The development of Japanese finance capital and the intensification of its contradictions by the world economic depression caused fascism to grow dramatically between 1931 and 1945. Comrade Kamiyama has fallen into the position of explaining the essential difference between militaristic-feudalistic imperialism and fascism conceptually by means of a formula, so he cannot clarify the relationship between the emperor system and fascism. (Shiga 1949, 47-8; English transl. in Hoston 1986, 262)

Shiga concluded that, between 1931 and 1945, during, that is, the war years of Japan in Asia, "the absolutist emperor system came to be made to execute fascist tasks" (Shiga 1949, 47-8; English transl. in Hoston 1986, 262). Shiga's position was soon endorsed by theorists like Inoue Kiyoshi – who called the wartime regime an "emperor-system fascism" (*tennōsei fashizumu*) (Inoue 1966, 3: 188) – Hattori Shisō, and Moriya Fumio, who further refined Shiga's analysis. Their analyses of fascism reduced the doctrinal gap between the two factions of Marxists theorists. Both *Rōnō* and *Kōza* Marxists now conceived of fascism as essentially an expression of monopoly capital, which assured its own existence via form of political dictatorship characterised by internal repression, external aggression, and exasperated nationalism in the form of emperor worship – whereby the formula "*tennōsei fashizumu*". As *Kōza* member Tanaka Sōgorō put it, "fascism in one form of dictatorship attempted at the time when capitalist society stands at the brink of disaster" (Tanaka 1960, 3; English transl. in Wilson 1968, 403).

The debate over Japanese fascism in the first decades of the postwar period was at the same time a theoretical attempt to come to terms with the catastrophe of the fifteen-year war and a political intervention on the future of Japan in the context of an intensifying cold war. The debate was carried on in a Marxian terminology and on the basis of a Marxist political dialectic of stage-development of base-superstructure forms. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it dominated the intellectual landscape of historical research and gave political orientation to the majority of intellectuals. For Marxist theorists the analyses of monopoly capitalism, represented in Japan by the *zaibatsu* conglomerates that the Occupying Forces had just pretended to dismantle, served as a perspective through which it was possible to understand the Emperor-system (*tennōsei*) and the aggressive imperialism in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as to critically assess the continuation of prewar conservatism after 1945, in the context of the 'soft fascism' of Cold War capitalism. The association of arm forces, *zaibatsu*, political parties, and state bureaucracy that constituted the formal structure of Japanese fascism (for the *Rōnō-ha*) or emperor-centred absolutist fascism (for the *Kōza-ha*) in the 1930s became, for Marxist theorists, allegories that revealed the corrupted and authoritarian governance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), among whose leaders it was possible to count many war criminals – in particular Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke.

Despite doctrinal divergences among thinkers of different Marxist factions, 'fascism' maintained a clear conceptual consistency in their formulations. It stood for the name of an objective stage of sociopolitical development, characteristic of monopolistic capitalist economies in times of protracted crisis. As such, it stood for more than a political form or style of propaganda (superstructure): it was a universal category, the attribution of which depended on scholars' analyses of the socioeconomic development of Japanese society in the interwar period. Despite its many differences with European movements, 'Japanese fascism', as particular declination contingent of the sociohistorical conditions of Japan, fit in with the notion of universal fascism that the Comintern had defined in the 1930s.

#### 3 Maruyama Masao and Japan's Fascist Modernisation

While *Kōza-ha* and *Rōnō-ha* theorists debated over 'Japanese fascism', the only non-Marxist analysis of Japanese imperialism that had great political bearing among Japanese intellectuals was that of Maruyama Masao, one of the most prominent political theorists of postwar Japan. His historical studies and political analyses had an unrivalled impact upon a variety of fields in Japan and abroad, from social and intellectual history to political science and philosophy. Soon after his graduation from the Law School of the University of Tokyo, in 1937, Maruyama Masao had served as researcher specialised in modern European political thought. During the Pacific War, he was mobilised and dispatched in the Imperial Army headquarters of Hiroshima, where he stationed until the blast of the atomic bomb. In the first years after the end of the war, his intellectual activity concentrated on two projects: first, to understand the intellectual and political reasons behind the advent of 'Japanese fascism'; second, to create the conditions for a democratic transformation of Japanese society.

Maruyama had assiduously pursued the first goal during the war years. It resulted in one of the most influential study of the political thought of the Tokugawa period, *Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū*, completed in 1944 and published in 1947, and a series of essays on Japanese 'fascism', nationalism, and authoritarianism that would be later published in 1956-57 as *Gendai seiji no shisō to kōdō*. 4 Of these essays, the first two focused primarily on the question of 'Japanese fascism': "Chōkokkashugi no ronri to shinri" ("Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism", originally published in the May 1946 issue of *Sekai*) and "Nihon fashizumu no shisō to undō" ("The Ideology and Dynamic of Japanese Fascism", originally a lecture he delivered at the University of Tokyo in 1947 and later published as an article in 1948).

Maruyama's argument is well known: Japan had a defective modernisation, the causes of which had to be traced back to the Tokugawa period. It was in the writings of the Confucian thinker Ogyū Sorai, he argued, that Japan first developed an original form of political rationality, which 'secularised' ethics and politics away from Zhu Xi's deterministic metaphysics. This modernising impetus in thought further unfolded, in the early Meiji period, in Fukuzawa Yukichi's enlightenment project of individual growth and citizens' political autonomy. Alongside Sorai, however, the Tokugawa period saw also the emergence of an irrationalist form of ethico-political thought, originating in Motoori Norinaga, which insisted on Japanese natural con-

4 See Maruyama 1952 (English transl. in Maruyama 1974), and Maruyama 1956 (English transl. in Maruyama 1963).

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nection with the deities and which developed in the mid-nineteenth century in those forms of emperor-worship (*sonnō*) and antiforeignism (*jōi*) that paved the way to the authoritarianism of the emperor-system and, eventually, fascism. The dialectic of "artifice" (*sakui*) and "nature" (*shizen*), of Sorai and Norinaga, and of modernising rationalism and irrationalist nativism, were, for Maruyama, constitutive of the political immaturity of Japanese citizens and pivotal to understanding the authoritarianism of its parliamentary institution in the interwar period (Maruyama 1952).

The intellectual template that Maruyama set up in his study of Tokugawa political thought was indispensable to explain his understanding of the divide between a "fascism from above" and a "fascism from below". As George Wilson later elaborated,

[i]n a Japan lacking the tradition of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, fascism had to develop from above since mass energy, having never before been a main force in political change, could not serve to bring it to power. (Wilson 1968, 405)

In "The Ideology and Dynamic of Japanese Fascism" Maruyama proposed a three-stage developmental model of Japan's 'fascism' in which "fascism from above" and "fascism from below" interacted and reinforced each other. After an initial "preparatory" phase, between the end of the First World War and the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which saw the emergence of an array of right-wing movements among civilians, a second phase, that of "maturity", spanning to the 26 February 1936 incident, saw those civilian movements becoming "concretely linked to with segment of military power", which became the "driving force of the fascist movement, gradually coming to occupy the core of the national government" (Maruyama 1963, 26). The third phase, that of the "consummation period", was the actual period of "Japanese fascism" that lasted until the end of the war, on 15 August 1945. In this phase,

the military, now the open supporters of fascism from above, fashioned an unstable ruling structure in coalition with the semi-feudal power of the bureaucracy and the Senior Retainers on the one hand, and with monopoly capital and the political parties on the other. (Maruyama 1963, 27)

Distinctively from Italy and Germany, where fascist movements developed since the beginning as movements from below, in Japan civilian fascism and military-bureaucratic fascism were engaged into a complex dialectic of opposition and assimilation that eventually reinforced one another. This characteristic explained, for Maruyama, the marked difference between Japan and its two European allies. On the one hand, the three forms of fascism shared an opposition to liberalism and parliamentarism, a stark antagonism against Marxism and capitalism (this last one only demagogic, being fascism, for Maruyama as well as for the Marxists, expression of monopoly capital), and aggressively expansionist policies:

Japanese fascism shared the ideology of its Italian and German counterparts in such matters as the rejection of the world view of individualistic liberalism, opposition to parliamentary politics which is the political expression of liberalism, insistence on foreign expansion, a tendency to glorify military built-up and war, a strong emphasis on racial myths and the national essence, a rejection of class warfare based on totalitarianism, and the struggle against Marxism. (Maruyama 1963, 35)

On the other hand, however, the ideology of "Japanese fascism" had "distinctive characteristics". First, the "family-system tendency", in its institutional, economic, and ideological declinations of the "family state" (*kazoku-kokka*), of "entrepreneurial familism" (*keiei kazokushugi*), and, most importantly, of *kokutai* (the multilayered trope of the "national body"), descended directly from that late-Tokugawa emperor-worship that connected people's morality (*dōtoku*) with nature (*shizen*) and the gods (*kami*), of which the emperor (*tennō*) was human progeny (Maruyama 1963, 36-7). Second, "agrarianism" (*nōhonshugi*), which had common characteristics with the semi-feudalism conceptualised by *Kōza-ha* Marxists, represented a distinguishing characteristic of "Japanese fascism", emphasising the autonomist rural movement that dialectically counteracted the centralising and statist tendencies of fascism (Maruyama 1963, 37-50). The third characteristic was "panasianism" (*DaiAjiashugi*), "the ideal of the emancipation of Asian people from European colonialism, a task which had been upheld since the days of the Popular Rights Movement (Jiyūminken *undō*) in the Meiji era", which, however, "became inextricably tied up with the idea that Japan should seize hegemony in Asia in place of European imperialism" (Maruyama 1963, 51). A further common feature of European and Japanese fascisms was the organisation of mass consensus through the violent coercion of police forces and censorship, but also, at an ideological level, through the activities of middle-class "pseudo- or sub-intellectuals" – whose activities of propaganda and demagogy echoed Gramsci's notion of the "organic intellectual" (Maruyama 1963, 58).5

Maruyama Masao's theorisation of 'fascism' had striking similarities with the Marxist interpretation. They both conceived of 'fascism'

5 On organic intellectuals, see Gramsci 1975, 3: 1550-1.

in realist terms: it pointed to a distinct and real (in the ontological sense) form of political organisation, with both universal characteristics and local specificities. Also like the Marxists, Maruyama's analysis of fascism was propaedeutic to the construction of an authentically democratic consciousness in postwar Japanese society, of which he became one of the most prominent public advocates during social conflicts of the 1960s. For Maruyama, the analysis of "Japanese fascism" was indispensable to counteract what he called a chronic "system of irresponsibility" dominant in Japanese public sphere, which he conceptualised in the essay "Chōkokkashugi no ronri to shinri" as "the product of interaction between […] common characteristics of mass society and the peculiar power structure of Japan" (Maruyama 1963, 1-24).6 Finally, like theorists of the *Kōza-ha* and *Rōnō-ha*, he understood fascism as emerging in an economic context of monopoly capitalism. What distinguished Maruyama's 'fascism' from the Marxist's was that for him it pointed to a *political* form of power, whereas for Marxist theorists ultimately pointed to the socioeconomic condition of monopoly capitalism that constituted the base for the development of specific form of authoritarian political institutions (superstructure).

