This chapter is intended to convey what simple cult places can sometimes still look like in Japan today. However, to what extent the (in some cases) rare examples selected here may also reflect conditions in protohistoric times is difficult to assess. First, a few sacred groves are illustrated and described, then the focus is on structures belonging to the category of kami no yorishiro, and finally simple boundary marks of a now very rare kind are discussed. As some of the groves and structures discussed belong to yashikigami worship, a brief overview of this cult is given by way of an introduction.
Yashikigami Worship
Yashikigami is a technical term used by Japanese scholars for a class of deities (kami, -gami) that are differently named in different places but have in common the fact that they are worshipped as the tutelary kami of a family’s yashiki or ‘estate’. The yashikigami cult is an aspect of Japanese folk religion which is characterised by a great variety of local forms. As Naoe Hiroji showed in an article (1963) and in a comprehensive study (1966), this cult is distributed over most parts of Japan, but its main features can be different in different places. The names of the worshipped deity, the ideas about the nature of this deity, the social structure of the worshipping group, the details of the ritual, the times of the festivals, the place of worship and of course the material objects regarded as temporary seats or dwellings of the deity may change from place to place. While this variety is confusing at first sight, it is also a valuable asset. It is probable that the present diversity is the result of various kinds of innovations which, in the course of history, have been introduced differently in different places. In a country like Japan, we may expect that some of the modern aspects of this cult still reflect its ancient forms, while others can be recognised as later innovations. Japanese folklore is still extremely rich in seemingly old and very old traditions that are kept alive in one place, although they have long been abandoned in most others. What reasons decided whether a custom was preserved in the old form in a specific case, whether it was changed or whether it was discontinued altogether is often impossible to say. However, a tendency towards preservation of the old and a readiness to accept the new have long coexisted and played their part in history, as is clear to everyone familiar with Japanese religious folklore.
Under such circumstances, Japanese ethnologists often profit from being able to establish their theories on fairly complete sets of possible ‘survivals’. Sometimes they can even illustrate all of the stages in a hypothetical developmental scheme through examples of customs that can still be seen in our time. Of course, the fact that such examples can be given does not prove the correctness of such a scheme, but it often increases its plausibility.
Naoe’s theory regarding the evolution of yashikigami worship is a good case in point. It traces the lines along which this kind of cult could have developed over the course of time, and the author is in a position to show convincingly that the main stations of this development correspond with traditions that are still alive and accessible for study in our time. Regarding the ancient form of yashikigami worship, Naoe argues that the ancestor was originally the founder of an estate who opened up the land and was worshipped after death as the yashikigami of the kinship group descended from him. The place of worship was a corner of the yard or a field, or a forest distant from the house, and the deity was believed to govern the entire life of the kinship group, including its agricultural work.
The deity was, moreover, believed to have a vengeful character; if not shown proper regard and respect it could make people ill and families decline, or do harm in some other way. Taken together, this would correspond to a sort of founder’s cult, but Naoe does not consider that the founder’s identity was conflated with that of a nature spirit, as has been suggested in this book.
Furthermore, Naoe thinks that the cult developed in two different directions. In some cases, the branch families later started to worship each their own yashikigami, so that each family in a village finally had its own place of worship and its own ritual. In other cases, however, the yashikigami of a particular family or the united yashikigami of several families came to be worshipped as the tutelary deity of a whole village. According to Naoe, ancient yashikigami worship would therefore have been one of the roots of village shrine Shinto, and thus of Shinto in general.
An example of a yashikigami grove is seen in figures 50–52. Exceptionally, the trees of this grove were growing on a U-shaped mound about 60 centimetres high and an outer ditch was about 70 centimetres deep. The shrine was a cone-shaped hut, as is usual for yashikigami shrines, 110 centimetres high and made of bamboo and miscanthus thatch. Inside, it contained three roundish stones, each placed in a small bed made of straw. According to a local informant, the place was originally in the garden of the Ogomori family, which had started worshipping its ancestor here around a thousand years ago. At the time we visited this place only branch families were still living in the area and taking care of the cult. Every year in December, ten family members were alternatively in charge of renewing the straw shrine and presenting offerings.
Sacred grove of a yashikigami. Kagoshima-ken, Minami-Kyūshū-shi, Chiran-chō, Nakafukura
Photos (50, 51) Gaudenz Domenig, 1969
Naoe was a follower of Yanagita Kunio’s view that ancestor worship was at the origin of Japanese religion. He mentioned cases from various parts of Japan where local informants said that the ancestor who had opened up or bought the land was worshipped as the tutelary deity of the ground under various names such as jigami, ji no kami, jinushisama, kōjin, iwaijin and so on. Naoe’s conclusion that “[i]n all these instances, an ancient ancestor or founder has been deified as yashiki-gami” (Naoe 1963: 208) is nonetheless doubtful, because these recent local beliefs and interpretations do not necessarily reflect ancient traditions.
The straw shrine of the deity that was worshipped in this grove
Author’s field sketch of the plan of this grove, which was partly surrounded by a mound and a ditch. The small arrow points to the straw shrine
Sasaki Masaru (1983) later also wrote a book on yashikigami worship but argued that there was a development from earth-related worship to ancestor worship. Similarly, Tokumaru Aki recently concluded from his research on mori no shinkō (‘grove beliefs’) in Yamaguchi Prefecture, that there is a strong tendency to worship the grove deity (morigami) as an agricultural deity and to combine with this belief notions such as water deity (suijin), corn spirit (kokurei), earth spirit (jirei) and the like (Tokumaru 2002: 42). A collection of articles edited by Tanigawa Kenichi (1995) deals with grove cults of various regions such as Wakasa, Nara and Hyōgo, Nishi Iwami, Futaoi shima, Tsushima, Ikinoshima, southern Kyushu and Tanegashima. The sacred groves (utaki) of Okinawa and the kami-mountains (kamiyama) of the Amami Islands are also famous among ethnographers. Apart from such regions where grove beliefs were still widely distributed in the last century and now continue to exist in many cases, there are also places where a sacred grove without a house-like shrine building can occasionally still be found.
As is argued in this book, there are good reasons to believe that sometimes the founders of territories were already worshipped after their death in pre-Taika times. Yet we cannot say to what extent this was the case. The cult of nature spirits appears to be older, but it has often come to be conflated with a founder’s cult. It is therefore quite likely that in the course of time the ancestor aspect often became so dominant that the nature spirit aspect was eventually forgotten. This could then lead to the situation where an ancestor was worshipped under the traditional name of a nature spirit like ji no kami or chinushi no kami (Yamazaki 2010).
While it is right to associate the foundation of a territorial cult with its founding ancestor, to identify that ancestor with the first deity worshipped at that place means to ignore that the founder had to start worshipping the nature spirits whose land he had opened up. In Shiiba mura of Miyazaki Prefecture, for example, the person who had opened up a new dry field (hatake) used to be buried in a corner of that field. Such a grave was called chinushisama (‘earth master’) and the field senzohatake (‘ancestor field’) (Noma 1970: 172). I assume that in this case chinushisama (or jinushisama) was originally the ‘land/earth spirit’ worshipped by the person who had opened up the field. But when that person died and was buried there, his identity came to be conflated with that of the land’s spirit-owner, so that eventually the ancestor (senzo) was worshipped in the corner of the field as chinushisama and the field came to be called senzohatake. Historically, however, the custom of burying the ancestor in a corner of the field may have come up much later than the custom to worship the land spirit there.
Yashikigami worship interests us here for two reasons. First, the characteristics of grove beliefs pointed out by scholars like Sasaki Masaru and Tokumaru Aki suggest that these cults are related to the territorial cults of pre-Taika times and, second, the place of worship of this type of deity is sometimes still a sacred grove that does not have a house-like building like ordinary Shinto shrine precincts.
