 67, 92 Kadoya Atsushi 門屋温 93 Kadoya Inn 角屋 178–​9 Kagura halls 神楽殿 1, 147, 263n. 38 kagura 神楽 1, 5, 57, 106, 119, 133, 135, 140, 146, 147–​8, 147f, 152, 155, 167, 177, 189, 240, 263n. 38 Kakinomoto no Hitomaro 柿本人麻呂 13, 26 Kamakura bakufu 63–​4, 65, 67, 72, 76, 80–​3, 97, 101, 237 Kamakura period, Ise in the 63–​5, 68, 75–​6 creation of secrets 91–​5 economic woes 79–​83 Eison’s role and the Saidaiji alliance 77–​9, 85, 92, 98 Daijingū Hōrakuji temple, establishment of 76, 102 Hōrakusha branch temples, founding of 76–​7, 79, 98, 117, 251n. 2, 251n. 3 Mongol crisis 76–​9, 83, 92, 98, 99 Ono 小野 transmissions 77 ‘Origin’ theme 83–​9, 91, 95–​7, 99 reinvention of Outer Shrine kami 89–​91 role of Watarai Yukitada in Shinto transmission 83–​9, see also Watarai Yukitada Shinto transmissions 83–​9, 95–​7, see also Shinto Kameyama 亀山院 (Retired Emperor) 77, 84 kami 神 -​caused calamities 12, 16, 20, 52 curse 25, 29, 35, 58, 244n. 18 ‘eighty myriad’ 16, 19, 20 epidemics caused by 15, 16, 18, 28, 29–​30, 36, 120

-​impregnated maidens 15, 17 land allotment to see land allotment to kami mirror see mirror of Miwa 美輪 16, 19, 26, 28, 245n. 27 offerings to see offerings to kami protection of Emperor Tenmu 13 snakes, association with 15, 17–​19, 28, 64, 99, 156 transfer of 2–​3, 19–​20, 47–​8 violent spirit of 21, 41, 42, 43, 94 wives of 17–​18 wrath of 15–​16, see also curse by kami see also Amaterasu (Sun Goddess); Ame no Hoakari; Izanagi; Izanami; Kotoshironushi; Ōmononushi; Takami-​musubi; Toyuke; Usa Hachiman; Yamato Ōkunitama kami body/​bodies (shintai 神体) 3, 38, 39, 42, 47, 96, 117, 118, 120, 144, 146, 150, 225 kami halls 1, 3, 5, 38, 40, 47, 61, 69, 70, 89, 96, 143, 165, 171–​2, 188–​9, 190, 191, 194, 195, 215, 225, 263n. 26, 264n. 42 kami treasures (shinpō 神宝) see treasures Kamijiyama 神路山 84, 256n. 2 Kami-​tsukasa 神司 (Kami Office) 21 see also Jingikan (Council of Heavenly and Earthly Deities) kanbe 神戸 (service households) 16, 20, 38, 46, 49, 51, 58, 59, 60, 248n. 24 Kanbesho 神部署 (Ritualists’ Division) 199 Kanhatori 神服織 51 kanjin 勧進 77, 108–​9, 114, 120–​3, 136 kanjin hijiri 勧進聖 66, 108–​9, 110f, 121, 138, 241 kanmiso-​sai 神御衣祭 (‘ritual of divine raiments’) 51 Kanmu 桓武 (Emperor) 36–​7, 50, 52–​3, 57, 72, 247nn. 1, 17 kanname 神嘗 ritual 37, 42, 47, 48–​51, 97, 111, 117, 121, 131, 158, 164, 169, 197, 249n. 51, 262n. 19, 263nn. 20,21 Kannon 観音 67, 90 kansō 観想 (contemplation practice) 69 Kantō 関東 Plain 60, 62, 63–​5, 72, 97 Kantō warriors 60, 63–​5, 71, 72, 237

Index Karu (Prince) 軽親王 25, 26, 27 see also Monmu (Emperor) Kasuga Shrine 春日大社 136, 160 Kawazoe Noboru 川添登 28, 224, 243n. 3, 246nn. 61, 71, 248n. 31 kaya 茅 thatch 1, 2, 38, 39, 40 Kazahinomi 風日祈 109, 251n. 5 Keikōin 慶光院 121–​2, 123, 124, 125, 127, 138, 256n. 1, 257n. 13 Keitai 継体 (Emperor) 9, 14, 245nn. 37, 41 Kenmu 建武 Restoration 101–​2 kinensai 祈年祭 ritual 49, 169, 247n. 16 King Yama 閻魔王 61, 62, 71, 73, 89, 96, 237 Kishi Nobusuke 岸信介 218–​19 Kitabatake 北畠 102–​5, 107, 113, 114, 115–​ 16, 117, 119, 122–​3, 137, 255n. 34 Kitabatake Chikafusa 北畠親房 102–​5, 137 Kitabatake Masakatsu 北畠政勝 117 Kiyomihara-​ryō 浄御原令 26 kō 講 (pious associations) 151, 152–​4, 155, 174–​5, 261nn. 78, 84, 265n. 69 kofun 古墳 (grave mounds) 22–​3, 24, 108, 245n. 49 Kojiki 古事記 (Record of ancient matters) 11–​15, 17, 28–​9, 38, 91, 150, 166, 243n. 6, 246n. 72 on Amaterasu–​Susanowo confrontation 17–​18 on founding of Amaterasu’s shrine 15–​16 on heavenly rule over earthly kami 20–​1 imperial princesses, reference to 14–​15 initiation of compilation of 11, 20 on Ninigi’s descent 24, 25–​6 redactions in 12 on tradition of sun worship 24 on worship of deities 29 kōke 高家 131–​2 Kōken 孝謙 (Empress) see Shōtoku (Empress) koku 石 115, 124, 125, 126, 127, 158, 256n. 7, 257n. 15 Kokutai no hongi 国体の本義 (Fundamentals of our national polity) 75 Kokuya Dainichibō 穀屋大日坊 108–​9, 121