Despite doctrinal disputes and different interpretations continued, the notion that Japan underwent a 'fascist' phase in the 1930s remained hegemonic among Japanese intellectuals well until the 1970s. In that context, 'fascism', the heuristic legitimacy of which was never questioned, had a twofold function: one was historical, as it gave an interpretive meaning to the wartime experience of Japan that was to be regarded as a negative template against which a new model of democratic citizenship had to evolve in postwar Japan; the other was political, as it stood as a memento of the ever-present danger of political power to turn authoritarian, especially as the intensification of the Cold War confrontation with the Communist neighbours required that Japan bent to the requests of the United States (McCormack 2007).

#### 4 Fascism during the Cold War

"In the 'thirties", George Wilson stated, "both Japanese and Western writers were quick to fasten on fascism as a label for the extremist patriotic group – civilian and military – that were appearing on the scene" (Wilson 1968, 408). So, for instance, in 1932 American journalist Thomas Arthur Bisson, sympathiser of the Chinese Communist movement, reported on "The Rise of Fascism in Japan" (Bisson 1932). The same year, Yoshino Sakuzō published a piece in English on

6 On the political implication of this view on the political activism of Maruyama Masao in postwar Japan, see Bronson 2016.

Ca' Foscari Japanese Studies 14 | 4 **65** Itineraries of an Anthropologist: Studies in Honour of Massimo Raveri, 53-86

"Fascism in Japan" (Yoshino 1932).7 In 1936, journalist William Henry Chamberlin described Japan as a "semi-fascist" state and anticipated its "natural alliance" between Germany and Japan. In Japan, he wrote, "intellectuals, always responsive to new foreign ideas and influences, were impressed by the sweep of Fascism in Europe" (Chamberlin 1937, 143). In 1937, W.B. Ashton compared Japanese political and economic systems to those of fascist states like Italy and Germany, pointing out the similar collectivisation of capitalist economy by monopolistic agents who operated in close collaboration with fascist elites inside the state apparatus (Ashton 1937, 42-3). E. Wilfrid Fleisher, after fleeing Japan in the summer of 1941, declared that the country had entered a fascist stage as a "collective dictatorship". A resident of Japan since his childhood, Fleisher moved back to the United States to work in the Foreign Office and, during the postwar Occupation, he became an investigator for Gen. Douglas MacArthur. In two texts he published in 1941 and 1942, Fleischer described Japan as "engulfed by the Fascist tide", and explained:

Japanese insistently repudiate the term "Fascist" as applied to their national movement, contending that it is not a copy of Italian and German methods but a nationalism of Japanese origin, rooted in feudal days. Certainly Japanese Fascism has elements of its own, but in recent years it has looked principally to Germany for guidance in the establishment of a totalitarian state. (Fleischer 1941, 62)8

During the war years, and especially after Japan's alliance with Italy and Germany, Japan would be regarded as part of the fascist Axis, and yet, even in propaganda products like Frank Capra's documentary *Know Your Enemy: Japan*, the emphasis was in explaining how Japan's feudal samurai mentality had indoctrinated its population to accept sacrifice for the semi-divine emperor, rather than in 'fascism'. Interestingly, when all wartime commentators appealed to 'fascism' to clarify the nature of the authoritarianism and aggressive imperialism of Japan, they tended to refer to Nazi Germany, rather than Fascist Italy, as the model upon which Japanese 'fascism' unfolded.

In the postwar period, the situation flipped, especially in the West. If the majority of Japanese historians and theorists, most of whom of Marxian leaning, throughout the first two decades after 1945 supported the notion that Japan in the 1930s had indeed turned fas-

7 "The party politicians work under the orders of their paymasters, the plutocrats, and these orders are obviously to serve the interests of big business, while the little man, and particularly the farmer, is progressively impoverished" (Yoshino 1932, 194).

8 See also Fleisher 1942.

cist, quite the opposite was the interpretation given by European and American historians, independently of their political orientation. With the exception of Robert A. Scalapino, who coined the term of "military-fascism",9 and Richard Storry, who adopted from Maruyama Masao the notions of a "headless fascism from above", the majority of Anglo-American historians rejected the attribution of 'fascism' for Japan. Edwin Reischauer, in *Japan, Past and Present*, opted to "organised ultranationalist movement" and of "military dictatorship with totalitarian tendencies" (Reischauer 1946). Delmer Brown, in his *Nationalism in Japan: An Introductory Historical Analysis* (1955), rejected 'fascism' as well, preferring locutions like "militarist ultranationalism" (Brown 1955). Albert Craig, too, favoured "militarism", although he acknowledged the similarities between Japan and Nazi Germany as an effect of their latecomer modernisation (Fairbank, Reischauer, Craig 1973, 682-725). John Hall rejected the notion of 'fascist Japan' and rather characterised it as a "defensive State" sustained by an "ultranationalist ideology", which mixed the authoritarianism of the Meiji constitution with the notions of "militarism" and "state socialism" (Hall 1970). Marius Jansen largely agreed with the interpretation of the first generation of American historians of Japan who, as members of the so-called modernisation theory school that formed in the context of the Hakone conference of 1960, were at the time responding to the predominantly Marxist Japanese academic historians and their consensus over a 'Japanese fascism'. "At first glance", Jansen argued,

the course of Japanese history in the 1930s differs so radically from that of the decade before that it presumes a profound discontinuity. Terms like 'military takeover' or 'fascism' have been employed to emphasize that gap.

In truth, for Jansen, the situation was much more complex than the view of a fascism or militarism imposed from above suggested.

Many of the development of the 1930s would in fact have been impossible without the development of mass culture and participation that had come before, and it is no less true that the military buildup and domination had powerful roots in the institutional pattern of the modern Meiji state. (Jansen 2000, 576)

9 Scalapino: "It is clear that there were some important differences between this Japanese 'Fascism' and its Western counterparts. In the first place, the concept of *der Führer* was absent in Japan. There was a great difference between a Hitler and a Tojo, and this reflected the complete lack of individualism in Japanese society. Moreover, Japanese 'Fascism', as was noted earlier, never approached a mass movement" (1953, 391).

As the Cold War intensified and Japan strengthened its position of strongest U.S. ally in an increasingly red East Asia, there was a mounting concern among Western historians of Japan to demonstrate the democratic and modern nature of Japanese society. This view was sustained in opposition to the prewar assessments about the political immaturity for democratic autonomy of the Japanese, still under the spell of premodern feudal power relations, which ostensibly explained Japan's fall into 'fascism'.10 But it was also predicated against the notion that Japan did not have a tradition of liberal thought strong enough to resist the ideological appeal of communism.

Opposition against the notion of a 'fascist Japan', however, did not come only from liberal and conservative historians. It was defended and pursued by Marxist historians as well. E.H. Norman, reprising Tanin and Yohan's study, argued that Japan lacked some important distinctive characters of fascist dictatorships (Norman 1940). Jon Halliday, too, upheld Tanin and Yohan's interpretation and explained the ultramilitarism of the 1930s as an effect of lingering feudal relations. As he put it,

to over-generalize is pointless. If every form of reaction can be termed "fascism", the word loses its meaning. Fascism can be only a *specific* form of reaction. It seems an open question whether the most valuable approach is indeed to try to compare Japan with the European fascist states. (Halliday 1975, 134)

Halliday's answer was negative. He insisted that "if Japan became a fascist country, then it must be possible to locate the transition" (Halliday 1975, 136). He showed that it was quite difficult indeed to do so. First, he argued, "bourgeois democracy in Japan was much weaker than in either Germany or Italy, and the left-wing movement was not comparable either". Second, "the system of imperial absolutism led to definite limitations on those who were fascists". Third, "the army certainly was more important politically in Japan than in Germany, Italy or even Spain, but it is by no means clear that it was qualitatively more important than it had been in the 1920s or even in the Meiji period" (Halliday 1975, 137). Finally, for Halliday "[t]he trouble with the term 'fascism' is that it forces any examination of Japan into a Eurocentric category", since "it is virtually impossible to examine the phenome-

10 This was the official view of the U.S. armed forces during the war, illustrated by Frank Capra in his propaganda documentary. It continued, however, during the 'reverse course' of U.S. Occupation. As George Frost Kennan, at the time personal adviser of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, admitted: "We should cease to talk about vague and – for the Far East – unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better" (cited in Bove, Duhan Kaplan 1995, 32).

non without constructing such an examination in terms of comparisons with Germany, Italy, and Spain". So, for him "Tanin and Yohan [were] correct to talk of imperial absolutism" (Halliday 1975, 139).

In continental Europe, where the Marxist historiographical tradition was stronger than in the Anglophone world, historians were less hostile to the notion of a 'Japanese fascism', although they tended to qualify that interpretation by appealing to the distinct sociocultural context of Japan. For instance, in Italy economic historians like Franco Mazzei and Alessandro Valota linked the fascist origin of Japanese ultra-militarism in the pressures of monopoly capital, but, in a logic that reminded that of the Frankfurt theorist Friedrich Pollock, they stressed the "predominant role played by state capital" (Mazzei 1979, 108 and Valota 1980, 238-78). Franco Gatti argued that, despite the absence, in Japan, of a one-party politics (until quite late) and of a charismatic leader, the bureaucratic transformation of the state to accommodate the needs of monopoly capital and the supporting ultranationalist rhetoric of *kokutai*, of *kazoku kokka*, and of emperor worship, suggested that the attribution of 'fascism' to Japan was not so far-fetched (Gatti 1983, 256-64).