A Sacred Grove on Hirado Island
On Hirado, the island close to the north-west corner of Kyushu, an old-style sacred grove was found on a hillside north of Hōki (figure 54). This grove protruded from a forest area into a patch of field land extending uphill and measured about ten by twenty metres when we first visited it in 1969. It was entered from the longer southern side, but usually a shimenawa was stretched across to forbid entrance (figure 53). Inside, there were three straw shrines called tobiyashiro, consisting of layers of kaya grass (miscanthus) heaped on top of a stone that is no longer visible.1 Two of these tobiyashiro, seen to the left when entering the grove, were marked off by a thin shimenawa stretched between trees all around. They were dedicated to Izanagi and Izanami, the mythical creators of the Japanese archipelago. They had been moved there from the precinct of the Sarutahiko Jinja, which was situated some 500 metres south on the coast.2 Also, a tiny cult place for ushigami (a cow protecting deity) at the south-eastern corner of the grove had been moved there secondarily from another place lower down the hillside. The only cult mark that had apparently always been in this sacred grove was the single tobiyashiro standing opposite the entrance to the grove (figure 75, bottom right). It had a small ring-shime hanging around its top and was dedicated to chi no kami, the ‘earth’ deity or guardian deity of the land, here also worshipped and feared as an aragamisama (‘wild deity’) who particularly dislikes women entering the grove.3
Entrance to the sacred grove of Hōki shown in figure 54. The vegetation on the ground shows that the grove is not usually entered, except at the time of the yearly festival
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, April 1969
The sacred grove of Hōki seen from the east. Nagasaki-ken, Hirado-shi, Hōki-chō
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, April 1969
The history of this local cult seems to go back to the early seventeenth century, but the type it represents is certainly much older. The Miwa Shrine of Himosashi, the community to which Hōki formerly belonged, keeps a document dated Kanei 5 (1628) and newly copied in Taishō 3 (1914), which says that the Sarutahiko Shrine of Hōki was founded in Kanei 2 (1625) and that a certain Sakamoto Zenbei was the chief petitioner (daiganshū) at its festivals. It was said that some years later the mighty Sakamoto family founded an exclave (tobichi) of the Sarutahiko Shrine adjacent to its fields. This was the sanctuary that is described here. It was locally called Sakamoto-san, but the Jinja Oaratamechō, the shrine register of Hirado dated Enkyō 2 (1745), mentions it under the name Sakamoto Daimōjin. A note says that it is situated in the countryside and celebrates its matsuri on the first day of the eleventh month (old calendar).4 The further history of the sanctuary is not clear, but it is known that the Sakamoto family later declined and sold the land to the Fukuda family, which has taken care of the sanctuary ever since.
According to the priest of the Miwa Shrine of Himosashi, who at the time of our first visit used to serve in the yearly festival, the ceremony used to take place in December at night, lasting about one hour and ending around midnight. In earlier times, one used to begin in the hour of the cow (one to three in the morning) and to continue until daybreak. There would only be four persons present, one member each of the Fukuda and Sakamoto families, the village chief of Hōki and the priest of the Miwa Shrine of Himosashi. While a fire (kagaribi) illuminated the grove, the priest would present offerings and read the prayers (norito), first in front of the two tobiyashiro at the side and then in front of the single main tobiyashiro which is dedicated to chi no kami. Traditional sayings associate the grove with strange occurrences. The fire burning in it at the yearly festival would make ships stop down on the sea, and the heat produced by the fire would not wither the leaves of the trees. It is also said that the deity formerly protected the village from pirates.5
The kaya grass used for periodically renewing the tobiyashiro before the annual festival was taken from a special kaya field that was reserved for this ritual on top of the mountain. The renewal was done according to the method of only adding a new layer of kaya without removing the old ones. As the inner layers gradually rotted away the form did not grow any more. Other types of tobiyashiro on the island were no longer renewed by the additive method and most of them had assumed the form of conical huts in which a stone served as a platform for a gohei or as a cult seat of the deity (figure 75).
To sum up, the main characteristic of this local cult is that the sanctuary was probably founded when a stretch of field land was opened up in the early seventeenth century. This field land may originally have been smaller and situated only on the hillside below the grove. The main deity worshipped was chi no kami, the deity of the land opened up. The two tobiyashiro in the separate enclosure were treated as subordinate shrines, although they were dedicated to the mythic creators of the Japanese archipelago.
Another noteworthy point about this grove is that the Sakamoto family had sold the land belonging to the grove to the Fukuda family, which continued to take care of the cult. The ownership of the land was still so strongly tied to the territorial cult that taking over the land meant to also take over the obligations of the cult dedicated to the land’s protective deity. Not to do so might cause the revenge (tatari) of the deity. The fear of tatari might therefore be the reason why the cult continues today. No great changes have occurred in this grove since we first visited it in 1969, except that the grove has become less dense due to typhoon damage. In October 2007, the tobiyashiro had suffered significantly from the weather.
The fact that the grove deity was once registered as Sakamoto Daimyōjin and was later called Sakamoto-san suggests that it was a case where the cult of the nature spirit (chi no kami) was associated and conflated with an ancestor cult. Another sacred grove related to the Miwa Shrine of Himosashi is situated on a small island called Oki no shima about three kilometres south of Hōki. When we visited it in 1994 a protected forest covered the whole island. Members of the Suenaga family we met on the site said that their ancestor, who arrived on Hirado together with members of the Miwa family six hundred and fifty years ago, is worshipped on this island “because he became a kami”.
The Garō Yama of Tanegashima
Tanegashima is an island to the south of Kyushu where one of these archaic cult traditions coexists with one of the most modern technological achievements, the Tanegashima Space Center, Japan’s largest rocket-launch complex. Shimono Toshimi, who has conducted field research about the garō or garō yama of this island since the 1950s, could locate no less than 175 such sacred groves, about two-thirds of which were in the southern half of the island (Shimono 1995b [1969]). One area where eighteen garō were still extant at that time of our visit is the Kukinaga plain about six kilometres west of the Space Centre. As usual, the garō were distributed at the foot of the hills surrounding the cultivated plain.
Shimono points out the following characteristics of the garō or garō yama of Tanegashima. They are forests or groves (mori) and often found by the side of paddy fields, dry fields (hatake) or an estate (yashiki). People say that when the place was cleared the spirits present on the land were displaced into the garō yama. Later, the person who had opened up the respective land was also worshipped, and then even later a gravestone was erected in the grove or nearby. The garō deity was originally the deity of one clan, but later it sometimes became an ujigami and a jinja deity. In the northern part of Tanegashima, a gravestone (sekitō) is often set up later for the spirit of the pioneer who owns a garō yama, while another side of the deity is separated off as a field deity and worshipped in a ta no kamiyama or ‘field deity grove’. The latter type of kami has best preserved the character of a chigami or chi no kami. Yet the tendency towards an agricultural deity is also strong in mid- and southern Tanegashima, where these groves are not called ta no kamiyama but garō yama. If one does something wrong, the garō deity suddenly becomes angry, and if one does not constantly worship the angry spirit, it comes out of the grove and wreaks havoc (Shimono 1995b: 503–504).6
Elsewhere, Shimono draws attention to the many sides of the garō deity. People say that this deity protects the water sources, serves as wind protection and is a ‘wild deity’, a ta no kami (‘field deity’), a hebi no kami (‘snake deity’), a chigami (‘earth deity’) and a yama no kami (‘mountain deity’). Shimono thinks, however, that the main aspect is that of yama no kami (1995a [1961]: 469). As Kokubu Naoichi has pointed out, these different sides of the kami concept probably developed rather late and from an archaic concept that has survived in the character of the garō as the original form of the folk belief (Kokubu 1995 [1958]: 462). While most garō groves are situated in the foot of hills at the edge of a plain, some are patches of forest in the rice fields.7
The garō grove illustrated in figures 55 and 56 is from an area called Hirayama about 4.5 kilometres north of the Space Centre. Situated where a hill extends into the fields of a narrow valley, it is the garō of thirteen families and also the village shrine (ujigami) of Mukai sato. When we visited the place in 2012, it had still a number of impressive old trees, but the cult place inside was marked by a miniature stone shrine (hokora) with an inscription saying that it was set up in Meiji 27 (1894). By the side of that hokora a big piece of coral and two or three small ones were seen, while the offerings consisted of libations in two cups and green leaves in two vases (figure 56).
The garō yama of Hirayama Mukai
Photo Mioko doi, 2012
Inside view of the sacred grove shown in figure 55
Photo Mioko doi, 2012
When Kokubu Naoichi visited this garō in 1957, the shintai in the hokora was a piece of coral resembling pumice stone and behind the hokora was still a large tabu tree with a hollow root, suggesting that this tree had marked the place of offering before the hokora was added (Kokubu 1995 [1958]: 459, 461). Since trees of different kinds still marked the temporary seat of the deity in other garō groves (Shimono 1995b: 487), this was a case showing what could happen when a small shrine was set up in front of a tree representing the cult mark of a sacred grove. The added shrine could, in time, take over the ritual function of the tree, which then could continue to contribute to the religious atmosphere of the grove or eventually disappear as in the case discussed. We can still get an impression of what such cult arrangements looked like when the tree alone was still the cult mark in the sacred grove belonging to the sacred rice fields of the Hōman Jinja in the southern part of the island. Here a large piece of coral was placed openly at the foot of the tree (figure 57).