291

Kōmei 孝明 (Emperor) 158–​60, 164, 166, 238, 262nn. 107,109 Kōnin shiki 弘仁式 31, 37 Kōnin 光仁 (Emperor) 34, 36 Korea 11–​12, 17, 18, 29, 40, 180, 189, 207 kōrozen 黄櫨染 165, 188 Kōshōji 弘正寺 78, 98, 251n. 11 Kōtaijingū gishikichō 皇太神宮儀式帳 (Protocols of the Imperial Great Shrine) 31 Kotoshironushi 事代主 13 kouchibito 小内人 (‘lesser inner staff ’) 43, 169 Kublai Khan 75, 76 Kubokura 久保倉 112, 139, 145 Kubota Osamu 久保田収 75, 76, 252n. 34 Kūkai 空海 52, 62, 66, 70–​2, 94–​5, 253n. 58 Kumano 熊野 64–​5, 72, 89, 114–​15, 250n. 27 Kunitokotachi 国常立 91, 103, 118, 131, 132, 143–​6, 259n. 41 Kuratayama 倉田山 182–​4, 183f, 204–​6, 208, 225, 240 Kusakabe 日下部 (Prince) 25, 26, 246n. 61 kusanagi 草薙 sword 25 Kyoto 京都 1, 36, 52, 68, 72, 77, 80–​1, 82–​3, 84–​5, 88, 92–​5, 101–​2, 112, 117–​20, 123, 124, 133, 142–​5, 152, 154–​6, 158–​60, 164, 166, 181, 183–​5, 192–​3, 198, 200, 203, 215, 216, 228, 257n. 27, 259n. 21, 260n. 58, 261n. 97, 262n. 111 Kyushu 九州 18, 32, 76, 149, 156, 178 land allotment to kami 16, 20, 38, 58–​9 land rights myōshu-​shiki 名主職 63, 65, 66, 68, 79–​81, 82, 88, 97, 99, 101, 113, 126, 237, 238 Laozi 老子 86–​90, 95, 252n. 38 law-​enforcing guards (kebiishi 検非違使) 82 ‘locals’ (jigenin 地下人) 109, 112–​13, 115–​16, 119, 120, 255n. 31 lodging rights (shukushiki 宿職) 115 log-​pulling (okihiki 御木曳) ritual 5 Magatama Lake 勾玉池 5, 182, 240 Mahāvairocana 61–​3, 66, 67, 69–​72, 78, 79, 86, 88, 89, 92–​7, 99, 104, 247n. 5, 250–​1n. 42

292

Index

Mainichi shinbun 毎日新聞 217–​18, 224–​5, 234, 269nn. 39, 40 mandalas, Buddhist 68, 70, 78, 86, 88, 89, 92, 94, 96–​7, 98, 251n. 43 see also Diamond Realm mandala (kongōkai); Womb Realm mandala (taizōkai) Man’yōshū 万葉集 (Collection of ten thousand leaves) 13 Matokata 的潟 22, 24 Matsumae 松前 151–​3, 178 McMullin, Neil 123 mediation dues (kunyūryō 口入料) 113 medieval Ise 1, 34, 53, 71, 73, 97, 131, 137, 146, 172, 235 ‘mediums’ (fugeki 巫覡) 55, 57 ‘Meiji-​era Ise rites’ (Jingū Meiji saishiki 神 宮明治祭式) 169 Meiji period, Ise in the abolition of oshi 163–​4, 167, 168, 172, 173, 238 agents of Meiji transformation 163, 173 consequences of Meiji transformation 163–​4 emperor’s Ise visit 164–​6, 165f Great Mausoleum 172, 184, 187, 213, 268n. 2 inns and innkeepers 173, 177–​80 Ise Shinto 175–​6 Ise Shrine College (Jingū kyōin), founding of 174, 175, 176, 198 Ise versus Izumo 175–​6 Mikkaichi house 177–​8, see also Mikkaichi modern rituals 169 physical changes to the Shrines 169–​72, 170f pilgrim numbers 172–​3, 177–​80 priesthood, new 168, 173 purification amulets (oharai taima), production of 173–​4 sanpai ichi 参拝位置 (‘pilgrim placing’) 171 Shin’enkai and its legacy 180–​5, see also Shin’enkai (Sacred Garden Society) Urata’s reforms 166–​9, 173–​6, see also Urata Nagatami Meiji Revolution 91, 163, 169–​70

mendicant monks (rokujūrokubu 六十六 部) 103 Mie Prefecture 6, 176, 180, 181, 189, 204, 219, 227, 228, 263n. 34 ‘might of the gods’ (shin’i 神威) 85 mihishiro 御樋代 38, 189 Mikawa 三河 58, 60, 156 mike hall 御饌殿 42–​3, 45, 48, 49, 89, 137 Mike-​tsu-​kami 御饌津神 43, 90–​1, 131 see also Toyuke Mikimoto 御木本 Road 225, 227–​8, 240 Mikkaichi 三日市149, 151–​2, 151f, 167, 173, 177–​8, 259n. 17, 260n. 65, 264n. 65 mikkyō 密教 68–​73, 75–​6, 86, 89 mikumari 水分 23 military governor (shugo 守護) 80, 82 Minamoto Mitsuharu 源光晴 58 Minamoto no Yoritomo 源頼朝 63–​6, 72, 80–​1 Ministry of Kami Affairs (Jingishō 神祇省) 163, 168, 173 mirror 3, 4, 15, 25, 28, 38, 39, 40–​1, 47, 57, 65, 67, 71, 78, 94, 96, 103–​4, 117, 119, 144, 168, 189, 196, 209, 219–​ 21, 248n. 31, 250n. 40 ‘miscellaneous people’ (zōnin 雑人) 82 mitamashiro 御霊代 174 Miura Baien 三浦梅園 143, 259n. 21 Miwa Daimyōjin engi 三輪大明神縁起 (The karmic origins of the Great Deity of Miwa) 78–​9, 251n. 11 Miwa 三輪 deity 16, 19, 26, 27, 28, 29, 78–​9, 245n. 27 Miwa no Takechimaro 大神高市麻呂 27 Miyagawa River 宮川 5, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 34, 37, 55, 58, 76, 79, 84, 102, 112, 123, 124, 125, 127–8, 139, 140, 148, 164, 173, 181, 216, 245n. 49, 257n. 15 Miyajiri Santō 宮後三頭 149–​50 miyuka 御床 (beds) 38, 43, 48 mokkan 木簡 14, 244n. 10 Mongol crisis 76–​9, 83, 92, 98, 99 Mongol invasion 77, 80, 82, 83, 84, 88, 237 monoimi 物忌 (‘abstinence children’) 42–​7, 169, 248n. 44