Between the late 1960s and throughout the 1980s, Anglo-American historians of Japan remained suspicious of the qualifier 'fascist' to describe transwar and wartime Japan. But if their immediate postwar predecessors understood fascism in terms of an objective developmental stage of modernisation, now historians looked at 'fascism' as heuristic model, the characteristics of which might or might not fit the case of imperial Japan. The first postwar generation of historians, Wilson argued, were moved by

an almost intuitive conviction that Japan's rapid evolution from "feudalism" to "absolutism" and "capitalism" indicates the proximity of Japanese historical development to the pattern of early modern and modern Western history. This conviction had led some to conclude that Japan's history should have followed a pattern practically identical to that of modern Europe were it not for certain "peculiarities". (Wilson 1968, 408)

Wilson's articles on "A New Look at the Problem of 'Japanese Fascism'" signalled the passage from a developmental model to a structural-typological one. Not persuaded by the developmental explanation of both Japanese and American historians, Wilson "recommended turning to the possibility of drawing enlightenment from comparisons with the late-developing non-Western nations". Midway between a new developmental heuristic paradigm and an understanding of political forms through patterns or structures, he suggested to

view interwar Japan as proceeding developmentally from the political stage represented by the precursory Meiji nationalist 'movement-regime' to a point where the 'extinction' of that regime's original dynamism, coupled however with the tenacity of its institutions and the onset of total war, brought a reassertion of authoritarian tendencies and a corollary restraint on the exercise of liberalism and individual freedoms. (Wilson 1968, 411-12)

The turn from a developmental analysis to a typological definition of 'fascism' is best exemplified in a provocative 'comment' article in the *Journal of Asian Studies* by two young assistant professors at Stanford University, Peter Duus and Daniel I. Okimoto. After rejecting the old developmental interpretations, both Marxist and non-Marxist, and asserting the unfitness of analytical models framed upon European history, the two historians urged that

instead of remaining transfixed by the need to explain the aberrational phenomenon of fascism […] we need to press beyond the orthodox concerns of the past to formulate new questions, […] new models, and test these empirically with a broad spectrum of heretofore unexplored perspectives. (Duus, Okimoto 1979, 76)

If there certainly were fascist tendencies among minority movements, especially among military officials, for them the term that best explain the sociopolitical character of transwar Japan was "corporatism". The 1930s should therefore be regarded as a "formative period of a managerial state or polity, in which a dirigist bureaucracy became the central element in the formation and execution of national policy" (Duus, Okimoto 1979, 72).11

Duus and Okimoto echoed Gilbert Allardyce's rejection of the heuristic category of 'fascism', on account that

only individual things are real; everything abstracted from them, whether concepts or universals, exists solely in the mind. There is no such *thing* as fascism. There are only the men and movements that we call by that name. (Allardyce 1979, 368; italics in the original)

Similarly, for Duus and Okimoto the question of 'fascism' ceased to be an eminently ontological problem, as it was in the developmental model of stages of earlier historiography, and became a matter of heuristic accuracy. Accordingly, the research on 'Japanese fascism' in the late 1970s through the 1990s generally relied on structuralist

11 For a critique, see McCormack 1980, 140-1.

terminology. If the epistemological approach changed, still the overarching majority of historians tended to reject the attribution 'fascist' to transwar-period Japan. Gregory Kasza rejected 'fascism' and opted for "military-bureaucratic regime" (Kasza 1988). Relying on Japanese historians who rejected the term – in particular on the work of the revisionist historian Itō Takashi (Itō 1976; 1978) – Kasza underlined the "conceptual fuzziness" ("fascism" applies to "the entire right wing"), the questionable Marxist "political motivation" behind the uncritical use of the concept, and the fact that "Japan differed from Europe", in that they lacked charismatic dictator, one-party politics, and grassroots origins.12 Possible alternative conceptions, for him, were "imperial absolutism", "developmental dictatorship",13 "wartime politics", and reliance on "historical nominalism", by which he meant the adoption of "native terms that were prominent in interwar political discourse" like "idealist right" (*kannen uyoku*) and "*kakushin*". Itō Takashi was the leading Japanese historian defending this "native nominalism", which Kasza endorsed in his own support of *kakushin*, a term that he renders as "renovationist authoritarian right" and that, for him, "fills an awkward gap in the comparative typology of rightist (and perhaps also leftist) political tendencies, and it also fills a void in the English language" (Kasza 2001, 231-2).14 The conceptual operation in both Itō and Kasza's interpretation, however, was that of creating synecdochically a new heuristic category which was supposed to stand – instead of 'fascism', but from an epistemological perspective performing the analogous conceptual labour of generic 'fascism' – for the regime that Japan ended up developing in the 1930s and in the 1940s.

Ben-Amy Shillony, in his *Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan*, emphasised the continuation of political institutions during the wartime, arguing that labels such as "totalitarian" and "fascist state" "are meaningful only if understood in their broadest and pejorative sense, as nicknames for highlighting the repressive and aggressive character of the state". But at closer look, Japan "possessed neither an official dogma nor an omniscient leader to interpret the truth", and oppression was never comparable "to the concentration camps

13 As in Wilson 1968 and Takabakate 1979.

12 As in Yamaguchi 1980 (Kasza 2001, 186).

14 "Alas", he polemically acknowledges, "there seems to be a law that political concepts must derive from English" (Kasza 2001, 231-2). See also Kasza 1984. *Kakushin* "has no equivalent in the English language. In the interwar context, it is sometimes translated 'renovation'. In the postwar context, it is often translated 'progressive' […]. Neither translation does it justice. *Kakushin* falls half way between 'reform', a modest change within an existing system, and 'revolution', the replacement of one system by another. *Kakushin* advocates would keep some features of the existing politico-economic system but change others fundamentally. They are selective revolutionaries" (Kasza 2001, 199).

and wholesale bloodshed of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia" (Shillony 1981, 15-16). Similarly, William Miles Fletcher III researched on "common themes between European fascist movements and the New Order Movement in Japan", but because "there were few institutional similarities between prewar Japan and fascist Italy or Nazi Germany" he contended that "the Japanese state was not fascist" (Fletcher 1982, 163-4). Interestingly, even though they negated its heuristic accuracy, 'fascism' for these historians stood mostly for Nazi Germany rather than Fascist Italy, and the accuracy of such conceptual reductionism was never questioned.

Other US historians who, in the 1980s, rejected the attribution of 'fascist' to the Japanese state were Mark Peattie, Gordon Berger, and Richard Mitchell (Berger 1977; Peattie 1988; Mitchell 1976). They all engaged in a conversation with European specialists of fascism who were at the same time struggling to develop a typological profile of fascism that could be applicable to historical regimes beyond Italy. Stanley Payne, in particular, was receptive to the research of Kasza, Peattie, Mitchell, Fletcher and Shillony. In his encyclopedic *A History of Fascism, 1914-1945* he concluded that "Japan had evolved a somewhat pluralistic authoritarian system which exhibited some of the characteristic of fascism, but it did not develop fascism's most distinctive and revolutionary aspects" (Payne 1995, 336). In an earlier review essays, Payne built upon Fletcher and Shillony to emphasise that fascism was deeply embedded in European intellectual traditions as it "stemmed from the intersection of the new doctrines of nationalism, militarism, and social Darwinism with philosophical and cultural currents of neoidealism, vitalism, activism, and the cult of the her". These intellectual strains, for Payne, became fertile grounds for the development of fascism in those countries where the "transition to mobilised liberal democracy" was interrupted by "military defeat and severe national frustration or status deprivation" (Payne 1980, 275). In contrast, Japan "had never experienced the degree of liberal democratic mobilisation that had earlier occurred in both Germany and Italy". In addition, it had "experienced only a few of the cultural influences which produced Fascism" (Payne 1980, 275).

An exception to Anglophone scholars' tendency to reject the notion of a 'Japanese fascism' came from the Australian historian Gavan MacCormack, who, while acknowledging the convenience of such label as *tennōsei* state, quite cautiously defended some advantages that the heuristic category of 'fascism' offered to understanding the socioeconomic developments of transwar Japan. For him,

in so far as fascism is to be used as a generic term in history and the social sciences, and subject to real doubts as to whether it should be, it would seem to be widely agreed that it is a phenomenon of capitalism in a time of crisis, its historic role being to consolidate bourgeois dominance by neutralising or crushing opposition and mobilising the active support of the masses. (McCormack 1980, 142)

If Japanese historians, he argued, should pay more attention to American criticism of the explanatory power of 'fascism', it was equally desirable that Western historians followed and understood the epistemological reason for the persisting use of 'fascism' in Japanese scholarship.

From an epistemological perspective, historians' interpretation of transwar Japan as fascist followed distinct heuristic perspectives in the research of the first and second generation of postwar historians of Japan. The first generation conceived of 'fascism' in terms of developmental stage in political structures, economic relations, and intellectual conceptions of the nation, which required of historians to recognise those sociocultural symptoms that could justify the assertion that Japan had indeed entered a 'fascist' stage of development. Obviously, developmental stages were differently conceived in the works of Marxist and liberal historians, in their respective variations – *Rōnō*, *Kōza*, aligned to Soviet orthodoxy, or heterodox for Marxist; of the so-called 'Modernisation school' or following Maruyama Masao's idiosyncratic Hegelianism. Both understood these stages ontologically, as actual conditions of those historical societies. The second generation of historians followed instead a typological procedure, whereby the attribution of the qualifier 'fascism' was determined by matching a generic ideal-type with the historical society under investigation. Whether or not Japan underwent a fascist turn, therefore, was no longer conceived in ontological terms, but as the result of a hermeneutic operation of the historian who read beyond the literal meaning of Japanese political institutions.

#### 5 'Japanese Fascism' after the End of History

With the end of the Cold War, the question of 'Japanese fascism' has reappeared in a new form. Today 'fascism' no longer nourishes the ambition of describing a stage of Japanese sociopolitical development, nor does it define the typology of the Japanese regime in the transwar period. Its target is smaller in size and heuristic ambition. It is rarely called to qualify political institutions, economic organisations, or ideological forms in their entirety, but rather certain cultural and social practices, forms of thought, and patterns of sociability. This change in focus mirrors changes in the writing of history in general that occurred in the last thirty years, especially after the so-called 'cultural turn' and the many subsequent sub-turns it triggered. The institutionalisation of new genres of historical inquiry like post-colonial studies, environmental history, subaltern studies, the history of science and technology, gender history, transnational history, and media studies, among many others, gave space to new research questions, new methods, new approaches, and new interpretations of the past. Post-structuralism has undermined the credibility of 'grand narratives', giving space to micro-historical research that were for the first time able to shed new light in previously unchartered topics like gender construction, sexuality, cognitive practices, material histories, etc. This transformation comes also at a cost. If thick descriptions have offered new depths in the analysis of social dynamics, the capacity to talk about or even conceptualise historical change seems to have been imperilled today, especially since the Marxian analytical paradigm has lost, among historians, its cognitive and institutional legitimacy with the disappearance of really existing socialist states (the failure of which has been shrewdly exploited to delegitimise Marxian theory *tout-court*) and the global affirmation of a capitalist "end of history" (Fukuyama 1992). As a consequence of these transformations in society and in the forms of historical knowledge they sustain, the heuristic category of 'fascism' has changed as well. Its application is narrower, targeted at specific cultural and intellectual forms, or particular political and economic dynamics. The restriction of its field of applicability, however, has at times rendered its meaning and thus its heuristic function even fuzzier than before. As a result, 'fascism' has lost not only cognitive power, but also political efficacy, notwithstanding its resurgence in the wake of Donald Trump's presidency.