The sacred grove called o-ta no mori belonging to the sacred rice fields of the Hōman Jinja. A garō yama that still only has an old sacred tree marking the cult place. Tanegashima, Minami Tanega-chō, Matsubara
Photo Mioko doi, 2010
The garō yama of Tanegashima is only one example of what has come to be called mori no shinkō (‘grove belief’) by Japanese scholars. Shimono (1995b) mentions as comparable cases the kamiyama of the Tokara islands, the moidon of Satsuma, the utaki of Okinawa, the kamiyama of Amami, the kojin no mori of the Chūgoku region and the niso no mori of Fukui ken.
The Sacred Forest of the Ōmiwa Shrine
Among the Shinto shrines already mentioned in Kojiki and Nihon shoki, the Ōmiwa Shrine in the south-east of the Nara basin is famous for its sacred grove, which covers much of Mt. Miwa (Miwayama). The main deity worshipped is still Ōmononushi (here called Ōmononushi Kushimikatama), the deity which Ōkuninushi had to worship on this mountain according to the land-making myth discussed in chapter 4. Numerous rocks in the sacred forest have been identified as iwakura (‘stone seats’) and are regarded as temporary seats of the deities worshipped. Three main groups situated at different levels on the western mountainside are distinguished. The group highest up is associated with Ōmononushi, the middle one with Ōanamuchi (Ōkuninushi) and the lowest one with Sukunabikona (Nakayama 1971: 62).
The whole precinct, including its mountain forest, was said to measure 350 hectares within a circumference of about sixteen kilometres, measured along the course of the boundaries as indicated on a map (Nakayama 1971: 45, 65).8 Comparing that map with a topographic map of the region, we notice that the precinct reached beyond the top of the mountain (466 metres above sea level) and about 800 metres down the eastern back side to the mountain pass that separates Miwayama from the higher Makimukuyama (566 metres) behind it. The southern boundary cuts across the southern side of the mountain without reaching down to the bottom of the valley.9 Between the numerous minor spurs of the mountain, about 60 concave parts are identified by names, most of them as tani (‘valleys’) (Nakayama 1971: 45). That they now carry names at the Ōmiwa Shrine does not fit with the old idea of a mountain as the dwelling space of deities; the names only serve the priests to identify different places of the forest. Nevertheless, it is interesting that they characterise the mountain as consisting of numerous small valleys. Even the so-called kinsokuchi or ‘forbidden land’ behind the fence with the threefold torii is called Ōmiyadani (‘Shrine valley’). It reaches halfway up the mountain and may be about 900 metres long and 250 metres wide at its broadest section (figure 58).10
Sketch of Miwayama seen from the west, indicating the forbidden zone behind the straight fence and the torii of the Ōmiwa Jinja
Source: Domenig 1997
The recent history of this ‘forbidden land’ of the Ōmiwa Shrine goes back to a dispute that arose among the priests in the seventeenth century because some of them took stones from Miwayama for making fences for other shrines. In 1665, this led to a lawsuit, which ended the following year with the decision to declare a part of the shrine’s mountain as ‘forbidden mountain’ (kinsoku yama). The area, provided with boundary marks, was then about 430 metres wide and more than 2 kilometres long, which means that it reached from the western foot of the mountain across the mountain top to the pass (tōge) in the east, which still forms the eastern boundary of the shrine’s precinct today. This part of the mountain was established as the ‘forbidden mountain’ (also called kinsokuzan) or ‘main shrine mountain’ (honshazan) of Miwayama or Miwa myōjin.11 A later document, dated 1810, says that this ‘forbidden mountain’ was a very important place that was worshipped as the goshintai of the deity (Nakayama 1971: 51), but it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the whole Miwayama precinct came to be called a shintaizan or ‘kami body mountain’ (Yamada 1993).12 It was apparently still later that other sacred mountains in Japan came to be regarded as shintaizan. The term is now properly understood in the sense of ‘a mountain where kami are dwelling’ (Miwayama bunka kenkyūkai 1997: 376), but unfortunately it appears to be more often misunderstood as meaning the material body of a kami, as if the mountain were the object of worship. The same misunderstanding has probably also led to associating the concept with the idea of regularly formed mountains such as Miwayama, which seen from the west displays a gentle conical form. Yet it was not the form of the mountain that accounted for declaring mountain land as the dwelling space of worshipped deities, nor was it normally the mountain as a whole that was considered sacred. Rather, the idea of the sacred mountain as a regularly formed body belonged to Buddhist imagery, and this influenced how Miwayama was represented in Buddhist mandalas.13
A tradition quoted in Ōgishō (compiled 1124–1144) says that Miwa no Myōjin, the deity or deities of Miwa, had no shrine, but that on the day of the festival one made three reed rings (chi no wa), placed them on rocks and worshipped (Nakayama 1971: 60). This tells that the absence of a wooden main hall (honden) had a long history at Miwa. Towards the end of the twentieth century there was still one natural stone of the kind that might formerly have been marked as an iwasaka in the forbidden zone behind the sacred fence. Its position was said to be about 200 metres behind the haiden or prayer hall. Close by are also traces of a small rectangular area which might perhaps have been a former cult place (Shirai 1991: 101–119).
On the other hand, it is clear that the present cult situation at Mt. Miwa has not survived from ancient times without changes. The cult has not been free of Buddhist influence in its long history. To the far right, behind the fence which separates the most sacred and strictly forbidden part (kinsokuchi) from the public area, there is still a small wooden storehouse. Before 1877, it formed a pair with another storehouse to the far left in which Buddhist sutras were kept. These treasure houses inside the kinsokuchi corresponded to some extent to the main building (honden) in other shrines (Nakayama 1971: 152; Harada 1980: 201–202).
Nonetheless, if we abstract from all the buildings except for the fence and the gate which separate the mountain from the land opened up, the Ōmiwa Shrine can still convey a good idea of what a sacred mountain forest may have been like in ancient times: a mountain, or rather a mountain side, in its natural wooded state with at least one tree or rock formation marked as a place where one would deposit offerings. A partial boundary to mark it off from the land below would probably belong to it too, but it did not necessarily have to be a wooden fence with a gate in it, although this might have already been a frequent sight in protohistoric times. That the gate was already a torii is doubtful.14
A shrine with a fence resembling that of the Ōmiwa Shrine, but simpler, was still in recent times the Asuka ni imasu Jinja to the south of Miwa. When I visited this shrine in 1981 it was no longer in its ancient location, but it still had a straight fence with a closed gate and behind it a flat ground on which four cult stones were lined up, each covered with a little two-sided roof.15
The question of how far ‘above’ the boundary of a territory the land used to be dedicated to kami in early times cannot be answered in a general way. The Ōmiwa Shrine is interesting as an example of an important shrine that displays the aspect of a straight fence that cuts off a sacred zone in a mountain as the dwelling space of deities, but we do not know whether this is a feature surviving from early times or one that was later introduced to revive a lost tradition. What we do know from archaeological investigations is that several rock formations on the western slope of Miwayama had been used in early times for depositing offerings (Nakayama 1971; Koike 1997). Perhaps the most reasonable assumption is, therefore, that in protohistoric times sacred mountain areas used to be vague in their extension and were usually not yet defined by artificial boundary signs. The natural features of a landscape, such as mountain tops and rivers, may already have been regarded as boundaries in many cases, as they were in later times, but, as pointed out in chapter 8, the most important thing was that people entering such areas behaved correctly and showed due respect to the kami that were supposed to own them and to be present there.
Thinking of protohistoric times, we must consider that the main sacred object at a cult place was often a tree or a stone that was marked as sacred or another simple cult sign prepared instead of this. It would seem natural in such cases to have the sanctuary or yashiro inside the kami land and close to the boundary, so that the ‘mountain entrance’ might have corresponded to what in later Shinto shrines was the torii at the entrance of a shrine precinct. In the case of Matachi’s yashiro (chapter 2), the cult mark was apparently the shii tree where the ‘divine snakes’ were still assembled when Maro had to build an irrigation pond. This was the situation when there was relatively flat land behind the ‘mountain entrance’, but the situation at historical shrines of the Shinto tradition is often different because the main hall (honden) can be so close to the foot of a slope that its ground is partly cut into the slope and secured by a retaining wall (figure 59). The forest usually extends forwards from there, so that the buildings stand in a clearing on flat land. The shrine’s forest behind the main hall is then situated on the slope of the mountain and is often visible in its extension because of the higher growth of its protected trees. Even if it is not strictly forbidden to enter the forest behind the main hall, visitors would usually remain in the front part of the forest where the buildings are erected in a clearing. A good example is the Matsushita Shrine of Ise.