Index see also ōmonoimi (‘great monoimi’) monoimi no chichi 物忌の父 (‘monoimi fathers’) 43, 169 monks 61, 71–​2, 84 Arakida 77, 78 Buddhist 33, 34, 66 Daigoji 76–​7 imperial 71 kanjin 66, 108, 110f Kanmu’s dispatch of 52–​3 Kōshōji 78 Kumano 64–​5, 114 mendicant 103, 108–​9, 110f receiving jewels from deities 67, see also wish-​fulfilling jewels Saidaiji 77, 78, 93 Shingon 104 of shrine temples 32–​5 Tendai 105 Tōdaiji 66–​7, 77, 97–​8 Watarai 77 Zenkōji 152 Monmu 文武 (Emperor) 27, 29, 51 Mori Jizaemon 森治左衛門 147–​9 Motoori Norinaga 本居宣長 146, 166, 175, 259n. 42, 261n. 91 Mount Asama 朝熊山 23, 37, 140, 148, 148f, 155, 184, 204, 205, 206 Mount Kōya 高野山 123, 128 Mount Miwa 三輪山 16, 17, 19, 20, 78, 244n. 21 Mount Sumeru 須弥山 32, 61 mulberry cloth (yū 木綿) 15, 18, 44, 45 Muraya Shrine 村屋 13 Murei Hitoshi 牟禮仁 viii, 86, 251n. 3, 252n. 34 Muromachi period, Ise in the Chikafusa’s Ise mission 102–​5, see also Kitabatake, Chikafusa development of Yamada 111–​14, see also Yamada dispersion of Ise worship 119–​20 kanjin practices 108–​9 Northern Court versus Southern Court 101–​4, 107 pilgrimages 101, 105–​11 political environment of 101–​3 ruin of the shrines 116–​18

293

trade, war and the Yamada council 114–​16, see also Yamada Musa Shrine 身狭社 13 Nagaochi 長尾市 16, 19, 20 Nagoya 名古屋 1, 141, 142, 156, 178, 192, 203, 209, 227 naishidokoro 内侍所 57, 67, 104, 159, 164, 168–​9, 267n. 42 Nakatomi 中臣 47 Nakatomi harae kige 中臣祓記解 94 Nakatomi harae kunge 中臣祓訓解 62–​3, 67, 68, 94, 250n. 34 Nakatomi purification formula 62–​3, 94–​ 5, 152 Nansei 南勢 Bypass 227–​8, 240 Naoki Kōjirō 直木孝次郎 22 naorai pavilions 直会殿 40, 42 Nara 奈良 36, 43, 52, 77, 160, 174, 181, 184, 244n. 12, 248n. 27, 264n. 46 National Association of Shrine Priests (Zenkoku shinshokukai 全国神職 会) 199 national polity (kokutai 国体) 75, 196, 203, 217, 220, 239–​40, 269n. 31 National Railway Company (Kokuyū tetsudō 国有鉄道) 203–​4 National Shinto Bureau (Shintō jimukyoku 神道事務局) 175–​6 negi 禰宜 41, 43–​7, 59, 77, 83–​4, 89, 94, 102, 105, 107, 109, 113, 116, 118, 121, 125, 127, 129, 135, 140, 168, 247n. 4, 252n. 17, 252n. 26, 255n. 41, 256n. 7 nengō 年号 35 Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (Chronicles of Japan) 9–​22, 24–​9, 38, 95, 96, 145, 166, 196, 217, 220, 244nn. 9,13,17,21, 245nn. 27,41, 249n. 50, 250n. 40 on Amaterasu–​Susanowo confrontation 17–​18 on association between Ise and silk 18 contradictions in 9 on founding of Amaterasu’s shrine 15–​16, 19, 90 on heavenly rule over earthly kami 20–​1 imperial princesses, reference to 14–​15 Jinshin coup, accounts of 10, 13

294

Index

on Ninigi’s descent 24, 25–​6 on origin of Heaven and Earth from Chaos 85, 87 on Outer Shrine kami 89–​91 recording of events in Tenmu’s reign 11–​15 redactions in 12, 22 on the tradition of sun worship 24 on twin aspects of Amaterasu 51 on worship of deities 29 niiname 新嘗 ritual 48–​51, 169, 249n. 52, 263n. 21 Ninigi 瓊々杵 24, 26, 29, 38, 45, 57, 89–​90, 91, 131, 132, 144–​5, 175, 196, 219, 220, 253n. 46 Nitta Yoshisada 新田義貞 103, 257n. 24 non-​Buddhism 32, 33, 52, 86, 87, 98, 136 ‘norito masters’ (nottoshi 詔刀師) 60, 62, 63, 94, 105–​6, 113 norito 祝詞 prayers 44, 62–​3, 94, 119–​20 Normal Primary Ethics Text (Jinjō shōgaku shūshinsho 尋常小学修身書) 197–​8 Nottoshi satabumi 詔刀師沙汰文 (Documents on the conflict over norito masters) 106 Nunaki-​iri-​bime 渟名城入姫 (Princess) 16, 19 Ōama 大海人皇子 (Prince) see Tenmu (Emperor) oaths (kishōmon 起請文) 73 Obiya Denzaburō 帯谷伝三郎 202–​4, 267n. 66 Oda Nobukatsu 織田信雄 123–​6, 256n. 7 Oda Nobunaga 織田信長 103, 122, 123–​5, 257n. 13 offences (tsumi 罪) 47 offerings to kami 2, 5, 17, 21, 22, 27, 28, 31, 34–​5, 40, 42–​3, 48–​53, 64, 105, 131, 143, 169 see also food offerings; ritual/​rituals; silk/​ silk thread, association with Ise Office of the Abstinence Princess see Saigūryō (Office of the Abstinence Princess) Ogawa Toyoo 小川豊生 86, 87, 252n. 34 Oharai Machi おはらい町 206, 227–​8, 228f, 240 oharai taima 御祓大麻 107, 173–​4

Ōhashi estate 大橋庄 80–​1 Okada Seishi 岡田精司 22, 24, 25, 243n. 3, 244n. 14, 259n. 53 Okada Shōji 岡田荘司 56 Okage Yokochō おかげ横丁 6 Ōkasedera 大鹿瀬寺 34, 35 Ōku 大来皇女 (Princess) dispatch of 11, 13–​15, 22, 28 return of 26, 28, 29, 246n. 61 ‘old Ise’ (O-​Ise san お伊勢さん) 61, 230 ōmonoimi 大物忌 (‘great monoimi’) 28, 44, 45, 47, 248n. 40 Ōmononushi 大物主 16–​17, 19, 244n. 21 Ōmura 大村 (daimyo) 149–​50, 152, 153 Ōnakatomi 大中臣 33, 45, 56, 63, 66, 72, 77, 90, 97, 101, 116, 118, 125, 167, 236–​7, 241, 250n. 33, 255n. 41 accusation of Saigūryō head 60 confiscation of land 58–​9 lineage 58, 60, 66, 82, 86, 98, 236 Rengeji temple 76, 80 saishu 59, 62, 76, 81, 84, 98, 102, 107, 122, 251n. 3 Yoshichika’s 能親 letter on Outer Shrine 89 Ōnakatomi Kiyomochi 大中臣浄持 33–​4, 45 One and Only Shinto (Yuiitsu Shintō 唯一 神道) 105, 118, 135 Ōnin 応仁 war 115, 118 Ooms, Herman 12, 18, 25, 26, 246n. 57 oracle crisis of 1031 55–​6, 57, 60 see also Fujiwara no Kokikoso; Fujiwara no Sukemichi oracles 18, 19, 20, 27, 34, 55–​8, 60, 61, 77, 78, 94, 96, 108, 120, 244n. 18, 246n. 64, 247n. 5, 249n. 6 original essence (honji 本地) 67, 78, 85, 87, 247n. 5 origination myth of Ise confrontation of Amaterasu with Susanowo 17–​18 founding of Amaterasu’s shrine 15–​16 kami-​impregnated maidens 17, see also kami, wives of weaving maidens 15, 17–​18, 28 Osaka 1, 5, 141–​5, 156, 185, 193, 202–​4, 215, 216, 222, 228, 261n. 82