In Japan, the hegemonic presence of practicing Marxist historians began to wane in the 1980s. Despite their ideological commitment, the eminently empiricist approach (*jisshōshugi*) they embraced resulted in a systematic organisation of the documentary sources on Japanese history. But dissenting voices began emerging. Itō Takashi, as we have seen, joined forces with the Italian revisionist historian of Fascism Renzo De Felice, contending that the generic use of 'fascism' was nothing but a Marxist creation (Itō 1976; see also De Felice, Ledeen 1975). In response to that, Marxist historian Furuya Tetsuo developed a definition of 'fascism' that could apply everywhere in the world. Fascism was for him a form of dictatorship which strived to develop a "uniform organisation of the masses at the level of daily life", which could "completely eliminate the roots of resistance" and to "mobilise the people in accordance with the wishes of the authority" (Furuya 1976, 84-6; English transl. in Mark 2015, 18). Among the group of historians that would be later defined as practitioners of "people's history" (*minshūshi*), politically on the left but no longer committed to Marxism, Yoshimi Yoshiaki published in 1984 a people's history of wartime Japan, in which he demonstrated the widespread popular support for Japanese militarist expansion.15 Entitled *Kusa no ne no fashizumu* – recently translated as *Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People* – the study, while aligning along the Marxist interpretation of transwar Japanese history as 'fascist', corrected the conventional vision of both Marxists and Maruyama Masao that 'Japanese fascism' was imposed from above, in the forms of a "militarist fascism" or "imperial fascism" (*tennōsei fashizumu*). For Yoshimi, who shared the documentary approach of *minshūshi* pioneers like Irokawa Daikichi and Kano Masanao, which strived to recuperate and reconstruct the historical experience of people detached from power, the fascist phase of Japanese modernisation was not violently imposed from above, but found in large sectors of the population support for the military efforts of the Japanese Imperial Army. Less clear, however, was the meaning and heuristic function Yoshimi gave the concept of 'fascism', which he did not define, but assumed.

Yoshimi's ground-breaking study, together with the waning of the institutional predominance of Marxist historians in Japanese research universities, opened up new research venues on wartime Japan. Among the vast bibliographical production, Suzaki Shin'ichi focused on fascism's appeal on state bureaucrats, who looked at Nazi Germany and, to a much lesser extent, Fascist Italy for new forms of administrative and technological solutions to improve the governance of the Japanese empire (Suzaki 1998). Most recently, Fuke Takahiro looked at the cultural and intellectual exchanges of Japanese right-wing activists and ideologues with Italian and German thinkers (Fuke 2010).

In the United States, as early as 1991, Andrew Gordon broke a decade-long reluctance to employ the concept of 'fascism' and utilised it, with keen attention "to avoid nominalist and Eurocentric snares", to scout for "analytic common ground" in specific social dynamics in Italy, Germany and Japan (Gordon 1991, 334-5). In *Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan*, he analysed changes in the relations between state and labourers in conjunction with the rise of militarism and imperialist expansion, which gave new nuances to the notion of "fascism from above" in Maruyama Masao and Yamaguchi Yasushi (Maruyama 1956; Yamaguchi 1979). What passed unnoticed to the reviewers of the book, most of whom critical of Gordon's adoption of 'fascism', was that in the book the term did not intend to describe, either ontologically or epistemologically, transwar Japan in general, but only certain forms of state intervention in labour relations in the context of empire building.

Harry Harootunian's *Overcome by Modernity* employed an even more contentious use of 'fascism', which did not label transwar Japan

15 On the history of *minshūshi*, see Gluck 1978 and 2007.

in general but rather named a recurring attitude among intellectuals like Miki Kiyoshi, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, Yanagita Kunio, Kon Wajirō, and others, to criticise the alienating effect of modernisation and its technological and economic mechanisms in favour of a return to "authenticity, folkism, and communitarianism". "Fascism", for Harootunian, pointed to the ideological and demagogic nature of the critique of modernity in the works of these intellectuals, as the appeal to "overcoming modernity" (*kindai no chōkoku*) implied the actual reproduction of the technologically most advanced forms of repression and violence, both domestically and internationally (Harootunian 2000, xxvii-xxxi). Harootunian found inspiration in the critical strategy of the Japanese Marxist Tosaka Jun, whose *Nihon ideorogii ron* represented the most ambition form of *Ideologiekritik* in 1930s Japan. In this essay, Tosaka

forcefully juxtaposed this image of modern life filled with new customs to the fictive abstractions of natural culture in order to reveal the utter bankruptcy of all those pronouncements claiming the eternality of Japanese culture. (Harootunian 2000, 118)

This Tosaka called "*Nihon ideorogii*" (or in the form of alternative conjugates like *bunkenshugi*, a neologism we can render with 'classicism', or *Nihon bunkashugi*, or 'Japanese culturalism'), a Heideggerian cultural essentialism that Harootunian unburies in the texts of different thinkers and describes as 'fascist'.

Julia Adeney Thomas, in her study of the ideological use of the concept of 'nature' (*shizen*) that sustained the modernisation of the Japanese state, has argued that

[c]laims to immemorial harmony with nature have become part of the evidence adduced by those who see Japan as "traditional" in the 1930s, and "tradition" has in turn been one of the touchstones in the debate over whether Japan's ultranationalism should be characterised as "fascist". (Thomas 2001, 181)

The appeal to 'nature', in the ideological constructs of thinkers like Miki Kiyoshi, Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō, and Tanabe Hajime, among others, supported, according to Thomas, those conceptions of agrarianism, primeval communitarianism, and national characters that were constitutive of wartime ultra-nationalism and analogous to fascism (Thomas 2001, 181-8).

Alan Tansman has scouted the cultural production of the 1920s and 1930s in search of "fascist moments", and found "a wide range of cultural expressions that share an urge for aesthetic wholeness": the anesthetisation of violence, militarism, expansionism, a religious attachment to national community, among others, were all elements that echoed similar ones in the European context (Tansman 2009a). In the edited volume *The Culture of Japanese Fascism*, Tansman argues "for the presence of a fascist culture in Japan and for the presence of fascistic ways of healing the crisis of interwar modernity" (Tansman 2009b, 1). In his analyses of different literary works in the transwar period, Tansman uses "fascism" to highlight the effects of certain aesthetic texts "to enchant a culture stripped of its magic by modernity", thus becoming an ideological tool to propose "a reactionary response to modernity", paradoxically articulating "a vision of a modernity that was born in the West yet was resistant to Westernisation" (Tansman 2009a, 9, 14-15).

Other historians have recently employed 'fascism' to speak of political changes in Japanese modernity. Takashi Fujitani argued that a feminine character distinguished the Japanese nationalist ideology from European fascisms (Fujitani 1996, 172). Kenneth Ruoff, in his reconstruction of the wartime celebration of the 2600th anniversary of the foundation of Japan, argued that "in political terms, Japan in 1940 shared far more in common with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy than it did with the United States and Britain" (Ruoff 2010, 19). Janis Mimura argued for the heuristic value of "fascism's ideology, expansionist policies, and modern technocratic thrust – all of which Japanese fascism shared with its European counterparts". According to Mimura, fascism offered Japanese technocrats and ideologists "a means to overcome the crisis of capitalism and resolve the problem of class conflict and authority in modern industrial society" (Mimura 2011, 5). Historians of 'Japanese fascism', following Maruyama Masao, "have tended to emphasise the nativist, agrarian, and pan-Asianist visions" (Mimura 2011, 107-8). In contrast to such view, Mimura coined the term "techno-fascism" to refer to those "Nazi-inspired concepts of 'leadership principle,' 'living space,' and 'national land planning'" (Mimura 2011, 3) which appealed to state bureaucrats and industrial managers, but also "progressive intellectuals and politicians", all university-educated middle-class professionals, who "sought to realise a productive, hierarchical, organic, national community based on cultural and geopolitical notions of Japanese ethnic superiority" (Mimura 2011, 3). The late Aaron Stephen Moore also adopted the notion of "techno-fascism". In his study of the technological and ideological foundations of the Japanese empire, he argued that

[w]artime Japan's technological imaginary represented a form of fascist ideology that employed familiar tropes of modernity and rationality rather than relying primarily on cultural appeals to spiritualism or ultranationalism. (Moore 2013, 7)

In his study, engineers and technocratic bureaucrats are the agents of fascism rather than philosopher, ethnographers, Shintō priests, or Buddhist monks (Victoria 2006). In line with the research of Suzaki and Mimura, Moore demonstrated how technology "serve[d] as a system of power and mobilisation" in Japan not only during its imperial expansion between 1931 and 1945, but also in the postwar period, as it sustained Japan's industrial high-growth (Moore 2013, 226-39).

Reto Hofmann has researched on the cultural exchanges between Italy and Japan, and on the popularity of 'fascist' ideas in Japan between the 1920s and the end of the war. Hofmann, whose approach is one of the most sophisticated in the recent scholarship on Japanese fascism, searched scholarly texts, popular books, political documents, newspaper articles, theatrical pieces, monuments and artifacts to reconstruct the circulation, understanding, appeal, or refusal of the concept of 'fascism' as it was imported in Japan from Italy. Hofmann, however, acknowledged "fascism" to be "both nationally specific and structurally transnational" (Hofmann 2015, 3). Distinguishing a Fascism distinct of Italy, which he renders with capital 'F', and a generic, transnational fascism, which he renders with a small 'f', he defends the notion that Fascism, by moving around the world through cultural and intellectual exchanges, transformed into a generic political idea that could become inspiration to other political movements "to counteract the negative effects of capitalist modernity" (Hofmann 2015, 2). When the poet and journalist Shimoi Harukichi popularised Fascism in Japan in the 1920s, Mussolini and his movement enticed intellectuals and political activists as an exemplary strategy to kindle patriotism and organise consensus for the state (Hofmann 2015, 8-37). Articles and monographs on Fascism – *fashizumu* or *fasshō undō* were its Japanese translations – had initially a good editorial success. Moreover, Hofmann shows, between 1928 and 1931 the image of Mussolini was at the centre of a cultural boom: theatrical pieces, *manga* comics, and young-adult novellas popularised Mussolini as a moral hero, engaging him in a variety of fictional adventures that evidenced his courage, strength, patriotism, and moral rectitude. "Japanese critics of parliamentary democracy", too, found in Mussolini an "extraordinary man", an "iron man". As such, he was taken as an example to emulate (Hofmann 2015, 38-62). But political enthusiasm for Fascism rapidly waned and remained quite timid throughout the 1930s and hostile during the Ethiopian War of 1935-36, as were the diplomatic relations between the two countries until the signing of the Tripartite Pact, on 27 September 1940. In Japan, the strongest antagonism against Fascism came from ultranationalist groups and activists – Hofmann calls this heterogenous group, with a certain degree of conceptual trickstery, "fascists against Fascism" (Hofmann 2015, 80-8) – who rejected the notion of its universality and its adaptability to Japan. Japanese ultranationalists – the majority of whom ended up politically marginalised, imprisoned, or sentenced to death before the alliance with Germany and Italy in 1940 – preferred to insist on terms such *kokutai*, *tennōshugi*, *nihonshugi*, or *nōhonshugi* rather than rely on imported foreign terms like 'fascism'.