The Matsushita Shrine and the Somin Sanctuary
The Matsushita Shrine (figures 59–64) is situated in the same river valley as the Inner Ise Shrine (Naikū) but about eight kilometres further downstream and close to the estuary of the old Isuzugawa. Its early history is not known, but it is likely that it had once been in some way related to the Ise Shrine. Ise sangū meisho zue, the illustrated guidebook for pilgrims visiting the Ise Shrines (dated 1797), includes a drawing of this shrine, which was then called Somin Shōrai no yashiro, after the cult place of Somin Shōrai at the western side of the precinct. The old drawing shows six small subsidiary shrines (massha) at different places of the precinct, each consisting of a bunch of twigs erected on a small heap of stones. Nowadays the shrine features no fewer than thirteen such arrangements. They are all made of evergreen sakaki twigs, locally called o-sakaki-san or sakaki-maki (‘sakaki bundles’). Some are set up to mark places for worshipping certain distant deities of other shrines (Kōtaijingū, Jinmu Tennō, Hachiman); some are placed in pairs to the right and left of the main shrine and the torii; one is dedicated to yama no kami and one to Somin Shōrai; and one is found under the main shrine, where now Susanoo no Mikoto is worshipped as the main deity (figure 61).
The Matsushita Shrine in its protected shrine forest extending from the two streets uphill (darker area). The main hall (honden) is built close to the foot of the hill. Ise-shi, Futami-chō, Matsushita Jinja. Model Mioko Doi
Plan of the Matsushita Jinja and plan of its public part (right). Ise shi, Futami-chō. (1) The main shrine or honden, raised on piles and enclosed by a fence; (2) The sanctuary dedicated to Somin Shōrai; (3) Haiden (prayer hall); (4) Okomori-dō (hall of confinement, used in a New Year’s ritual); (5) Store-room; (6) Well; (7) Shamusho (shrine office); (8) An old camphor tree (prefectural natural monument); (9), (10) and (11) torii. Author’s plans
Source: Domenig 1997: 94 (adapted)
The main hall of the Matsushita Shrine in its wooden fence. On the right there is a withered sakakimaki on a small stone platform
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 2004
The cult place of Somin Shōrai in November 1973. The sakakimaki alone was standing on its platform and the sacred place was not yet fenced off
Photo Gaudenz Domenig
The cult place of Somin Shōrai in March 1994. A little shrine had been erected close to it and the place was fenced off at the front
Photo Gaudenz Domenig
Changing positions of the sakakimaki dedicated to Somin Shōrai between 1994 and 2015
Author’s drawing
The cult place of Somin Shōrai (2 in figure 60) is situated close to the main entrance of the precinct (9 in figure 60) and its sakakimaki stands on a round stone platform. When it was freshly renewed at the end of 1972 it looked like the same sakakimaki seen in figure 32 (chapter 7), but on a later visit in autumn 1973 it looked rather miserable because it was almost eleven months old (figure 62). Nevertheless, it was impressive to see such a simple structure still marking the cult place of a deity. The illustration in Ise sangū meisho zue shows this site as it looked some two hundred and twenty-five years ago. The only differences were that two steps led up to the ground and that the sakakimaki was erected on a heap of stones instead of on a round platform.
The sakakimaki consist of evergreen sakaki boughs that are tied around a wooden stick. In the case of the main shrine only, a large stone is said to be half buried in the ground and the sakaki boughs are tied around it (Furukawa 1952). Not rooted in the ground, the sakaki soon wither and are therefore replaced annually with fresh ones before the New Year festival. Those under the raised floor of the main hall only receive a new layer of twigs around the old ones, so that the arrangement grows thicker over the years. When the shrine is rebuilt, which happens every twenty years, the old layers are removed and a single new one is added again. Formerly, the normal sakakimaki also used to grow thicker over the years (Furukawa 1952: 15). In 1994, only one year before the rebuilding of the shrine, I noticed that the old twigs had not all been removed before the new ones were added around them.
The arrangement at the cult place of Somin Shōrai has changed in an interesting way since I first saw it in 1972. On a visit in 1994, the ground was newly fenced off at the front and a small wooden shrine had been erected close behind the sakakimaki, which stood still on its platform (figures 63 and 64/2). This was still so in 2004, but a photograph on the internet, taken in 2011, shows only the small building on the platform, whereas the sakaki bundle had been moved to the lower ground in front of it (figure 64/3).16 When the shrine was rebuilt again in 2015, the sakakimaki dedicated to Somin Shōrai was again placed on the platform and the small shrine stood on higher piles right over it (figure 64/4).17 Although these changes took place in recent years, they are typical of a kind of embarrassment that people may already have felt in protohistoric Japan when treasure houses derived from granary architecture first came to be set up at cult places.
Cult Marks Replaced by Shrine Buildings
When a particular piece of treasure offered to the deity and kept in a granary (figure 65) came to be regarded as representing that deity, the granary assumed the function of a shrine, and where to place this shrine relative to the older open-air cult seat of the same deity became a problem. One of several possible solutions was to build the shrine on posts and place it over the cult mark.
A granary from the protohistoric Kofun period reconstructed in the Miyoshi Fudoki-no-oka Park. Hiroshima-ken, Miyoshi-shi
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1981
The famous example is the Ise Shrine where, since ancient times, the Naikū and Gekū each have a sacred cult mark under the raised floor of their main hall (here called shōden). This is the shin no mihashira (‘august heart pillar’) or imibashira (‘taboo post’), a post that has no structural function and originally used to be erected first when the shrine was rebuilt. According to Gochinza denki (twelfth century), in the middle age it was a post four sun (twelve centimetres) wide and five shaku (150 centimetres) long, tied up with five-coloured strings and decorated with layers of sakaki boughs (yae sakaki).18 A nineteenth-century source says that two-fifths of it were buried in the ground.19
In ancient times, the selection and felling of the tree for making the wooden post of this cult mark was already the subject of an elaborate ritual, as was its erection and decoration. If the oldest texts do not mention the decoration with sakaki boughs (Kōtaijingū gishikichō (804 CE); Engi shiki, book 5 (Bock 1970: 133–34)), then presumably this is because it was the most important part of the ritual. Some scholars have suggested that this taboo post may originally have been a form of the ancient himorogi and that the sakaki boughs, not the supporting wooden post, were the main sacred elements (Harada 1961b; Sakurai 1991: 48–52). What exactly the decorated taboo pillar of the two main shrines looked like originally is not known; even its present form is still a secret matter at the Ise Shrine.
As for the ancient himorogi, Nihon shoki records that Emperor Sujin had Amaterasu brought out of the palace and moved to Mt. Miwa (chapter 4, figure 24), where a himorogi was established for her at the village of Kasanui, something that, according to the Chinese characters, would be a ‘kami-hedge’ and has therefore often been interpreted as a ‘sacred enclosure’ (Aston I: 152). But the meaning of himorogi is unclear. In Shinto, it has come to designate a small sakaki branch or sakaki tree used as the temporary seat of a deity invoked in a ritual (a kind of yorishiro, see figure 76). However, if in ancient times a himorogi had been a simple tree or tree branch set up for a ceremony, it would be hard to understand why the ancient scribes did not write the word with a different Chinese character. By choosing one that meant ‘hedge’, they probably intended to indicate that a himorogi consisted of more than only one green bough. Harada Toshiaki has therefore suggested that a bundle of sakaki branches, such as that traditionally still erected in the precinct of the Matsushita Jinja, might better correspond to the himorogi referred to in Nihon shoki (Harada 1961a; 1961b). A variant in Nihon shoki (9.2) says that Takamimusubi set up a himorogi and ordered to carry it down to earth to used it in worship (Aston I: 81–82; NKBT 67: 152), which also suggests that a himorogi was not an enclosure but rather something small like a sakakimaki.
The sakaki tree (cleyera japonica) is particularly associated with the imperial house and Shinto, but in early times the name might have been used for various plants used in rituals. In the myth of Amaterasu’s concealment in the heavenly rock cave, the god Futotama no Mikoto holds up an uprooted sakaki to whose upper, middle and lower branches are attached magatama beads, a large mirror and white and blue cloth, respectively. In Kojiki, this decorated sakaki is called a mitegura, a kind of offering (Philippi: 83–85; NKBT 1: 81). When later in the mythic narrative Ninigi no Mikoto is to descend from heaven and Amaterasu entrusts him with the beads and the mirror, she identifies the beads and the mirror as those ‘which had lured’, referring back to the episode where they decorated the uprooted sakaki held up by Futotama no Mikoto (Philippi: 139–40; NKBT 1: 127, 127n15).
These treasures (perhaps together with the sakaki) were therefore meant to have served as items that could lure the spirit of Amaterasu out of hiding. Today, we could call them kami no yorishiro or yorishiro, using the technical term that has become common for an object that a deity is supposed to ‘approach’ (yori-tsuku) when being invoked in ritual.