Index oshi 御師 107, 109, 110, 119–​22, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131–​3, 136–​40, 143 abolition of 163–​4, 167, 168, 172, 173, 238 agents of 147–​54 business 112–​17, 121 disputes 105–​6, 145–​6, 146–​7 functions of 107, 113, 117, 120 funds collection by 113–​14 hoe festivals 153 houses see Fukushima; Kubokura; Mikkaichi; Miyajiri Santō; Ryū; Uji Asōguchi Inner Shrine 131, 132, 137, 139, 145, 150, 152 inns 147, 151, 151f, 167, 181, 263n. 38 Kumano 114 Outer Shrine 115, 133, 136–​7, 145–​7, 152, 154, 260n. 56 -​pilgrim relationship 149–​54, see also pilgrims Oshi Club (Oshi kōsha 御師講社) 178 Oshihomimi 忍穂耳 26 Ōta Kosaburō太田小三郎 164, 180–​1, 184, 205 Ōtomo 大友皇子 (Prince) 10–​12 Ōtsu (palace) 大津宮 10–​11, 12, 16, 19, 21 Ōtsu 大津皇子 (Prince) 25, 246n. 61 Outer Shrine (Gekū 外宮) 23, 35 accusation by Inner Shrine priests 105–​6 auxillary shrine of 43 compound 2, 2f, 5, 42, 194, 214, 216 hall of divine food 42–​3, 46, see also mike hall ‘Heavenly Rock-​Cave’ rites at 108–​9, 109f, 249n. 46, 253n. 60 Hōrakusha in 76–​7 interim sengū in 83 location 1–​2, 5, 22, 43 mandalas 78 mirror 96 origin of 27 oshi 115, 133, 136–​7, 145–​7, 152, 154, 260n. 56 pilgrims’ description of 143–​4 precinct 1, 5, 23, 108, 116, 127f, 138 priests 45–​6, 59, 84, 95, 106, 114, 117, 132, 141, 145, 155, see also Watarai, priests

295

protocol of the 31, 37, 42–​3, 48, 49 reinvention of kami in 89–​91 restoration of 122 ruin of 116–​18, 121 staff 43 Tsubura estate conflict 81–​2 Uji–​Yamada war 115–​16 versus Inner Shrine 37, 42–​3, 44, 45, 89, 131, 132, 137, 144–​6 Owari 尾張 18, 25, 26, 28, 60, 123, 138 Ōyamatsumi 大山祇 29 palace (miya 宮) 47, 48, 52 patrons (danna) see danna (patrons) pebble-​laying rite (oshiraishimochi gyōji お 白石持行事) 5, 215–​16 pilgrimage entrepreneurs 101, 106, 133 Higashi Futami model 153–​4, 261nn. 78,82 to Ise 1, 3, 4–​5, 6, 8, 66–​8, 76, 77, 101, 105–​11, 116, 120, 140–​7, 153–​4, 164 to Kumano 65, 114 shogunal 106–​7, 131 see also pilgrims pilgrims 4–​5, 6, 101, 105–​12, 114, 115, 117, 119–​22, 128, 129, 134, 137 from companies 202 -​diarists 140, 143, 147–​9, 150, 156, 196, see also Tenaka Toshikage experience in Ise 140–​8 guidebooks 143, 144–​5, 156, 169, 172, 179, 182, 184, 185, 204, 235, 236 miracle stories of 155–​7 numbers in the Edo period 139–​40, 141, 154, 156–​7 in the Meiji period 164, 172–​3 in the Shōwa period 201–​3, 227 in the Taishō period 201–​2 okage mairi お陰参り 156 -​oshi relationship 149–​54 pleasure quarters see Furuichi schoolchildren as 202–​3, 205 and sex 141–​2, see also Bizen’ya brothel; teahouses (chaya) theories on Outer and Inner Shrines 143–​6

296

Index

women 143, 154, 155–​6 Pilgrims’ Express Railway (Sankyū 参急) 204 Pilgrims’ Road (Sangū kaidō 三宮街道) 140 pious associations (kō 講) 151, 152–​4, 155, 174–​5, 261nn. 78, 84, 265n. 69 pivot post (shin no mihashira 心の御柱) 40, 47, 48, 49, 70, 72, 96, 150, 171, 214, 216, 248n. 31 pollution 46, 47, 62, 109, 258n. 37 Popham, Walter 214 postwar Ise 211–​12 in 1953 212–​16 in 1973 218–​22 in 1993 225–​34 marketing strategies 229–​31 print media’s role in 216–​18, 222–​5, 230–​4 publicity campaign 216–​18 Shinto establishment 211, 212, 214–​16, 218–​22, 224–​5, 229–​32, 234, 239 ‘true guise’ of Ise (shinshi kengen 真姿顕 現) 220–​2, 269n. 31 power spots 6, 7, 235, 243n. 10 prayer fees (kitōryō 祈祷料) 113–​14, 238 priestly middlemen (kunyū kannushi 口入 神主) 59 priests action against the governors 58 Arakida 55, 58, 59, 60, 63, 72, 77, 78, 79, 98, 101, 104, 105, 106, 109, 112, 116, 237, 241, 248n. 42 Buddhist 62 court see Jingikan (Council of Heavenly and Earthly Deities); Ōnakatomi; Saigūryō (Office of the Abstinence Princess) function of 2, 3, 43–​6 Inbe 40, 90 Ise see Ise priesthood/​Ise priests land rights administration by 79–​81, 82, 88, 97, 99, 113–​14 and lineage 33, 40, 45 of Miwa Shrine 27 Watarai 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 72, 77, 79, 101, 112, 237, 241, 248n. 42 priests’ offices (negichō 禰宜庁) 59, 81, 82, 101