The return of 'fascism' as heuristic category in the Anglophone historiography of the last twenty years evidences a profound change in its hermeneutic function. Today 'fascism' operates in a quite distinct manner than in the postwar era. It does no longer define a stage of development in an ontologically given teleology of modernisation, aimed at the final affirmation of either capitalist liberalism or communist socialism in accordance with the politico-metaphysical orientation of historians. It does no longer operate as an epistemic category that is capable of capturing the essential nature of the political system and social organisation of a specific historical context. It is rather employed to emphasise the character of *distinct* sociocultural phenomena.

In the process, the meaning of 'fascism' has become however more difficult to pin down. It may stand today for authoritarianism, statism, racial ethnocentrism, cultural communitarianism, or revolutionary conservatism; it can stand for the aestheticisation of violence, ultra-militarism, the worship of war and violence, for popular support of a charismatic leader, or for the demagogic ideology of antimodern modernism. It stands, in other words, for one or more characteristics that have been once associated with Italian Fascism or, more contentiously, with German National Socialism, without, however, presupposing or requiring an explicit comparison (or connection) with the actual historical experiences of Italy and Germany. More precisely, when 'fascism' is adopted to describe or explain certain characteristics of specific social, intellectual, economic, or political phenomena of transwar Japan (from bureaucratic technocracy and economic planning, to political discourses on the national community, philosophical investigations on the alienating effects of industrial modernisation, and the aesthetic appreciation of everyday life), the meaning historians attribute to this heuristic category is only loosely reconstructed comparatively from the contemporary historical situations of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; it is rather derived from the typological domains that historians of fascism had previously conceptualised in generalised definitions of 'fascism'. Relying on the works on typological fascism of Payne, Griffin, Laqueur, Paxton, Mosse, and others, 'fascism' is now understood as a generic category, in itself bearing semantic values that are distilled in its definitions, but one-step removed from actual historical references to Italy (or Germany). In turn, since 'fascism' is genericised in this manner, it is no longer required of the historian to argue for its application in extra-European contexts, as it once was, because the definition of 'fascism' can be removed from the genesis of the term in the historically specific events of Italy between 1919 and 1945. That is why Mimura, Moore, Victoria, and others can attribute 'fascism' to the sociocultural phenomena they inquired even though Japanese historical actors have adopted these from Nazi Germany rather than Fascist Italy. That is why Hofmann, after reconstructing the penetration of Italian Fascism in popular and intellectual discourses of 1930s Japan, can conceptualise the resistance against Italian Fascism by Japanese right-wing ideologues in terms of "fascists against Fascism" (Hofmann 2015, 80).

#### 6 Conclusions

The changes in historians' understanding of Japan in the 1930s do not merely reflect the opening of new archives and perspectives. It also bears witness of the changes in historian's sociohistorical situation. During the Cold War, the use of 'fascism' as a discrete political ideal-type was convenient to historians of both Marxian and liberal (or conservative) leanings: for the first, 'fascism' represented an inevitable development of monopoly capitalism in a period of crisis of profit accumulation; for the second, it was a new political form delinked from and independent of capitalism. The return of populist and authoritarian tendencies in twenty-first century world politics, especially in those countries of Western Europe and North America that presented themselves as the champions of democratic liberalism during the Cold War, is calling for a rethinking of the heuristic advantages and disadvantages of the category of 'fascism'.16

Today's semantic encyclopedia justifies a genericised use of 'fascism'. And yet, its meaning – not only what the term refers to, but the internal consistency of the encyclopedia of definitions, characteristics, nuances, uses, and connotations that history has added to it – are more than ever uncertain and fuzzy. As Umberto Eco once put it,

[i]t is pointless to say that Fascism contained in itself all elements of successive totalitarian movements, so to speak "in a quintessential state". On the contrary, Fascism contained no quintessence, and not even a single essence. It was a fuzzy form of totalitarianism. It was not a monolithic ideology, but rather a collage of different political and philosophical ideas, a tangle of contradictions. (Eco 2001, 72-3)

The fuzziness of its conceptual core makes it a malleable tool, but it also deprives it of heuristic efficacity, as Jon Halliday has pointed out (Halliday 1975, 134-6). Differently from other coeval political concepts like socialism, communism, democracy, and liberalism, 'fas-

16 See, for instance, Camus, Lebourg 2017; Snyder 2017; Berizzi 2018; Cusset 2018; Stanley 2018; Brown, Gordon, Pensky 2018; Gentile 2019; Temelkuran 2019; Traverso 2019; Giroux 2019; Ben-Ghiat 2020.

cism' is a term that had originally no meaning apart from the political movement it came to refer to as proper name. It had no inherent conceptual content, no set of ideas or notions that existed before the historical vicissitudes of the movement it named.17 Today's encyclopedia understands 'fascism' or 'fascist' as referring to the violently autocratic, intolerant, or oppressive behaviour of a person, regime, or ideology; but this sense of the term is the result of the contingent historical development of the movement. The conceptual meanings we assign to 'fascism' today is nothing but the history of the regime it named, the character of which was the product not of a preexisting set of ideals, but of Italy's contingent situation between the two wars and of the opportunistic decisions of its leader.

The cognitive fuzziness of the category 'fascism' translates into heuristic weakness. Italian Fascism, like German National-Socialism, was symptomatic of the structural weakness of liberal democratic institutions that made them vulnerable to become totalitarian under certain socioeconomic conditions specific of the 1920s and 1930s. On the contrary, Japan did not undergo any revolutionary change: its economy developed corporatist dynamics and strong ties to the state since the Meiji period; the vibrant political debates and liberal tendencies of the Taishō period unfolded within the narrow limits of the authoritarian constitution of 1889; and the aesthetic currents that shared tastes and ideals with European Nazifascism can be traced in those countries that ended up fighting fascism (Griffin 2007). Furthermore, many of the elements that Japan developed in the 1930s can be more easily explained contextually, as effect of the transnational situation of conflicting imperialisms, expanding communist revolutions, anticolonial movements, economic crises, and total war.

Fascism's fuzziness translates also in political weakness. If analogously dangerous circumstances would arise today, evoking 'fascism', despite its convenience as boo word, would conjure up ultranationalists marching in the streets in unicoloured shirts, invoking their leader, war, and different forms of 'final solutions' for all social problems on the basis of some invented myths. In other words, it is

17 We can identify three distinct historical usages of the term 'fascism' – each with its own peculiar history. First, it is the *proper name* of a new political movement, of a regime, and, only much later, of an ideology specific to Italy. Second, it is the term that coeval antifascist activists and thinkers adopted and transformed, by metonymical procedures, into a generic term that inductively explained the common causes of the rise of distinct ultranationalist regimes and movements in the 1920s and 1930s. Third, it is the name of a metahistorical category that seeks to understand 'fascism', in synecdochical fashion, as a generic political ideal-type analogous to communism, socialism, and liberalism. The historians who utilised this metahistorical category developed all-encompassing definitions of a "fascist minimum" which they then deductively mobilised to categorise a variety of movements and regimes from the late 19th to the early 21st century, of which Italian Fascism was but one example.

perceived as a threat from *without* democratic institutions, whereas Fascism, like Nazism, as 'revolutionary conservatisms' originated *within* them. In other words, the genericisation of 'fascism' has the reifying effect of externalising a phenomenon that was born within democratic institutions. Fascism was not an invading pathogen, but an intrinsic neoplastic disease.

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#### **Itineraries of an Anthropologist** Studies in Honour of Massimo Raveri edited by Giovanni Bulian and Silvia Rivadossi

## The Localisation of Kumano Gongen Cult and Mountain Beliefs: From *engi* to *kagura*

Masataka Suzuki Keiō University, Japan

**Abstract** This paper discusses the Kumano Gongen cult, which played an important role for Japanese religious beliefs and mountain beliefs. The first part is the analysis of the *engi* of Kumano in comparison with that of Hikosan in medieval times. The second part focuses on the localisation of Kumano Gongen cult tracing and explaining the shift from *engi* to *kagura* in medieval and modern times. This paper analyses the contents of the *Kumano Gongen gosuijaku engi* focusing on three themes: 1) mountain beliefs found in *engi* narratives; 2) the concept of *kami*; and 3) the diffusion and localisation of religious concepts about Kirime no Ōji, showing how the shift from Gongen to Ōji occurred.

**Keywords** Mountain beliefs. Pilgrimage. Ritual. Kagura. Engi. Shugendō. Kumano.

**Summary** 1 Introduction. – 2 Kumano and Hikosan *engi*. – 2.1 *Engi* Similarities. – 2.2 Direction: Eastward from the Origin Place. – 2.3 Caves and Rocks. – 2.4 Reversal Between Centre and Periphery. – 2.5 Points, Lines, Area. – 2.6 Sacred Places as a Representation of Nature. – 2.7 Water Belief. – 2.8 Moon Belief. – 2.9 Four Stage Composition. – 2.10 Logic of Place. – 3 *Engi* Differences. – 3.1 Difference of Quality and Aim of the Text: Cosmology and Ideology. – 3.2 Narrative Differences About Sacred Places: Indigenous Assimilation and Continuity of Foreignness. – 3.3 Narrative Differences About Sacred Places: Revelation or Hiding of the Deity's Name. – 3.4 Differences in the Integration of the Indigenous Deities. – 3.5 Differences in Textual Form. – 3.6 Historical Background. – 4 Kirime no Ōji. – 4.1 Positioning Kirime no Ōji. – 4.2 Legends about Kirime no Ōji. – 4.3 Transformation to Dharma Protector. – 4.4 Nagi and goōhoin, Ox-bezoar Talismans. – 4.5 Kirime and Kakko-Kirime. The Localisation of Kirime no Ōji. – 4.6 Kirume and Mirume: The Localisation of Kirime no Ōji. – 4.7 *Ama no matsuri* and *Yudate*: Ritual of Heaven and Hot Water. – 4.8 Mt. Shirayama: The Pure Land Entrance. – 4.9 Transformation of Ox-bezoar Talismans. – 5 Conclusions.