Yorishiro and Ogishiro
The term yorishiro is so often used by students of Japanese religion that it is important to note that it was coined and introduced by Orikuchi Shinobu together with the term ogishiro. The context was an article that dealt with a special kind of basket called higeko that was fixed to the top of a pole at festivals (Orikuchi 1915/16). The basket had its name because its ribs, closing in above, crossed one another at the top, their upward projecting ends forming a hige (literally, ‘beard’). Orikuchi interpreted this basket as an object symbolising the sun and the hige as its most important part representing the sun’s corona. Referring in this context to the myth of Amaterasu’s concealment in the heavenly rock cave where the mirror was used to lure the deity out, he coined the word ogishiro for something by which a kami can be ‘enticed (to approach)’, whereas the object to which a kami ‘approaches’ he called yorishiro. Numerous other things that are also used to function in this way he likewise classified as ogishiro or yorishiro, depending on the perspective taken.
Although it was Orikuchi who introduced the term yorishiro into the vocabulary of Japanese religious studies, the term later came to be used in a wider sense following the view of Yanagita Kunio, according to which not only the top of a thing but the whole thing would be approached and possessed by a kami (Tokieda 2015). Referring to the illustration included in Orikuchi’s article (figure 66; cf. figure 67), we can say, therefore, that Orikuchi would regard the dashi at the top as the yorishiro or ogishiro, whereas according to Yanagita and the now normal understanding, the structure as a whole (dashi, hoko and yama) would be possessed by the spirit of the deity in worship.
Illustration from Orikuchi 1915–1916 (adapted, with words written in roman letters). Each of the three words yama (‘mountain’), hoko (‘halberd’) and dashi (‘out …’) can also designate a festive float as a whole
A structure called hashiramatsu (‘pillar-pine’), two samples of which were used in a divining ritual. Nagano-ken, Iiyama-shi, Kosuge
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1971
Orikuchi’s basic idea was that a sign (mejirushi) was needed to show the deity where to approach so it could be addressed in a ritual, and that this sign was also an ogishiro by which one could actively entice the deity to approach. Orikuchi assumed that land spirits (chi no kami or chijin) were probably first thought to be attracted by small plants like reeds or sakaki branches erected on the ground, but he did not consider that they were thought to approach these elements horizontally. Noting that ogishiro for land deities later also came to be attached to the top of a tree or pole, he interpreted this to mean that for the people of ancient times, kami communicating by way of the air must have come from the sky and therefore also had characteristics of a sun deity to some extent (Orikuchi 1915/16; Tokieda 2015: 18).
Seeing, therefore, that Orikuchi understood the concept of yorishiro as related to the idea of a deity’s descent from heaven, Sasō Mamoru has recently argued that the concept is inadequate to explain the sacred rock formations of Okinoshima because the deities of the Munakata Shrine, to which Okinoshima belongs, are deities whose spirits reside “in the natural environments and its working” (2012: 71). However, there is no reason why the concepts of yorishiro and ogishiro could not also be applied in a wider sense and in relation to deities that were thought to approach horizontally, as when coming from a nearby mountain.
Japanese ethnography knows of countless things that are made, set up and used as yorishiro of a kami in religious festivals (figures 67–71).20 The examples shown in figures 68 and 69 are variations of a potentially very old type that was generally called ohake and used in villages where there still existed a cult group (miyaza) headed by a tōya priest descended from an old family (Harada 1980: 211–75). As the ohake was newly made every year, its proportions could change over time, but the comparison of forms suggests that some may be older than others. It is known, for example, that the proportion between the conical lower part containing offerings and the free upper parts of the marushime shown in figure 68 was rather balanced in the past and similar to that of the presumably older type seen in figure 49 (chapter 8), which is from another village in the same area. There, the completed form was placed in an alcove (tokonoma) and its upper part was hidden behind a screen.21 These marushime are considered highly sacred; the type from Tategami was said to be an image of the deity.
Two marushime set up in the back of the Ukehi Shrine on the third day of the New Year. Mie-ken, Shima-shi, Agō-chō, Tategami. Compare figure 49 (chapter 8), which shows another type of marushime
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1972.
A type of ohake (here called hakke) in the form of a conical hut (left) with a higher central bamboo pole that carried a white gohei at its top (right). Tōban festival of the Yoshikawa Hachimangū. Okayama-ken, Kako-gun, Kibichūo-chō
Photos Gaudenz Domenig, 1970
The type of ohake shown in figure 69 is from another part of Japan and represents a further change in the sense that the lower part with the offerings was emphasised, while the upper part was replaced by parallel elements arranged around a central bamboo pole that rose high up into the air and carried a white gohei at its top (figure 69a). The pole corresponded to the hoko in Orikuchi’s schema (figure 66), while the hut and gohei represented the yama and dashi, respectively.
Whereas these forms are variations based on the prototype of a conical structure made with elements that cross one another, another type of yorishiro takes the basic form of an offering-stand with a rectangular platform and is characterised by parallel legs that rise higher than the platform and carry leafage at the top (figure 70). Based on their appearance from the side we can distinguish the two prototypes as X-type and H-type. As I have shown in a study of offering stands that were used by ethnic groups of Indonesia, the H-type can be understood as a transformation of the X-type, which is easier to construct (Domenig 2014: 139–82). In Japan, the H-type is sometimes also used as a simple altar for the Buddhist bon festival (o-bon) where it can serve as a yorishiro for a family’s ancestral spirits.
Altar with parallel legs on the dam of a small irrigation pond. It measured 115 centimetres up to the platform and a wish for good luck was written on the white streamer attached to the leafy top. Nagasakiken, Hirado-shi
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1994
The great range of constructive, formal and decorative variations in the making of both the X-type and H-type yorishiro cannot be illustrated here. The two last examples (figure 71) show more elaborate structures that used to be finally burnt at the fire festival (hi-matsuri) of a shrine (Shinoda Jinja 1966; Egenter 1982).
Decorative torches (kazari taimatsu) used at the fire festival of the Shinoda Shrine. Shiga-ken, Ōmihachiman-shi, Shinoda
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1969
The Shimenawa and the Straw Snake
Apart from man-made yorishiro, we also still find single sacred trees that served as cult marks in sacred groves related to mori no shinkō or ‘grove beliefs’ (figure 57). Many scholars assume that such single natural trees were the original kind of yorishiro where a kami used to be invoked in rituals. Historically, however, such trees were usually marked with something artificial, most often with a shimenawa, a rope made of straw that is distinguished from normal ropes by having tassels and white paper cuttings (shide) hanging down (figures 72 and 73).
A shimenawa with paper shide and tassels hung around the foot of the cult tree in a sacred grove that was dedicated to a snake deity. Yamaguchi-ken, Shūhō-chō, Yowara
Photo Mioko doi, 2007
Offering-sticks (gohei) set up in front of a shimenawa forbidding access to a straw snake hanging in the lowest branches of a tree. Shimane-ken, Matsue-shi, Mihonoseki-chō, Kitaura
Photo Mioko doi, 2007
The shimenawa has its name because it was apparently understood as a ‘claiming sign’ (shime) that marks a thing or site as claimed for a kami cult. Often the shimenawa is therefore also tied across the entrance to a cult place (figure 45, chapter 8). When it is hung around the stem of a tree, the tree is usually considered sacred but does not carry a special ogishiro on its top.
In the ancient texts, the shimenawa appears in the myth of Amaterasu’s concealment in the rock cave. When Amaterasu is pulled out of the cave a rope is hung behind her to prevent her from going back in again. In Kojiki, this rope is called a shirikumenawa (a back-twist rope), whereas Nihon shoki writes this name with ideographs meaning ‘a rope with shiri (back-end/s) coming out’. This corresponds to the traditional form of a shimenawa that is made by letting the ends of the lengths of twisted straw stick out to form a sort of decorative tassel. Significantly, when the shimenawa is replaced by a straw snake, it may be the snake image rather than the tree that is felt to be sacred.22 In our key story discussed in chapter 2, it was not a tree that was in the way of the building project, it was the assembly of old ‘snakes’ that could not be removed without due ceremony. The tree was only the support or seat of the sacred snakes, as it were; the ancient text does not say that it was cut down and removed as well.
Seeing that the shimenawa is, in parts of Japan, sometimes replaced by a straw snake, and that both are then usually seen close to the ground (figures 72 and 73), it seems possible that both were once thought to also function as ogishiro attracting deities that were expected to approach a cult place horizontally when offerings were presented.23 In the case of the straw snake, the relation to the ground is obvious, whereas the shimenawa expresses it with its tassels, which point down to the ground, in contrast to the usually upwards-opening top of a yorishiro.