‘princes’ (ōji 皇子) 61, 62 print media 193, 212, 216–​18, 222–​5, 230–​4, 269n. 18 see also names of individual newspapers proprietors (ryōke 領家) 57, 59, 80–​1, 249n. 12 Protocols, 804 (Kōtaijingū gishikichō 皇 太神宮儀式帳 and Toyukegū gishikichō 止由気宮儀式帳) 31–​2, 33–​4, 36, 37, 40, 44, 51, 59, 70, 85, 89, 133 provincial governor (kokushi 国司) 38, 102, 247n. 20, 249n. 14 purification amulets (oharai taima 御祓大 麻) 107, 173–​4 purification formula 62–​3, 94–​5, 97, 152 purity 13, 29, 37, 40, 41, 47, 49, 52, 55, 62, 88, 94–​5, 107, 108, 109 see also impurity qi 気 86, 87, 90, 91, 95, 96, 145, 146 Rambelli, Fabio 7, 243n. 9, 247nn. 2,14, 254n. 71 Realm of Form 61, 63 realm of the dead 61, 62, 71, 73 rebuilding of Ise Shrines 3–​7, 48, 116, 118, 122, 125–​6, 130, 138, 158, 191, 211, 213, 214, 215, 221, 222, 227, 229–​ 30, 232–​4 rebuilding of Ise Shrines in 2013 funding for 4, 5, 8 meanings and agents 6–7 pilgrims 4–​5, 6 political intrusions in 3–​5 preparations 3 public as visitors 5, 6 rituals 3–​5 sengū 2–​5, 4f sengyo 2–​5, 4f regalia 4, 67, 70, 72, 104, 181, 221, 250n. 40 see also jewel(s); sword(s) regular sengū (shikinen sengū 式年遷宮) 3, 83, 84, 106, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124, 252nn. 17, 24, 25 reiheishi 例幣使 131, 262n. 106 remote worship (yōhai 遥拝) 3, 169, 188, 192 Rengeji 蓮華寺 76, 80

Index see also Daijingū Hōrakuji ‘reserve priests’ (gonnegi 権禰宜) 59, 62, 64, 65, 77, 79, 104, 106–​7, 133, 135, 139, 168 Restoration Club (Isshin kō 一新講) 178–​9 restoration of Ise Shrines cadastral surveys 126–​8 funding for 124–​6 imposition of a new order by Oda Nobunaga 122–​4 power hierarchy 128–​9 Rishu makaen 理趣摩訶衍 92–​3, 93f, 95 ritsuryō 律令 funding system 56–​8 Ritsuryō state 9, 36–​7, 53 ritual/​rituals 20, 23–​4, 27, 28, 31–​2 for activation of jewels 67, 71 court 49–​53 Buddhist 32, 136 Ise 2–​5, 38, 39–​41, 42, 43–​9, 78 kanname 37, 42, 47, 48–​51, 97, 111, 117, 121, 131, 158, 164, 169, 197, 249n. 51, 262n. 19, 263n. 20, 263n. 21 kinensai 49, 169, 247n. 16 niiname 48–​51, 169, 249n. 52, 263n. 21 ‘river’ (onkawa shinji 御川神事) 112 shin no hashira (pivot post) 40, 47, 48, 49, 70, 72, 96, 150, 171, 214, 216, 248n. 31 in shrine temples 33, 42 tsukinami 37, 48–​51, 55, 111, 117, 121, 152, 246n. 64 see also food offerings; offerings to kami Rock-​Cave of Heaven (Ame no iwato 天 の岩戸) 20, 40, 45, 108–​9, 109f, 120, 140, 145, 195, 240, 249n. 46, 253n. 60 Ruijū jingi hongen 類聚神祇本源 91, 95–​7, 103, 131, 253n. 60, 254nn. 3, 65 ryō 両 151, 152, 156, 261n. 83 Ryō no gige 令義解 50 Ryōbu Shintō 両部神道 98 Ryōgū honzei rishu makaen 両宮本誓理趣 摩訶衍 see Rishu makaen Ryū 龍 139, 147–​8, 167 sacred dance (kagura 神楽) 1, 5, 57, 106, 119, 133, 135, 140, 146, 147–​8, 147f, 152, 155, 167, 177, 189, 240, 263n. 38

297

Sahā world 32, 61–​2, 96 Saidaiji 西大寺 77–​9, 92, 98, 107, 251n. 9 monks 77, 78, 93 temple 77, 78 Saigūryō 斎宮寮 (Office of the Abstinence Princess) 37, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59–​60, 63, 72, 81–​2, 119, 247n. 20, 249n. 14 Saijōsho 斎場所 118, 135 saiō see abstinence princesses (itsuki no miko or saiō) saisei itchi 祭政一致 168, 189 saishu 祭主 (‘head of rituals’) 58–​60, 62, 76, 80–​2, 84, 98, 102, 107, 113, 115, 116, 122, 125, 127, 129, 131, 138, 152, 160, 167–​8, 188, 213, 236, 251n. 3, 252n. 17, 255n. 41, 256n. 7 sakaki 榊 branch 44, 58, 165, 200–​1 Sakurai Katsunoshin 櫻井勝之進 viii, 27, 28, 224, 246n. 70, 248n. 39 Sangū Railway 173, 177, 179–​80, 203, 264n. 65 Sanwu liji 三五歴紀 (Historical records of the three sovereign divinities and the five gods) 87 sarugaku 散楽 106 Saruta-​hiko 猿田彦 24–​5, 26, 246n. 53 school curriculum, Ise in 195–​8, 202 secrets 62, 68, 70, 75, 76, 77, 79, 84, 85, 86, 91–​5, 96, 97, 99, 103, 104, 105, 118, 125, 145, 146, 159, 250n. 39, 253nn. 48,53, 262n. 109 Seison 成尊 71, 251n. 42 Senge Takatomi 千家尊福 176, 264n. 57 Sengū Pavilion (Sengūkan 遷宮館) 5, 6 sengū 遷宮 48, 60, 83, 131, 138, 143, 150, 155, 157, 158, 177, 183, 184 1585 125–​6 1609 128 1789 171 1869 188 1889 181, 187, 189 1929 187–​8 media coverage of 193–​5, 201 participants of 191–​3 progress of Sun Goddess (Amaterasu) 188–​91, 233, 233f 1953 211, 214–​16 1973 4, 211, 220–​2