**Ca' Foscari Japanese Studies 14 | Religion and Thought 4** e-ISSN 2610-9417 | ISSN 2610-900X ISBN [ebook] 978-88-6969-527-8 | ISBN [print] 978-88-6969-528-5

**Peer review | Open access 87** Published 2021-10-18 © 2021 | cb Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution alone **10.30687/978-88-6969-527-8/005**

#### 1 Introduction

This paper discusses the Kumano Gongen 熊野権現 cult, which played an important role for Japanese religious beliefs and mountain beliefs. The first part is the analysis of the *engi* 縁起 (accounts of sacred origins) of Kumano 熊野 in comparison with that of Hikosan 彦山 in medieval times. The second part focuses on the localisation of Kumano Gongen cult tracing the movement from *engi* to *kagura* 神楽 (ritual drama and dance) in medieval and modern times.

According to the original ground and traces (*honjji sujaku* 本地垂 迹) theory, which developed after the mid-Heian period (794-1192), Japanese deities (*kami* 神) appeared as the incarnations of buddhas and bodhisattvas to save the people (*suijaku*), and, conversely, the buddhas and bodhisattvas were the original form (*honji*) of the Japanese deities. Many mountain *kami* were given the title of *gongen* 権現 (avatar), and *engi* were written to transmit the legends of sacred origins about these *gongen*. The oldest *engi* text of Kumano Gongen is the *Kumano Gongen gosuijaku engi* 熊野権現御垂迹縁起 (in *Chōkan kanmon* 長寛勘文, Chōkan 1, 1163), which is regarded as the primary *engi* for the Kumano deity. This *engi* focuses on the Hongū 本宮, one of the Three Places of Kumano (*Kumano Sansho Gongen* 熊野三 所権現). The origin legends of the other two sacred places, Shingū 新 宮 and Nachi 那智, differ from that of Hongū. In this study the oldest and fundamental text about Hongū is investigated.

This paper analyses the contents of the *Kumano Gongen gosuijaku engi* as a starting point and focuses on three themes: 1) mountain beliefs found in *engi* narratives by the comparison of *Kumano* and *Hikosan engi*; 2) the concept of *kami* (including local tutelary deities *jinushigami* 地主神, mountain deities *yama no kami* 山神 and fierce deities *kōjin* 荒神) in representations of nature; and 3) the diffusion and localisation of religious concepts about Kirime no Ōji 切 目王子; this will entail an examination of the localisation of Kumano Gongen cult, the ox-bezoar talismans (*goōhōin* 牛玉宝印), the role of Kirime no Ōji performed by *kagura* and its relationship with hot water rituals (*yudate* 湯立) and mountain asceticism (Shungendō 修験 道). I will show how the shift from Gongen to Ōji, and from *engi* to *kagura*, occurred.

#### 2 Kumano and Hikosan *engi*

#### **2.1** *Engi* **Similarities**

Comparing the *Kumano Gongen gosuijaku engi* (1163) about Kumano and the *Hikosan ruki* 彦山流記 (Kenpō 1, 1213), an *engi* about the Mount Hiko in Western Japan, I analyse the transformation of the mountain beliefs from the Heian to the Kamakura period (1192-1333).

The plot of the *Kumano Gongen gosuijaku engi* is as follows (Hanawa 1960, 242-3).

In the year of the tiger wood-yang (*kinoe tora* 甲寅), Kumano Gongen flew from the original place associated with Prince (*ōji* 王 子) Shin 信 (also written 晉) to Mount Hiko 日子山 (also written 彦 山) in Japan. He took the shape of a crystal octagon. After five years, in the year of the horse earth-yang (*tsuchinoe uma* 戊午), he moved to Mount Ishizuchi 石鎚 in the Iyo 伊予 province. After six years, in the year of the mouse wood-yang (*kinoe ne* 甲子), he transferred to Mount Yuzuruha 遊鶴羽 in the Awaji 淡路 province. After six years, in the year of the horse metal-yang (*kanoe uma* 庚午) he went to Mount Kiribe 切部山 in the Kii 紀伊 province. After fifty-seven years, in the year of the horse metal-yang, he reached Mount Kannokura 神蔵山 in the same province. After sixty-one years, in the year of the horse metal-yang, he moved to the Iwabuchi valley 石淵谷. Here the deities Musubitama 結玉 and Ketsumimiko 家津美御子 were venerated in two shrines. After thirteen years, in the year of the horse wateryang (*mizunoe uma* 壬午), he took the shape of three lunar discs and flew on the tops of three chestnut oaks (*ichii* 櫟) at Hongū Ōyunohara 大湯原 (also written 大斎原). After eight years, in the year of the tiger metal-yang (*kanoe tora* 庚寅), a hunter called Chiyosada 千与定 from Minamikawachi 南河内 in the Kumano area went up to the Iwata River 石多河 pursing a large wild boar and arrived at Ōyunohara. The hunter ate the wild boar that he found dead by the side of an oak and planned to spend the night under this tree. When he saw the three lunar discs on the top of the tree he wondered why it had left the heavens and was told, "I am the Gongen of the Three Places of Kumano. The first shrine is Shōsei Daibosatsu 証誠大菩薩. The two moons are the Ryōsho Gongen 両所権現".

The plot of *Hikosan ruki* is reported below (Gorai 1984, 463-5).

Hikosan Gongen vowed to save human beings (*rishō* 利生) in the east and, starting from the Yuèzhī 抛月氏 (Jp. *Hōgesshi*) land in China, moved east. He threw five swords from the country of Magadha in India. In the year of the tiger wood-yang (*kinoe tora* 甲寅) he crossed the sea from an ancient place associated with Prince Shin 晉 on Mount Tiantai 天臺山 (Jp. Mount Tendai) and arrived by boat at Ōtsu 大津 in the district of Tagawa 田河 in the province of Buzen 豊前. Hikosan Gongen asked the local tutelary deity Kawara Myōjin 香春 明神 for lodging but was refused. So he ordered Kongō Dōji 金剛童子 to eradicate all the trees on Mount Kawara and transformed it into a huge rock. Hikosan Gongen climbed up Mount Hiko and stopped at its middle reaches to negotiate with the local tutelary deity Kitayama 北山. Finally, Kitayama moved to Konomiyama 許斐山. In Konkō 金光 7 (587) year of the monkey fire-yang (*hinoe saru* 丙申), Hikosan Gongen descended in the Hanñya cave 般若窟 in the shape of an octagonal crystal. There he discovered the first of the five swords. After eightytwo years, in the year of the horse earth-yang, he went to Mount Ishizuchi and found the second. After eighty-six years, in the year of the mouse wood-yang, he moved to Mount Yuzuruha 楡靏羽山 in the Awaji province and found the third. After six years, in the year of the horse metal-yang, he arrived at Mount Kiribe in the Kii province and found the fourth. After sixty-one years, in the year of the year of the horse metal-yang, he discovered the fifth at the Iwabuchi valley. After two-thousand years, on the day of horse wood-yang (*kinoe uma* 甲午) in the year of the horse wood-yang he returned to Mount Hiko.

The contents in the *Kumano* and *Hikosan engi* suggest that these two documents might have influenced each other. Taking into account the similarities between their plots, these two *engi* reveal common features of the origin of deities and beliefs in those deities. And these deities played a pivotal role in Japanese religious beliefs about mountain.1

#### **2.2 Direction. Eastward from the Origin Place**

There is an eastward movement from China (or India) toward Japan, Kyūshū, and Kii province. Foreign deities become native deities by following the route of Buddhist transmission through the three areas of India, China, and Japan (Sangoku-Denrai 三国伝来). The starting point is located in India, which is imagined as an origin place of Buddhism in the West.

#### **2.3 Caves and Rocks**

In mountain beliefs, caves and rocks are the most important origin places. The Hanñya-cave on Mount Hiko is extremely important and is regarded as the Jewel-room Cave (Tamaya-kutsu 玉屋窟) in which resides the spirit of Hikosan Gongen. It is probable that the stone pillar located inside the cave was venerated as a manifestation of the crystallised octagonal body of Hikosan Gongen. The history of the

1 See the general explanation on the mountain beliefs in Japan in Suzuki 2015.

beliefs about this cave reveals a progression from water belief, via dragon worship, to the appearance of the jewel.

#### **2.4 Reversal Between Centre and Periphery**

The Gongen moves from India (centre) to China and eventually to Japan (periphery). While in Japan, he proceeds from the periphery toward the centre: Mount Hiko, Mount Ishizuchi, and Mount Yuzuruha are transfer points that direct one toward Kumano in Kii peninsula, which is the centre in the system of beliefs about mountains. But Hikosan Gongen do not goes to Kumano and comes back to his origin place located at Kyūsyū 九州. This is the dynamic reversal between centre and periphery.

#### **2.5 Points, Lines, Area**

Points, lines, and areas unify sacred landscapes and contribute to the sacralisation of the land. Kumano and Hiko Gongen arrive in the Kii province in the same year and proceed from West to South following 'lines' (Mount Kiribe → Mount Kannokura → Iwabuchi valley). After sixty years they transform these 'points' into an 'area', which is conceived of as a sacralised territory. There is a sort of qualitative transformation from 'points' (mountains), to 'lines' (pilgrimage routes), from 'lines' to 'area' (sacred territory).

#### **2.6 Sacred Places as a Representation of Nature**

The natural landscape of Kumano is a representation of a sacred place. Mountains, valleys, and forests such as Kiribe, Kannokura, and Iwabuchi, which gained significance due to their status as locations through which Kumano Gongen passed, constitute the essential elements of Kumano and are regarded as numinous sites. At Kannokura and Iwabuchi there are also traces of the cult dedicated to Shingū and Asuka 阿須賀, who were enshrined along riverbanks and seashores as the liminal place. These places testify to an early stage in the sacralising process of the Kumano landscape.

#### **2.7 Water Belief**

Water belief is central to *engi* narratives. Thanks to the divine power of Hikosan Gongen, a spring gushes from the Hanñya-cave on Mount Hiko. In the same way, as soon as Kumano Gongen appears, water starts flowing at Ōyunohara. Water belief suggests the purifications and renewal of life (*saisei* 再生) and remind us of the pivotal role played by springs in mountain beliefs.

#### **2.8 Moon Belief**

Kumano Gongen appears in the guise of the moon at Ōyunohara. The shape of the moon of the twenty-third night (*nijūsan-ya* 二十三夜) resembles three bodies that progressively manifest themselves in the middle of the night starting from the East. This narrative corresponds to the visible figure of Kumano Gongen as the Three Places (Sansho Gongen 三所権現). The day in which Hikosan Gongen returned to Mount Hiko was the fifteenth day of the first month when the first full moon of the year appears in the sky. This day is thought to be a moment when the universe regenerates. The nocturnal landscape lit by the moon's glow as well as mountains are also important elements in Pure Land belief (*jōdo shinkō* 浄土信仰).