This interpretation could also be considered with regard to large stones or rocks that served as iwaza (‘rock seat’) and yorishiro in early times. Whether and how such rocks were additionally marked with perishable materials we cannot know for sure, but it is not unlikely that shimenawa and snake images were used for this long before the Taika Reform.24 As noted earlier in connection with the sacred forest of the Ōmiwa Shrine (Nakayama 1971: 73–81), rocks in their natural situation in areas dedicated to deities were often regarded as places where offerings could be deposited. This is thought to explain why archaeologists have sometimes found treasures in the shade of such rocks or nearby, as for instance also on the island Okinoshima in Fukuoka Prefecture (Sasō 2012).
Harada Toshiaki has sketched an interesting theory about the ways in which the countless types of artificial yorishiro known to Japanese ethnography might have been developed from the ancient himorogi. Assuming that the himorogi was a bundle of twigs set up on a sacred base made of stones (iwasaka), he considers that two basic changes could occur over the course of time. On the one hand, as the bundle of twigs would wither and occasionally fall off, the remaining stick or post might come to be regarded as the sacred object or yorishiro. As such, single sticks or twigs could come to serve as yorishiro and be further developed in many different ways. If, on the other hand, the organic twigs were tied around an upright stone, then this stone could eventually come to be seen as the yorishiro when the twigs had withered and fallen off. A further possible change was that the twigs could come to be regarded as a cover hiding a sacred object inside. This could have led to developing the cover into a simple hut (kariya) which had to be rebuilt annually as long as it consisted of perishable materials (Harada 1961b).
On Hirado island, I studied a tradition where a cult mark called tobiyashiro underwent various developments of the kind described by Harada. A sacred grove with three tobiyashiro of a special kind I discussed already earlier in this chapter. In principle, a tobiyashiro consists of a stone and a tobi in the form of a bunch of straw that is tied together at one end. The tobi is either placed on an upright stone that supports it or it is erected as a sort of hut over a stone while being supported by a conical bamboo frame. According to Inoguchi Shōji, who visited Hirado in 1952, the simplest type of a tobiyashiro was then still frequently used. When someone got fox-possessed one would immediately make a tobiyashiro and worship Inarisama, the ‘fox deity’ (Minzokugaku Kenkyūsho 1958: 134).
Such simple shrines also used to be set up in the farmers’ estates (as yashikigami), but later some of them came to be assembled in the precincts of village shrines. In one such case, there were five tobiyashiro in the form of conical straw huts standing side by side when we first visited the place in 1969 (figure 75, top right). It is therefore not unlikely that in the case of figure 74, too, all five deities were originally worshipped with a tobiyashiro. However, when we first visited the place only one of the five cult marks was still a tobiyashiro, and its tobi had been blown off by the wind and was lying behind the stone that had supported it. On the last visit, in October 2007, the harvest festival had just been celebrated and the newly made tobi was still fresh, as seen in figure 74. It was supported by the same slender stone I had sketched nearly forty years earlier. If we could assume that, here too, there were originally five tobiyashiro, then the situation shown in the photograph could be interpreted as the result of a kind of diachronic change that may have happened at many simple cult places since ancient times. Eventually, the perishable part (in this case the tobi) was no longer added in some cases and the remaining stones were marked with a shimenawa instead, or they were kept in small house-shaped shrines (hokora).
A tobiyashiro in the precinct of the Chinjū Jinja of Funagi, together with two stones marked as sacred and two stone shrines (hokora)
Photo Mioko doi, 2007
Tobiyashiro from five different places of Hirado Island, Kyushu. The largest type was seen in the sacred grove of Hōki, shown in figure 53. Drawings by Mioko Doi
Source: Domenig 1976 (adapted)
Comparing the tobiyashiro in different villages of Hirado and considering the local traditions about these shrines, it was possible to understand in which way the presumably original type was changed to eventually take the form of conical huts in one of these villages (Domenig 1976). Comparing the simple tobiyashiro of Hirado with similar straw shrines (waramiya) set up and annually renewed in other parts of the country, we noticed that in southern Kyushu the straw huts had come to be built more carefully, whereas in parts of north-eastern Japan there was no stone inside and the straw was usually put around a stick of bamboo or wood that only served as a support for the straw (Domenig 1992b: 108–112). Naoe Hiroshi has therefore theorised that the prototype for this kind of simple shrines was a sheaf of newly harvested rice that was erected as a yorishiro to indicate the place where the deity should descend and stay at the time of a festival. Later, this sheaf would have come to be reinterpreted as a kariya, a temporary shrine of a deity, and only the roof would be periodically rethatched with new straw. At this stage, often a mirror, a gohei or a round stone would be kept in the straw shrine as a shintai representing the temporary seat of the deity (Naoe 1966: 302).
Another possibility in interpreting these traditions is to assume that the straw shrines were developed from claiming signs such as those described at the end of this chapter, and that the lack of a crowning top expressed the low status of such private shrines. This interpretation is suggested by the observation that several names of simple straw shrines are identical with, or closely related to, the names of traditional claiming signs (Domenig 1976: 20–23).
In the case of the tobiyashiro of Hirado, the relation to a claiming sign is also suggested by the use of the tobi as a cover that was put on rice stacks left in the field. On the island of Takushima, which belongs to Hirado-shi, this was called waratobe. In other parts of Kyushu, it was called to’wara (‘tobi straw’), or the rice stack as a whole was called tobe, tōbe, tobee, etc. Since the tobi placed on a rice stack is usually too small to function as rain protection, folklore scholars have interpreted it as a former claiming sign (senyūhyō) (SNMG 4: 1754, s.v. waratobe). Its message was that the stacked rice plants must not be taken away by others. In a part of Niigata Prefecture, the word tobisa was indeed still the name of a claiming sign that was made by binding the top of a piece of straw or miscanthus grass. A tobisa was stuck into a heap of harvested rice plants or leaves, or on an embankment to prevent others from cutting grass there. It was also set up where one did not want others to pass through (SNMG 3: 1057, s.v. tobisa).
Comparing such customs with others where the cult mark was only a stone with a shimenawa hung round it, it is conceivable that the stone originally only served to support a cover made of perishable grass or straw.
Claiming Signs Made by Binding or Knotting Growing Plants
The technical term senyūhyō is a Sino-Japanese compound meaning ‘occupation sign’. The element sen (Sino-Jap.) corresponds to Old Japanese shime, as it appears in about 30 poems of the ancient anthology Man’yōshū:
While this poem (no. 4197) uses the verbal form OJ shimu (‘to claim’), other poems use the expression shime yū (‘to bind a shime’), where yū (OJ yufu) could mean ‘to make by binding’, as when it was used for making a fence or a simple hut. Its use for making a sign (shime) by using grass meant that such signs were made by knotting or tying grasses. Most of these shime poems are metaphorical love poems that speak of binding a shime in a field whose grasses or other plants are likened to the person whose love one hopes to gain.
Binding or knotting grasses or twigs was also represented in Man’yōshū by the expressions kusa (o) musubu (‘grass knotting’) and matsu musubu (‘pine[-twig] knotting’). Notably the verbal form kusa o musubu and the noun kusamusubi also occasionally appear in later literature. To give an example, Yōtenki, a text dated 1223, mentions grass knotting in the foundation story of the Hiyoshi Shrine near Ōtsu in the year 668. It tells that the deity of that shrine originally appeared as Miwa Myōjin (the deity of Mt. Miwa) at the time of Emperor Kinmei (r. 539–571) and first ‘descended from Heaven’ in the time of Emperor Tenchi (r. [662]–671).
In the time of emperor Tenchi, the deity came to this place, first went to Karasaki, the dwelling place of Kotonomitachi Ushimaro, and instructed Ushimaro, saying: “You must become my clan member and take care of the shrine. As for my treasure hall (hōden), you must divine a good site to the north-west from here. Indicate this by means of places with knotted grass, build the hōden and decide the rituals.” Therefore Ushimaro, following the oracle, went north-east, and when he looked for a place, there was a place with nire trees. So, he marked that place and revered it as the place where to build the hōden. This became the hōden of today’s Ōmiya. (*Yōtenki, quoted by Maeda 2006: 13)25
Another shrine-founding story mentioning grass binding is found in Ezo no teburi, a travelogue by Sugae Masumi, under the date of 25 May 1791. In summary it goes as follows. A long time ago a great boat almost overturned on the sea and the captain prayed to heaven, saying that if this is caused by the anger of the sea god, then he will pacify (worship) that deity. He clapped his hands above the waves, weeping with the head turned down, whereupon a big wani (a mythical sea animal) appeared in the waves and the sea calmed down. When the shipmates arrived at the coast, “they first made a so-called orikake [a sort of offering] and knotted grass, worshipping the deity with only a sign; later a shrine (yashiro) for the sea deity Sogō myōjin was erected”.26
These are examples indicating that simple signs made by knotting or tying grass were sometimes still used to mark the site where a shrine should be built. The kusamusubi was, in such cases, only a claiming sign, although it could be combined with the presentation of a small offering. Thinking in terms of our model of the two-part founding ritual, the shrine would be built later at some distance from that sign. Moreover, it could be dedicated to a higher deity. Miwa Myōjin, in the story from Yōtenki, was a deity of Mt. Miwa in Yamato; and Sogō Myōjin, mentioned by Sugae Masumi, was a sea deity. Both were invited from somewhere else to the place where a new shrine was to be built for them. The kami worshipped with a simple kusamusubi, however, were in all likelihood not these invited gods but the autochthonous local spirits. To understand such stories correctly, we must not forget about these spirits.