298

Index

1993 4, 5, 6, 211, 227, 233, 234 2013 2–​5, 4f emperor’s participation in 3–​4 interim (karidono) 83, 98, 106, 121, 123, 252n. 17, 252n. 24, 252n. 25 Prime Minister’s participation in 3–​ 4, 4f, 6 rationale of 47 regular 83, 84, 106, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124, 252nn. 17, 24, 25 Sengūin 仙宮院 62, 66 sengyo 遷御 2–​5, 4f, 138, 189, 193–​4, 217, 221, 225 service households see kanbe (service households) service people (jinin 神人) 82 shamans, female 121, 135 shiki 式 37 see also Engi shiki; Jōgan shiki; Kōnin shiki shikinen 式年 (twenty-​year cycle) 3 shikinen sengū see regular sengū Shin Buddhists/​Buddhism 157, 174, 175, 200–​1 Shin’enkai 神苑会 (Sacred Garden Society) 164, 187, 188, 204–​5, 225, 229, 264n. 65, 267n. 73 Chōkokan museum 183–​4, 206, 208 fundraising campaign 181, 182–​3 Kuratayama plan 182–​4 modern pilgrims’ experience 183, 184–​5 Shin’enkai sōsetsu shushi 神苑会創設趣 旨 180 Ujiyamada 宇治山田 Town 182, 183, 184–​5 Shingon 真言 school 67, 68, 70–​1, 104, 135 Ono 小野 branch 68–​9, 77 Shinmei hisho 神名秘書 (Secret book of the names of the gods of the two Ise Shrines) 84–​8, 90, 91, 95 shin no mihashira 心の御柱 (pivot post) see pivot post Shinto 1, 8, 31, 32, 33, 73, 75–​6, 79, 95–​9, 105, 118, 122, 185 ‘deputy heads of Shinto’ (Shintō kanrei chōjō 神道管領長上) 135 Ise 79, 98, 133, 175–​6 lineage (shintō monpū 神道門風) 97, 105, 133

origin of 83–​9, 133–​4, 144 teaching 135–​6, 137, 138 see also Watarai Yukitada Shinto-​Buddhist Clarification Edicts (shinbutsu hanzenrei 神仏判然令) 166 Shinto Directive (Shintō shirei 神道指令) 211, 212, 214, 216–​19 Shinto 神都 (‘Divine Capital’) 8, 169, 184–​ 5, 188, 241 Shinto establishment 211, 212, 214–​16, 218–​22, 224–​5, 229–​32, 234, 239 Shintō gengihen 神道玄義篇 (On the profound meaning of Shinto) 97 Shinto meishōshi 神都名勝志 23f, 169, 185 Shintoization vii, 97, 133–​8 shirie 後家 (back house) 41, 44, 47 Shōden kan 正殿観 (Amaterashimasu nisho kōdaijin shōden kan 天照坐二所皇 大神正殿観) 69–​71, 85, 89 shōen 荘園 see garden estates, commended shogun(s) 72, 82, 112, 115, 116–​17, 120, 125, 159–​60 Ashikaga 107, 125, 237, 238 Kamakura 124, 238 Muromachi 114, 122, 124 pilgrimages of 106–​7, 131 Tokugawa 103, 127–​32, 152 shōgyō 聖教 (sacred teachings) 68, 78, 79, 83, 92, 94, 95, 99, 104, 105, 251n. 3 Shōken 勝賢 67–​9, 70–​1, 251n. 47 Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 27, 35, 246n. 68, 247n. 17 shōmonji 声聞師 118 Shōmu 聖武 (Emperor) 32, 34, 36, 66, 247n. 7 shoshin 諸神 (various deities) 20, 21 Shōtoku 称徳 (Empress) 34–​5 Shōwa period, Ise in the 187–​8 discourse in 1920s and 1930s 193–​8 pilgrims’ return to Ujiyamada 201–​3 promotion and publicity of 198–​201 war 207–​9 see also sengū, 1929; Ujiyamada Shōyūki 小右記 57, 249n. 1 shrine booths (massha 末社) 120, 129, 248n. 35, 256n. 53 Shrine Clauses (Jinja jōmoku 神社条目) 135, 136, 137, 138

Index shrine district offices (Shingun mandokoro 神郡政所) 82 ‘shrine duties’ (jin’yaku 神役) 82, 112 shrine keepers (miyamori 宮守) 120, 129, 240, 256n. 54 shrine lands 36, 42, 59, 68, 80–​4, 88, 113, 123–​6, 139, 176, 237, 255n. 31 see also garden estates ‘shrine-​roaming kami’ (miyameguri no kami 宮巡神) 42, 43 shrine temples (jingūji 神宮寺, jinganji 神 願寺) 27, 33–​6, 42, 136–​7, 251n. 7 see also Ōkasedera (Ise shrine temple) Shuetsu 守悦 121–​2 Shūkaku 守覚法親王 (prince-​abbot of Ninnaji 仁和寺 temple) 68–​71, 251n. 47 silk/​silk thread, association with Ise 3, 4, 18, 38–​9, 44, 49, 51, 64, 165, 215, 216, 221, 225, 243n. 5, 246n. 64 see also weaving Silla 新羅 11, 17, 21, 246n. 65 Silla–​Tang invasion 11–​12, 29 Southern Office (Dōgo mandokoro 道後政 所) 82, 113 Souyri, Pierre François 119 snakes 15, 17–​19, 28, 64, 99, 156 Special City Planning Law (Jingū kankei tokubetsu toshi keikaku hō 神宮関 係特別都市計画法) 206–​7 state Shinto 199, 211, 224, 243n. 10 stewards (jitō 地頭) 80–​1, 252n. 21 sugadachi no monoimi 菅裁物忌 45, 46, 47, 248n. 44 Suiko 推古 (Empress) 9, 12, 14, 243n. 1, 245n. 37 Suinin 垂仁 (Emperor) 9, 14, 19, 20, 220, 245n. 41 Sujin 崇神 (Emperor) 14, 15–​17, 19–​21, 25, 26, 29, 51, 52, 168, 184, 220 Sukate 酢香手 (Princess) 14, 15, 244n. 13 Sun Goddess (Amaterasu) see Amaterasu (Sun Goddess) Susanowo 素戔嗚 17–​18, 195–​6 sword(s) 4, 22, 25, 38, 39, 42, 47, 67, 104, 144, 159, 171, 209, 216, 221, 250n. 40