#### **2.9 Four Stage Composition**

These *engi* display a fourfold structure: 1) arrival of the foreign deity from abroad, 2) encounter with the local tutelary deity (*jinushigami*), 3) buddhification of the local deity and removal, and 4) indigenisation processes on the territory. At the end of these four stages the narration of the origins is concluded.

#### **2.10 Logic of Place**

A central element is the amalgamation of folk believes (*minkan shinkō* 民間信仰) (e.g., veneration of mountains) with Buddhism. What really matters are not doctrinal teachings, but rather the semiotic links that tie together different locations. Mountains are particularly suitable environments for connecting and merging different cultural discourses.

#### 3 *Engi* Differences

There are also structural differences between the two *engi*.

#### **3.1 Difference of Quality and Aim of the Text: Cosmology and Ideology**

The *Kumano engi* was intended to serve as textual proof of the origins of the land in legal disputes over control of the fiefs. It is for this reason that it displays a strong administrative flavour, in which Ise 伊勢 and Kumano are described as two halves of a single territorial and intellectual body; it thus reflects the intentions of the aristocratic elites who sponsored the creation of this *engi*. On the other hand, *Hikosan engi* focuses on the legitimation of Mount Hiko, which had been emerging as a centre for mountain beliefs in western Japan. Competing with Kumano for the status of 'centre', the *Hikosan engi* emphasises the independence of Mount Hiko. This text was probably composed by Buddhist monks and its historical approach is based on the 'original ground and traces' (*honji suijaku* 本地垂迹) theories. The *Kumano engi* prioritises ideology, while the *Hikosan engi* emphasises cosmology.

#### **3.2 Narrative Differences About Sacred Places: Indigenous Assimilation and Continuity of Foreignness**

Kumano Gongen's origin is in China, while Hikosan Gongen's origin is in the Indian country of Magadha. In the concluding part of the *Kumano engi*, a hunter arrives at Ōyunohara, where he is ordered to stop killing, starts serving the Gongen, and organises rituals on his behalf. On the other hand, the research of the five swords that Hikosan Gongen threw from India does not conclude at Kumano but at Mount Hiko. The act of throwing swords from China to Japan is a recurrent theme in the foundation stories of temples associated with eminent monks such as Kūkai 空海 (774-835) and Saichō 最澄 (767-822). The legend of the sword-throwing is also reported in the *Shintōshū* 神道集 (14th century) edited by an Agui 安居院 monk on Mount Hiei 比叡山 (Shintō Taikei Hensan-kai 1988, 35). After describing the return of Hikosan Gongen to Mount Hiko, the *engi* focuses on the relationships between Hōren 法蓮, the third founder, who saved Mount Hiko from decline, and the sacred place of Usa 宇佐. According to the *Chinzei Hikosan engi* 鎮西彦山縁起 (1572) (Gorai 1984, 474-7), the monk Zenshō 善正 arrived in Japan from the Northern Wei dynasty 北魏 in China and met with the hunter Fujiwara Kōyū 藤原恒 雄. After this encounter, Kōyū repented for killing, received ordination, and became the first monk in Japan. The historical background of these events is the third year of the reign of Emperor Senka 宣化 天皇 (538), which is the same year that Buddhism was introduced to Japan, where it was initially perceived as a foreign element.

#### **3.3 Narrative Differences About Sacred Places: Revelation or Hiding of the Deity's Name**

How is it possible to narrate a sacred place? Kumano Gongen spent five years on Mount Hiko, six years on Mount Ishizuchi, and went to the Kii province after six years. Here the name of the deity is revealed to forests, rivers, and specific locations such as the Iwabuchi valley and Ōyunohara. The deities of mountains and forests venerated by the hunter communities are included within the *honji suijaku* system under the general name of local tutelary deities (*jinushigami*, 地主神). This is the reason why the hunter becomes a religious practitioner for Kumano Gongen. In the *Kumano engi* the revelation of the deity's name plays a pivotal role. On the one hand, Hikosan Gongen spent eighty-two years on Mount Hiko, six years on Mount Ishizuchi, and moved to the Kii province after six years. In his quest for the five swords, the Hikosan Gongen passed from mountain to mountain, but his name is never revealed, and after spending two-thousands years at Iwabuchi valley, he returned to Kyūshū. The main point of this narrative is to reveal a process, not an end. The climax of the *Hikosan engi* is the self-seclusion ritual (*sanrō* 参籠) performed by Gagen 臥験, a disciple of Hōren, in the forty-nine caves that resemble the internal court of the Tuṣita Heaven (Jp. Tosotsuten, 兜率天) or the empowerment (*genriki* 験力) of Hikosan Gongen that transforms Kongō Dōji 金 剛童子 as his messenger. The focus of this text is on Buddhist ascetic practices and the revealing of his name is not important. It exhibits a strong Tendai esoteric influence. The *Kumano engi* emphasises the importance of the last sacred place, Ōyunohara, while the *Hikosan engi* emphasises the Hanñya cave, that is the starting point of the narrative. Even if the vector of narrative is opposite, water becomes a connecting and shared element between riverbeds and caves.

#### **3.4 Differences in the Integration of the Indigenous Deities**

In the case of the encounter between Kumano Gongen and the tutelary deity of that sacred territory, the clash is not intense. On the other hand, the encounter between Hikosan Gongen and the tutelary deities such as Kawara Myōjin 香春明神 or Kitayama 北山 is firstly characterised by strong opposition, which is later transformed into a permission. Kumano Gongen is represented flying in the sky from China to Japan, while Hikosan Gongen realistically arrives by boat, which echoes the historical contacts between Japan and the continent. The *engi* of Kumano integrates different elements through imagination, while the *engi* of Hikosan combines them through logic.

#### **3.5 Differences in Textual Form**

The narrative content of the *Kumano engi* is simpler than that of the *Hikosan engi*, which adds many details about Hikosan Gongen's eastward movement. The time divisions of the *Hikosan engi* are based on exact calculations of the sexagesimal system (*eto* 干支), while the *Kumano engi* is more approximate and reports mistakes, such as the name of Prince Shin written with 信 instead of 晉. Generally speaking, the *Hikosan engi* is more accurate. The *Kumano engi* is usually thought to be the earlier of the two *engi*, but it may in fact be the later in some elements.

#### **3.6 Historical Background**

The sacred landscape, which is described in the *Kumano engi*, is limited to Hongū and does not include Shingū and Nachi, both of which are mentioned in the *Kumanosan ryakki* 熊野山略記 (Eikyō 永 享 2, 1430) in which Ragyō Shōnin 裸形上人 is presented as the patriarch of the "Three Mountains of Kumano" (Kumano Sanzan 熊野三山) (Chiho-shi Kenkyūjo 1957, 425). The *Kumano engi* includes different narrative from other *engi* and illustrated stories (*otogizoshi* 御伽草 子), such as the *Kumano no honji* 熊野の本地. In Kanji 寛治 4 (1090), a monk of Onjōji Temple (園城寺 Jimon-branch 寺門派), Zōyo 増誉 (1032- 1116), became the superintendent (*kengyō* 検校) of Kumano Sanzan after serving as a guide (*sendatsu* 先達) for Emperor Shirakawa 白河 (1053-1129) in a pilgrimage (*gokō* 御幸) to Kumano. The alliance between Onjōji Temple and high aristocracy members marked the golden age of Kumano pilgrimage. On the other hand, an episode dated Kanji 8 (1094), which is reported in the *Chūyūki* 中右記, describes an uprising of the monks of Mount Hiko and the powerful coalition between Hiko and Usa. In Eireki 永暦 1 (1160) Emperor Goshirakawa 後 白河 (1127-1192) dedicated a protective shrine to Kumano Gongen at Higashi-yama 東山 in Kyōto; it appears that Mount Hiko was an auxiliary fief under the control of Kumano. In Ōho 応保 2 (1162) there were tumults in the fiefs of Kumano Hongū in the Kai 甲斐 province, and a petition recorded in the *Chōkan kanmon* 長寛勘文 (1163) makes an explicit reference to the *Kumano engi*. It is probable that the *Kumano engi* was composed after the construction of the new Kumano Shrine on Higashi-yama, and after information about the situation on Mount Hiko was collected. It seems that the *Hikosan ruki* (1213) was written in order to escape from Kumano's yoke, stressing as it does the fact that Hiko's tradition was older than Kumano's. Mount Hiko is associated with the Pure Land of the bodhisattva Miroku 弥勒 as the same as Mount Yoshino 吉野山 and Mount Oomine 大峯山 in the centre of mountain beliefs. At Hikosan some elements of Kumano influence are remained, such as the construction of *sūtra* mound (*kyōzuka* 経塚), the ritual invitation (*kanjō* 勧請) of a deity called Imakumano 新熊野, the engraving of the bodhisattva Seishi's 勢至 Sanskrit letter, main statue for the twenty-third night vigil (*nijūsan-ya*) in a cave. Moon belief (*tsuki shinkō* 月信仰) and Pure Land belief (*jōdo shinkō* 浄土信仰) exhibit a Kumano influence. The historical background had an important impact on the narrative structures of these two *engi*.

#### 4 Kirime no Ōji

#### **4.1 Positioning Kirime no Ōji**

I will now focus on Kirime no Ōji to clarify the transmission and localisation of the *Kumano engi*. In both the *Kumano Gongen gosuijaku engi* and *Hikosan ruki*, Mount Kiribe is the first place reached by the Gongen in Kii province. The *Kumano engi* reports that the Gongen's abode was "a pine tree over the deep pool called Tamanagi 玉那木 on the northern marine coast and the west side of Mount Kiribe". Similarly, the *Hikosan ruki* reports that the Gongen established his residence "over the deep pool of Tamanagi at Mount Kiribe". The term *tamanagi* echoes the belief that divine spirits (*shinrei* 神霊) reside on *nagi* 梛 leaves (Podocampus trees), which were also regarded as the sacred tree (*shinboku* 神木) of Kumano. Mount Kiribe was later called Kirime no Ōji, one of the five *ōji* who were selected as important place among the ninety-nine *ōji* shrine, the retinues and messengers for Kumano Gongen.