A similar case is when Ihara Saikaku, in a text dated 1688, uses kusamusubi in the sense of kusawake, meaning the founding or founder of a village (KGJ, s.v. kusamusubi, kusawake). These terms invoke the image of a village founder striding through the wilderness in search of land, ‘pushing aside the grass’ (kusawake), but eventually ‘knotting grasses’ (kusamusubi) to mark a claim for founding a village. The kusamusubi could serve as an archaic kind of claiming mark, but the cult seat of the deity would later be prepared in the form of a yorishiro or a wooden hall built for the deity. Understanding, therefore, that grass growing on a site could be used to make a temporary sign for claiming the site of a shrine to be built, we can more easily accept the idea that such simple signs could have been prototypes in the history of minor shrines such as the tobiyashiro of Hirado and other straw shrines used in yashikigami worship.
Pacifying the Site
The custom of starting to build a house or shrine by first worshipping at a temporary sign is of course well known in the usual forms of the jichinsai or tokoshizume no matsuri (literally, ‘land-pacifying ritual’). The original meaning was probably to worship the local land spirits, but the ritual has changed in the course of history to a pacifying of the ground and is now sometimes no longer considered a true religious rite. The online Encyclopedia of Shinto treats such rites under ‘Ritual of Daily Life’ and explains them as “ground purification rites performed to pray that the project proceeds safely and smoothly and to pray that no structural problem arises after its completion”.27
Historically, however, the jichinsai corresponds to the miyadokoro shizume (‘pacifying the site of the shrine’), a rite which at the imperial shrine complex in Ise used to be combined with the erection of a cult mark in the form of the sacred centre pillar or taboo pillar (shin no mihashira or imibashira) (Sakurai 1969: 183). Later in history, the two parts of the ritual came to be separated. The first part was called chinchisai at the Ise Shrine (corresponding to the normal jichinsai) and was performed at the beginning of the shrine’s construction; the second part, the installation of the taboo pillar, was done at the end of the long construction period more than five years later (Sakurai 1973: 168–77, 237, 267–68). The chinchisai was a sort of purification of the ground that was done when levelling the building site, whereas the installation of the cult mark in the form of the imibashira became a highly sacred and esoteric matter.
At the Outer Shrine, the relation to the guardian deities of the land also found expression in the fact that until the beginning of the Meiji period the first fruits from the sacred rice fields used to be annually presented at the imibashira under the raised floor of the main hall (Sakurai 1969: 72–73). The lower-ranked shrines of the Ise Shrine complex likewise sometimes used to have offerings presented under their raised floor, but where I have seen traces of such offerings, they were deposited inside a rectangular enclosure consisting of sakaki branches and there was nothing comparable to the imibashira of the two main shrines.28
Compared with the imibashira of the Ise Shrines, the sign of knotted grass in the story told by Sugae Masumi was only a temporary claiming mark that was probably left standing to naturally wither away when the shrine was later built. The modern jichinsai is usually also a onetime affair: it takes place before construction begins and the sakaki branch, usually erected on a small portable altar, is removed with the altar as soon as the ceremony is over. If the sakaki is sometimes erected on the ground, however, it can be left standing until construction begins (figures 76, 77).
A Shintō priest worshipping in front of a modern himorogi at a jichinsai celebrated on a building site. Kyoto-fu, Kameoka-shi
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1973
The same himorogi, consisting of a sakaki tree tied to a wooden post and left standing on the site until construction time
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1973
Ancient Land-Claiming and the Rural Gathering Economy
As I have argued in this book, when it was still possible to freely claim land for agriculture in early Japan one used to first address the local spirits, searching for their agreement through some form of divining. Then one would place a claiming sign; and returning later, one would expel the spirit-owners of the land and start to worship them collectively as the local guardian deity. If we now think of the custom of making claiming signs with the intention to only gather mushrooms or other goods, this was a temporary affair and as such did not require the founding of a permanent cult. Nonetheless, it would seem possible that in that case, too, one used to address the spirit-owners of the land when making claiming signs. Returning later to gather the products and seeing that the knotted signs have come apart, one might take this for a bad omen and desist from carrying the products home. Were the signs found intact, however, one could regard this as a good sign and gather the products, leaving perhaps a small offering behind. To others passing by such signs freshly made and still intact could have indicated that to ignore them might invoke supernatural punishment.
This is of course hypothetical as long as we have no trustworthy sources about how the gathering of products was done in ancient times. What the sources do tell us is that the rural gathering economy of present Japan goes back to ancient times.
Although forbidding private ownership of land for rice cultivation, the ancient laws explicitly stated that other kinds of land should be used by ‘public and private in common’. Already In the year before the proclamation of the Taika Reform edict, the governors of the eastern provinces were ordered “to use gardens and ponds and water and land together with the farmers” (Nihon shoki, NKBT 68: 273; Aston II: 200). In principle, this phrase meant the zones that were not, or not yet, developed for rice cultivation, including areas where farmers used to collect things such as timber, fuel, grass, stones and other products of the soil, catch fish and hunt animals, and where even sweet potatoes and other things could be planted and harvested in the practice of archaic crop farming.
The law allowing the use of these zones by the public and private in common was not always followed, however, and the validity of this principle had to be stated repeatedly. Whereas an edict of the year 711 still banned the habit of disregarding that law, Ryō no Gige, a commentary on the laws dated 833, says that the forbidden zones should not be too numerous, because the use of mountains and rivers, bush and moor, was in principle allowed to everyone.
This change in attitude occurred with the gradual reintroduction of the private ownership of land during the eighth century, which is symptomatic of the general failure of the ritsuryō system. It is noteworthy, however, that despite a resignation to the fact of private forests, the principle of general use of non-rice growing zones remained valid, although exceptions were tolerated. According to medieval documents, this situation continued into the Edo period. While mighty feudal lords (ryōshu) insisted that the no man’s lands in their sphere of influence belonged to their domain (ryō), they set few limits to the free use of these zones by farmers: As Toshitaka Ushiomi (1968: 14–15) has pointed out, “In most forest lands clear-cut ownership was not […] established and a manifold relationship of usufruct and control occurred. In other words, farmers were freely allowed to enter wastelands and forests nearby to fell trees and cut grass, thus utilizing the woodlands irrespective of their ownership.”
Since the Meiji Restoration (1868), much of Japan’s forest land was nationalised and the government followed a policy of suppressing the traditional rights of common use (iriaiken) as far as possible. Nevertheless, the constant resistance of numerous villages meant that the customary iriai rights persisted and are still valid in quite a few rural areas today. Since the forms of exercising this right may differ in different villages, what is allowed or required in each specific case depends on the local regulations (Toshitaka 1968: 41–48).
Sign-Making Dealt with in Ethnographic Studies
In the years before World War II, the Kyōdō Seikatsu Kenkyūshō, the Japanese Folklore Research Institute under the direction of Yanagita Kunio, organised systematic field studies in many villages of Japan. One of the questions to be asked in the field regarded the use of house and timber signs; one apparently did not expect that the ancient custom of making kusamusubi would have survived in some rural areas. Once in the field, however, several researchers heard of such a custom still being practised when gathering goods such as mushrooms, firewood, grass as manure or kaya (‘miscanthus’) as thatching material. Their notes about this subject were soon synthesised in a published article (Mogami 1937), but as no pictures were added it remained unclear how such signs used to be made in the respective places. A separate article that happened to appear at the same time included at least a few sketches of such signs that were seen in the south-western islands of Okinawa Prefecture (Hayakawa 1937). After the war, other authors occasionally reported on such sign-making, but usually without adding illustrations. It thus took a long time until the first well-illustrated article on the subject appeared in print (Doi 2005). It deals with signs that were observed in 1973 in two villages north of Osaka and includes not only photographs but also sketches of different forms of signs, as well as two plans showing where and in what numbers the signs had been made in the two villages.29
This is not the place to go into more detail regarding this tradition, but it may be mentioned that the comparative study of many types of such signs that were still used by Japanese farmers in the twentieth century (figures 78–81) shows that the signs were generally characterised by having tree branches or the tops of grasses bent downwards or the ends of tree branches turned backwards towards the stem of the tree. This typical feature corresponded to the fact that when the material of a sign was first cut off from the ground or from a tree its top was often bent downwards before it was tied to a stick or tree (figures 78 and 81). To have the natural top turned down was apparently a typical feature of claiming signs that distinguished them from yorishiro, for which a free and movable top was characteristic.