299

‘taboo’ (imi 忌) 33, 39, 61, 62, 75, 145, 202, 243n. 5 taima 大麻 see amulets (taima) Taira no Kiyomori 平清盛 63, 64 Taira 平 regime 63, 64, 65, 80 Taishō period, Ise in the 185, 187, 188, 195–​7, 201–​2 Taizan Fukun 泰山府君 61, 62, 89 Taizan Fukun sai 泰山府君祭 62, 63 Taka Shrine 多賀宮 43, 55, 61, 94 Takakurayama 高倉山 22, 23, 24, 108, 140, 155 Takami-​musubi 高皇産霊 11, 24, 26, 244n. 14, 253n. 46 Takatori Masao 高取正男 36, 224 Takechi 高市皇子 (Prince) 13, 21 Takechi Shrine 高市社 13 Taki 当耆皇女 (Princess) 27, 28 Taki 多気 14, 22–​4, 27–​8, 38, 55 Takihara Shrine 瀧原宮 27, 41, 43, 79, 80, 81, 248n. 33, 248n. 42, 257n. 15 Takimatsuri Shrine 瀧祭神 42, 45 Takuhata 栲幡皇女 (Princess) 14, 15, 17, 18, 28, 244n. 13, 244n. 26 tamagushi 玉串 gate 160, 165, 171 Tamura Enchō 田村圓澄 27, 243n. 3, 243n. 7, 244n. 13, 246n. 63, 248n. 28 Tanaka Takashi 田中卓 22, 243n. 3, 248n. 27 Tanaka Yoritsune 田中頼庸 168, 175, 176–​7, 198 Tanba 丹波 Province 43, 48, 89, 157 Tang 唐 ritual codes 20, 21 tatari 祟り see wrath (tatari) tato 田堵 (‘ricefield chiefs’) 59–​60 taxes 38, 47, 50, 56, 58–​9, 60, 80, 82, 108, 113–​14, 123, 128, 237, 246n. 64, 247n. 20, 255n. 31 see also yakubukumai tax teahouses (chaya 茶屋) 141–​3, 164, 173, 177, 179–​80, 181, 184, 187, 205, 258n. 14 see also Bizen’ya tea pourers (chakumi onna 茶汲女) 141, 142f murder of 142 performance see Ise ondo tedai 手代 139, 148

300

Index

temporary halls 48, 84, 117–​18, 119, 255n. 45 ‘temporary shelters’ (yashiro 屋代) 48 temples 27, 30, 32 see also shrine temples Temür (Emperor Chengzong 成宗) 76 Tenaka Toshikage 手中敏景 140, 143, 259n. 17 Tenchi reikaku hisho 天地霊覚秘書 (Secret book of the spirit-​enlightenment of Heaven and Earth) 86–​8, 252n. 38 Tenji 天智 (Emperor) 10–​13, 16, 19, 21, 28, 34, 36, 245n. 37, 245n. 40 tenjin chigi 天神地祇 (heavenly and earthly gods) 20, 21, 245n. 37 see also jingi cult Tenmu 天武 (Emperor) 9, 30, 31, 34, 48, 52 authoritative strategies 11, 12 brother of see Tenji (Emperor) Buddhist canons’ copying 11, 12, 77 court cult creation 20–​1, see also jingi cult daughter of see Ōku (Princess) dispatch of Ōku 11, 13–​15, 22, 28 enthronement of 11 illness by curse 25 initiation of Kojiki compilation 11, 20 Jinshin coup 10–​11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 21, 26, 28, 29, 244n. 9 Kudara no Ōdera 百済大寺 case during the reign of 36 protection by kami 13 sons’ deaths 13, 25, 26 victory of 13 visionary reforms by 11–​12 wife of see Jitō (Empress) and white pheasant 11, 12 worship of Amaterasu 11, 12, 13–​15, 18–​22, 29 tennō 天皇 (heavenly sovereign) 11 Tenshō Daijin giki 天照大神儀軌 (A ritual manual for [the worship of] Amaterasu) 61–​2, 68, 71, 89, 251n. 3 Tenshō Daijin kuketsu 天照太神口決 (Oral transmissions on Amaterasu) 93 Tenshō 13nen gosengū ki 天正十三年御遷 宮記 125, 256n. 13 thatched roofs 1, 2, 38, 39, 40

theft in shrines 39, 81, 94, 105, 120 timber 2, 39, 40, 48, 66, 83, 84, 124, 128, 150, 208, 214, 215, 217, 221, 256n. 2, 264n. 42 Tōdaiji 東大寺 32, 36, 64–​8, 76–​8, 107–​8, 184, 251n. 4 burning down of 64, 66 monks 66–​8, 76, 77, 97–​8 restoration of 66, 72 Tōkawa River 迹太川 11, 13 Tokaidōchū hizakurige 東海道中膝栗毛 (Shank’s mare) 142, 142f, 259n. 41 Tokugawa Iemitsu 徳川家光 129–​32, 257n. 15 Tokugawa Iemochi 徳川家茂 159–​60, 262n. 111 Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康 122, 124, 127, 129–​32, 135, 138, 238, 257nn. 24,25, 262n. 106 tokusei 徳政 (virtuous government) 81–​4, 88, 99, 112, 123, 252n. 20 Tokyo Prefectural Federal Education Committee 203 torii 鳥居 5, 6, 77, 116 Tōshōgū Shrine 東照宮 129, 131–​2, 262n. 106 Tōtōmi 遠江 60 Toyoda Shōichirō 豊田章一郎 5 Toyosuki-​iri-​bime 豊鋤入姫命 (Princess) 14, 15, 16, 19–​20, 25, 27–​8 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉 122, 124–​8, 135, 256n. 9, 257nn. 13,16 Toyouke 豊受 2, 145–​6, 167 Toyouke Kōtaijingū 豊受皇大神宮 145, 146 Toyuke Great Shrine 止由気大神宮 31, 37 see also Outer Shrine Toyuke 止由気 2, 29, 42, 43, 48, 89–​91, 94, 131, 132, 137, 145, 146, 232, 253n. 46 trains to Ise 180, 192, 201, 203–​4, 228, 240 see also Sangū Railway treasure halls (takaraden 宝殿) 38, 39, 92, 116, 117, 171, 256n. 10 treasures 4, 5, 38–​9, 64, 69–​70, 83, 92, 94, 96, 116–​17, 125, 132, 144, 150, 166, 171, 180, 184, 188, 194–​5, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 224, 250n. 40, 256n. 10

Index Tsubura 積良 estate 81–​2 Tsuchinushi 土主 45–​6 Tsūkai 通海 76, 79–​80, 85, 250n. 35, 251n. 2 tsukinami 月次 ritual 37, 48–​51, 55, 111, 117, 121, 152, 246n. 64 Tsukiyomi Shrine 月読宮 35, 41–​3 tsunagi-​sen 繋銭 128 uchibito 内人 (‘inner staff ’) 43–​6, 47, 169 Uda 宇多 11, 19 Uji 宇治 1, 102, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 132, 139–​40, 141, 144, 147, 161, 163 council 128–​9, 257n. 15 militants 115–​16 oshi 137, 178–​9, see also Uji Asōguchi temples 136–​8, 166–​7 see also Ujiyamada Uji Asōguchi 宇治麻生口 149–​51, 260n. 56 Uji Bridge 宇治橋 106, 109, 110f, 121, 180, 192, 193–​4, 196, 204, 206, 207, 215, 217, 227 Uji 菟道皇女 (Princess) 14, 15 Ujiyamada 宇治山田 173, 179 City 182, 183, 184–​5, 187–​8, 192 in early twentieth century 203–​7 as Grand Divine Capital 205–​7, 211, 225 National Railway Company 203–​4 pilgrims’ return to 201–​3 Town 182, 187 war in 208–​9 Unidachi 宇仁館 Inn 178–​9 Urata Nagatami 浦田長民 163, 166–​9, 173–​6, 180, 264nn. 44,53 Uratatarō Dayū Masasada 浦多太郎太夫 政定 106 Usa Hachiman 宇佐八幡 32, 34–​5, 38, 69, 78 ‘verses of purity’ (shōjō-​ge 清浄偈) 92, 95 ‘violent spirit’ of Amaterasu 21, 41 of Toyuke 43, 94 of Tsukiyomi 42 ‘virtuous power’ (toku 徳) 85, 90 warriors 101, 103–​4, 114, 119, 123, 125, 126, 128–​9, 134, 135, 137, 238, 239, 253n. 41

301

Chōshū 160 intrusion into shrine lands 80, 81, 82 Kantō 60, 63–​5, 71, 72, 237 Kitabatake 113 pilgrimage to Ise 106–​7 warlords 1, 103, 107, 113, 115, 119, 122, 123, 125, 134 Watarai 度会 lineage 45, 66, 77, 82, 98, 168, 236, 238, 255n. 31 priests 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 72, 77, 79, 101, 112, 237, 241, 248n. 42 shrine district 13, 14, 19, 27–​9, 38, 42 Watarai Ieyuki 度会家行 84, 91, 92, 94–​8, 102–​6, 131, 133, 254nn. 65, 66 see also Ruijū jingi hongen Watarai Shintō 度会神道 98 Watarai Tsuneyoshi 度会常良, 常昌 84, 92–​6, 98, 99, 105, 253n. 55 Watarai Yukitada 度会行忠 83–​90, 94, 95–​6, 98, 105, 108, 252nn. 29, 34, 38, 253nn. 40, 48 acquisition of new knowledge 85, 86, 88 dismissal of 84 on emergence of Heaven and Earth 85–​6 on Origin and Way 86–​8, 99 on origin of gods 85, 87 reinstation as Outer Shrine negi 84 rewriting of Shinmei hisho 85, 86, 88 texts on the origins of the Ise Shrines 90–​1 and Watarai secrets 92 writing of Shinmei hisho 84, 88 weaving 39, 51 halls 2, 17 maidens 15, 17–​18, 28, see also Takuhata (Princess) see also silk/​silk thread, association with Ise wish-​fulfilling jewels (nyoi hōju 如意宝珠) 67, 69, 70, 71–​2 Womb Realm mandala (taizōkai 胎蔵界) 70, 78, 86, 89, 94, 98 ‘worship from afar’ (yōhai 遥拝) 3, 79, 169, 188 wrath (tatari 祟り) 16, 33, 47, 244n. 18, 245n. 37

302

Index

Yahata-​hime 八幡姫 35 Yaketsu 野決 (Transmissions of the Ono branch [of Shingon]) 68–​9, 71 yakubukumai 役夫工米 tax 60, 72, 83, 117, 252n. 21 Yakushiji 薬師寺 (temple) 39, 184, 200 Yama see King Yama yamabushi 山伏 114, 115, 121, 134, 136, 258n. 37 Yamada 山田 1, 43, 101, 106, 119–​22, 127–​30, 136, 161, 163 aldermen 115, 139–​40, 146 as Buddhist-​free zone 166–​7 danna contracts 114, 115, 121, 137 development of town 111–​14 fundraisers for temple 121–​2, see also Keikōin oshi 147–​8, 167 riots in 1429 112–​13 temples 121, 166–​7 ‘three neighbourhoods’ (sanbō 三方) of 112, 114, 115 tokusei rioting in 112–​13t trade in 114–​15, 121, see also pilgrims war in 115–​16 see also Ujiyamada Yamada council (Yamada sanbō 山田三方) 114, 115, 117, 119, 121, 122, 128, 129, 257n. 15 Yamada ikkishū 山田一揆衆 (defence league) 102, 103, 104, 114 Yamada magistrate (Yōda bugyō 山田奉 行) 106, 128–​30, 136–​41, 146, 161, 258n. 37 yamaguchi-​sai 山口祭 46, 124 Yamato 大和 11–​12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24

Yamato-​hime no mikoto seiki 倭姫命世 記 (Record of the life of Yamato-​ hime) 89–​90, 246n. 53, 253n. 61, 257n. 27 Yamato-​hime no mikoto 倭姫命 (Princess) 14, 15, 16, 19, 24–​5, 28 Yamato Ōkunitama 日本大国魂 16, 19, 20, 244n. 21 Yamato Totohimomoso 倭迹迹日百襲 16, 17, 18 Yanagihara Mitsunaru 柳原光愛 160–​1 yashiro 屋代, 社 48 Yin-​Yang 26, 52, 62, 71, 85, 135, 237 Yōda 山田 see Yamada Yōfuku ki 陽復記 (Record of the winter solstice) 133, 134 yōhai 遥拝 (remote worship) 3, 79, 169, 188, 192 Yomiuri shinbun 読売新聞 172, 215, 217, 224, 225, 232, 234, 269n. 43 Yoshida Kanemi 吉田兼見 135 Yoshida Kanetomo 吉田兼倶 105, 118, 120, 122, 133, 135, 254n. 14, 257n. 29 Yoshino 吉野 11, 101–​2, 104, 107, 115, 116, 237 Yūryaku 雄略 (Emperor) 9, 14, 15, 42–​3, 245n. 27 Zen 禅 86, 87, 88, 252n. 38 Zenkōji 善光寺 149–​53 Zhuangzi 荘子 86–​7 zhushen 諸神 20, 21, 245n. 33 see shoshin 諸神 (various deities) Zō Ise nisho daijingū hōki hongi 造伊勢二 所大神宮宝基本記 104, 253n. 40