Boundary sign made with high-growing kaya grass, prohibiting entry into a forest where mushrooms were growing. Osaka-fu, Toyono-gun, Nose-cho, Katayama
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1975
Boundary sign made of the leafy tops of two young trees joined together, bent down and tied with straw. Katayama
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1974
Sign made of brushwood and two downwards-bent tree branches tied with straw to the stem of a tree. Noma-guchi, Nose area
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1973
Prohibition sign made of a bunch of grass that was folded and tied to a stick with the top leaves hanging down. Hirado-shi, Shishiki-chō
Photo Gaudenz Domenig, 1981
The ancient sources about signs called shime, kusamusubi and matsumusubi suggest that the prototypes of this sign-making tradition are represented by the types that were made on growing plants and that the custom of attaching inverted twigs and grasses to a supporting stick (figure 81) represents a development that naturally came up when signs were needed at places where no grass or tree was growing.
The custom of making signs by knotting grasses or other plants – usually high-growing grasses and sometimes bushes or tufts of grass – is still little known and received almost no attention in the past. It is not a Japanese curiosity, but once we have an eye for it, we can also occasionally find it mentioned in old travel literature and in ethnographic studies or still see samples on journeys in parts of Asia and Africa. For Europe, there is the historical study by Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand (1978), which deals with the wisp of straw tied to the top of a stick as a ban and prohibition sign. Schmidt-Wiegand came to the conclusion that the Old German names of such signs – wiffa, bake, schaub, wisch – originally referred to something bound. She noted that this was due to the fact that the sign consisted of a bound form and suspected that a ‘binding spell’ was once associated with them. “The straw wisp on the pole was, as it were, the knot that indicated a taboo, as is still the case today among peoples of the South Sea” (Schmidt-Wiegand 1978: 149).
Signs such as those illustrated at the end of this chapter (figures 78–81) could have been used at any time in human history. Although archaeology cannot provide material proof for this, the anthropological relevance of this observation is evident if we consider that early human groups lived in natural environments and could have used such signs to temporarily mark places, ways and boundaries, and to communicate messages by making the signs in different forms.
By ending the Japan-related part of this book with these notes about primitive sign-making, I also raise the question of the general anthropological relevance of the theoretical model that has been tested in this book. I am aware that cross-cultural comparative study is not a popular trend in our time, but it is important for a subject that ultimately concerns human territoriality and the territorial aspect in the evolution of religious thinking. Having already done some investigations in this direction, I conclude this book with a final chapter that opens up a wider perspective by presenting comparative materials from a few other parts of the world.
For a comparative study of the tobiyashiro of Hirado, see Domenig 1976. See also the section ‘Changing Forms and Interpretations of Cult Marks’ later in this chapter. I have visited Hirado repeatedly together with my wife Mioko Doi between 1969 and 2007. What first inspired me to study this case are three photographs of tobiyashiro from different villages on the island by Inoguchi Shōji, included in Nihon Minzoku Zuroku (Minzokugaku Kenkyūsho 1958: 134 and figures 638–40).
A drawing of Sarutahiko Jinja given in Hirado’s Jinja meisai shirabechō dated Meiji 8 (1875) shows the two tobiyashiro and the text says that they were massha (subsidiary shrines) dedicated to Izanagi and Izanami. The source is one of the many jinja meisaichō, records made at the beginning of Meiji period to provide detailed information about the condition of shrines all over the country.
Minzokugaku Kenkyūshō 1958: 134.
The manuscript is held in the City Library of Hirado, where we were able to study it together with other documents in 1969.
This information about the history of this local cult was received in an interview held on 18 April 1969 with Mr Miwa, the priest of the Miwa Shrine of Himosashi.
The names garō and its variant garan probably derive from garan, meaning a Buddhist temple. On Tanegashima, the contact with Buddhism goes back to the Nara period, but Shimono thinks that the name garan for such groves may have come up only in the middle age (1995b: 504). In earlier times people may have used different generic names for such groves, for instance kamiyama.
For a recent study with illustrations, see Nagasawa 2013.
According to Umeda (1982: 554–55), the size was 885’644 tsubo or 293 ha.
A similar situation is seen at the Kasuga Taisha of Nara, where the mountain area as part of the shrine’s precinct is called Mikasayama (293 metres above sea level). There too the precinct includes the top of the mountain and ends beyond at a pass and two eastern valleys that separate it from the higher Kasugayama further east. See the very detailed study of this shrine precinct in Kasuga kenshōkai 1990: 256, figure 32.
Measured on a map reproduced in Nakayama 1971: 65.
A document dated 1666 gives its size as 20 chō 56 ken from west to the pass in the east and 4 chō from south to north (Nakayama 1971: 50–51). According to the normal measurements of the time, this would equal 2,283 by 436 metres and an area several times larger than the present kinsokuchi.
For a discussion of Yamada’s article, see Domenig 1997: 98–102. For a study that deals with Shinto sacred forests in a wider context, see Rots 2015.
Already earlier, the Buddhist priests who authored the Miwa daimyōjin engi, dated 1318, found that the Ōmiwa Shrine “could demonstrate that the mountain itself was the sacred body of Miwa Myōjin, and therefore, a physically existing source of Buddhist enlightenment” (Andreeva 2017: 193).
For the problem of the torii’s age in the history of Japan, see chapter 8.
On a later visit in 1994, the small roofs had all collapsed and the stones were visible. On my last visit in 2007 the whole arrangement had disappeared and a large shrine was standing at the place where the open-air enclosure with the sacred stones had been before.
https://jingu125.info/2011/01/23/20110123_0758339688/ (figures 5 and 6 from the top).
For a photographic documentation of the shrine’s rebuilding in 2015, see http://www2 .jingu125.info/2015/11/01/post-35706/.
Kokushi taikei 7: Shintō gobusho, p. 26. Miyaji and Sakamoto 1929: 86. Other sources quoted by Kōnō (1974b: 140–41) say it was wrapped in white silk when being carried to the building site.
Gekū sengū yōshu ki, quoted in Jingū ten-ryaku vol. 6: 381, a work in 44 volumes compiled after 1816 by Sonoda Moroyoshi (1785–1849) (Online Encyclopedia of Shinto).
For figure 67 and an illustrated description of such a festival, see Domenig-Doi 1993.
For a photograph of a similar case from another village of the same area, see Hotta 1972: photo pages.
For a shimenawa in snake form that receives offerings before it is attached to a large torii, I refer to the Etoeto festival of the Oisugi Shrine of Kusatsu in Shiga Prefecture (see the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuHHgnaroAA).
Horizontally in the senses of ‘from the local horizon’, as for instance when approaching from a nearby mountain and in contrast to ‘vertically’ (from the sky).
It is easy to find photographs of numerous types and forms of shimenawa online.
The Ōmiya or Daigū corresponds to the present Nishihongū (Western Main Shrine), in which Ōnamuchi is worshipped. Maeda (2006: 13) quotes this story as an important source supporting the tradition that Ōnamuchi (his nigimitama) was originally worshipped at Mt. Miwa (chapter 4).
‘Mazu, worikake to ifu koto wo shite kusa hiki-musubi, shirube bakari ni kami wo iwai, nochi ni yashiro o tatekeru to nan’. The mythical sea animal called wani is sometimes identified with an alligator or a shark. Worikake or orikake is explained as an offering of rice wine (sake) in a bent piece of bamboo (SNMG 1: 305, s.v. [w]orikakedaru).
Kokugakuin Daigaku Digital Museum, https://d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/eos/detail/?id=8916.
Looking under the raised floor of subordinate shrines of the Ise Shrine complex, I sometimes saw a bare conical stone, a bare short post, or a small enclosure formed by withered sakaki branches with earthenware offering plates inside. The last arrangement I saw for instance under the honden of the Tanoe Ōmizu Jinja, a subordinate shrine (sessha) of the Outer Shrine I visited in 1969. The sakakimaki of the Matsushita Shrine are probably the best examples of a cult mark corresponding to the taboo pillars of the two Ise main shrines.
I am grateful to Mioko Doi for having written several articles on the subject (Doi 2005; 2006; 2018; 2019), partly using photographs and materials we collected together in the years 1973–1975 after we had discovered the first case by chance. Most other places visited on Honshu and Kyushu we knew from ethnographic literature that mentioned such signs without including illustrations.