In the *Shozan engi* 諸山縁起 (c. 1192) there is an interesting passage about Kirime no Ōji (Sakurai, Hagiwara, Miyada 1975, 102-3). It reports that during a pilgrimage from Ōmine 大峰 to Mount Aitoku 愛 徳山, En no gyōja 役行者 met with an old man at Hosshinmon 発心門. According to the old man there were three sites at the foot of Mount Kumano where ascetics who climbed and descended the mountain were robbed of their getting merit by supernatural powers (*genki no rishō* 験気の利生). The three places were Hosshinmon, Taki no moto 瀧本 (瀧尻?), and Kirime. This was due to the fact that the tutelary deity of Kumano always opposed virtue. The old man explained to En no gyōja that during the ascetic practices on Mount Kumano it was possible to dispel this obstacle-deity (*kōjin*) by throwing soybeans, applying *nagi* leaves on the cap, and reciting the appropriate spells near pine trees. He said that the *nagi* tree corresponds to the symbolic form (*sanmaya-gyō* 三昧耶形) of Kongō Dōji 金剛童子. After accomplishing ascetic practices on Mount Kumano by En no gyōja 役行者, his disciple Jugen 壽元 succeeded the position of ascetic practitioner after nine ascetic retreats on Ōmine, and then moved to Mount Hiko in Kyūshū. According to the *Shozan engi*, Kirime no Ōji corresponds to one of the Kumano obstacle-deities that prevent people's passage at three specific places. The *Ryōbu mondō hishō* 両峯問答秘鈔 reports that the violent-deities (*soranshin* 麁乱神) residing at Haraidono 祓殿, Hosshinmon, Takijiri 滝尻, and Kirime "could be blinded by throwing the scent of soybeans at their eyes" (Nihondaizōkyō Hensankai 1985b, 610). Haraidono was a place for ritual ablutions before entering Hongū, Hosshinmon was the site where pilgrims exchanged their old pilgrimage walking stick (*kongō-tsue* 金剛杖) for a new one, Takijiri was the entrance of the sacred territory and corresponded to the confluence of the Tomita 富田川 and Iwabune rivers 石船川, and Kirime was a veneration place (*haisho* 拝所) on the west coast of the Kii peninsula. Because all these places were important liminal points inhabited by tutelary deities, ascetics had to pacify (*ibu* 慰撫) the *kami* and make abstinence (*kihi* 忌避) to accomplish their ascetic practices. Kirime was regarded as a point of contact between the Kii peninsula and the other world (*takai* 他界).

#### **4.2 Legends about Kirime no Ōji**

According to the *Kumano mōde nikki* 熊野詣日記 of Jūshin'in jitsui 住 心院実意 (Gorai 1976, 422), on the sixth day of the tenth month of Ōei 応永 3 (1427), before passing in front of the Kirime no Ōji shrine, the author made up his face with soybean flour, disguising his human form and imitating the sound of a fox's cry: "kō-kō". Thanks to this trick he could escape the peril. In the *Hōzō Ekotoba* 宝蔵絵 詞 (Bun'an 文安 2, 1446) (Ishizuka 1970, 77-81) there is the story of a monk who was at a service for Kirime no Ōji (*Kiribe no Ōji* 切部王 子 in the original text). Because the Ōji began to dislike the monk, an old pilgrim suggested that he "cover his body from the top of the head with bad smelling sardines (*iwashi* 鰯) and rotting *nagi* leaves" (Ishizuka 1970, 81). The Ōji could not stand the stink, flew into a rage, and cut the nose of the monk, who died immediately. When the Ōji returned to Kumano Gongen and reported the death of the monk, the Gongen immobilised the Ōji, cut his right foot, and exiled him to Mount Kiribe. Nevertheless, the Ōji started stealing the religious benefits (*fukusaiwai* 福幸) of the people who passed by his mountain during the Kumano pilgrimage. Seeing the sorrow of the pilgrims, Kumano Gongen summoned Inari Myōjin 稲荷明神, who decided to send his friend deity Akomachi あこまち to talk with Kirime no Ōji. Akomachi told the Ōji that those people who made up their faces with soybean flour (*mame no ko* まめのこ) were his followers, and he made Ōji promise to not steal the pilgrims' religious benefits. Then Inari Myōjin reported to Kumano Gongen that Kirime no Ōji could not stand the smell of the soybean flour and from that moment all the Kumano pilgrims smeared their faces with soybean flour when passing by Mount Kiribe in order to avoid the attacks of the Ōji. From these narratives it is possible to understand that Kumano pilgrims imitated the cry of the fox because this animal was the emissary of their protective deity (*shugojin* 守護神), Inari Myōjin. Mount Kiribe is "the point of contact between the faith in Kumano and Inari", who agree to protect pilgrims (Nanami 1988, 91). Nevertheless, Kirime no Ōji obeys the words of the local deity Akomachi rather than Inari Myōjin. On the other hand, even if the monk who practiced ascesis at Kumano received divine protection (*kago* 加護) from Kirime no Ōji, in the end he was killed because he harmed a sacred tree of *nagi* leaves and used smelly foods, such as sardines. These legends seem to emphasise the negative attributes of Kirime no Ōji. Nevertheless, it is important to take into account that even Kumano Gongen was offended by the monk's behaviour and consequently punished him. Kirime no Ōji should be regarded as the original tutelary deity of Kumano, who has the power to pacify the fierce deities of nature (*araburu shizen no kami* 荒ぶる自然のカミ) and realise the ascetics' vows.

The visual representation of Kirime no Ōji in the *Kumano mandara* conforms to the legend, as the deity is depicted without the right foot while leaning on a stick (Yamamoto 2012). His external appearance is similar to Seitaka Dōji 制咜迦童子 in the retinue of Fudō Myōō 不動明 王. Like Kirime no Ōji, Seitaka Dōji has the ability to control evil influences and transmits the rough nature of the mountain recesses. The single-foot image of Kirime no Ōji reminds us of the appearance of the mountain monster standing on one leg called Ippon datara 一本ダタラ, who is known in the Western and Southern parts of the Kii Peninsula, the upper part of the Kumano River, and the Totsukawa river 十津川 village in the Yoshino 吉野 province. In a valley close to the area of Kirime no Ōji there is a legend about an ascetic who saved an anthropophagous fierce spirit called *oni* 鬼 by chanting magic spells. According to the *Ryōbu mondō hishō* (Nihondaizōkyō Hensankai 1985b, 610), an ascetic was making a pilgrimage to a valley close to the abode of Kirime no Ōji in order to purify his body when a blue demoness approached the ascetic and confessed to him that she had accumulated a terrible karmic debt because of her habit of devouring human beings. The demoness begged for help from the ascetic, who recited the *Ōnakatomi no harae* 大中臣祓 purification formula and saved her by weaving a big sacred hemp (*ōnusa* 大幣) over her body.

In the vicinity of Kirime no Ōji there was a constant presence of various types of evil creatures. According to the *Shozan engi*, the tutelary deities of Kumano were violent deities (*soranshin*) with a rough temperament who transformed various places into dangerous spots. Nevertheless, the mountain ascetics who were empowered by performing ascetic practices had the ability to control these local deities, transforming them into protective spirits (*shugorei* 守護霊) and using them as tutelary servants, Dharma protectors (*gohō dōji* 護法童 子). On Mount Kiribe ascetics obtained divine powers from Kumano Gongen and Inari Myōjin thanks to which they smashed the obstacles created by local deities and forced them to become protectors of the Dharma at the service of human beings.

#### **4.3 Transformation to Dharma Protector**

The whole Kumano pilgrimage was a ritual. Ablutions (*kori* 垢離) and purificatory rituals (*misogi harae* 禊祓) were diligently conducted at five important five place, Gotai Ōji 五体王子. Ritual drama and dances such as *kagura* 神楽 and *nareko-mai* 馴子舞 were dedicated to the deities. The goal of Kumano pilgrimage was not limited to obtaining rebirth in Amida (Amitābha)'s Pure Land (*gokuraku ōjō no jōdo iri* 極 楽往生の浄土入り); it was also to purify oneself of misdeeds (*metsuzai jōka* 滅罪浄化) (*Ryōbu mondō hishō*, first volume, thirty-ninth chapter). Because of the progressive influence of the Shugendō tradition, elements of hard ascetic practice on mountains and in forests (*sanrin tosō* 山林抖擻) became fundamental to the Kumano pilgrimage. A Shugendō text (*Ozasa hiyōroku* 小笹秘要録) explains that the Kumano pilgrimage imitate the funeral ritual and enact the baby born ritual at the same time. It is also said that the Kumano pilgrims were constantly protected by Dharma protectors, Gohō Dōji (護法童子). In the sixth chapter of the *Keiranshūyōshū* 渓嵐拾葉集, which is dedicated to protective deities (*shinmyōbu* 神明部), it is reported that "in the Kumano pilgrims' language (*michi kotoba* 道詞) men were [called] *sao* サヲ, women *ita* イタ, nuns *soki* ソキ, and monks *sori* ソリ". The term *sao* referred to male shamans (*otoko miko* 男巫), *ita* to female shamans (*miko* 巫女), and even lay pilgrims were said to walk during the pilgrimage to Kumano in a state of possession (*hyōi* 憑依) because Gohō Dōji descended on their bodies in order to protect them. On the other hand, nuns and monks were called *soki* and *sori* because they had shaved (*teihatsu* 剃髪) and round heads (*enchō* 円頂) that were not suitable for possession.

On their way back to the capital, pilgrims stopped at Fushimi Inari 伏見稲荷 on the southern side of Kyōto, where they performed the ritual of the "Dharma protector dismissal" (*gohō okuri* 護法送り). The chapter "Yasuyori's pilgrimage to Kumano" (*Yasuyori Kumano mōde* 康頼熊野詣) in the *Engyō-bon* 延慶本 version of the *Heike monogatari* 平家物語 reports that "after offering paper streamers (*hōhei* 奉

幣) to the *kami*, [Yasuyori] greatly rejoiced, replaced the *nagi* leaves of Kirime no Ōji with the *sugi* 椙 (Cyptomeria) branches of Inari, and obtained the *kurome* 黒目". The changing from the *nagi* leaves to the *sugi* branches symbolised the obtainment of a rebirth in Amida's Pure Land after death and the shift to Inari Myōjin's protection for returning to the capital. The chapter "Kumano pilgrimage" (*Kumano sankei bon* 熊野参詣品) explains that the word *kurome* "refers to the lower upper birth (*jōbon geshō* 上品下生)" level in Amida's Pure Land. The character *me* 目 means 'eye' and, at the same time, a liminal point that marks the contact zone between the visible and the invisible world. Kirime no Ōji represented the entrance from a foreign country to the Kii peninsula, the starting point for approaching the sacred land of Kumano, the liminal point between sea and mountains, the forests where Dharma protectors and Inari Myōjini met and a multileveled extra-ordinariness that produced a variety of legends.

#### **4.4** *Nagi* **and** *goōhoin***, Ox-bezoar Talismans**

At Kirime no Ōji the *nagi* tree was considered a sacred tree. Both the *Kumano Gongen gosuijaku engi* and the *Hikosan ruki* make references to the *nagi*. In the *Shozan engi* the *nagi* leaves are regarded as bodily transformations (*hengeshin* 変化身) of Kongō Dōji that opposes the fierce spirits of the mountain. The term *sanmaya* 三昧耶 (Skt. *samaya*) means the symbolic forms that embody the vows of buddhas and bodhisattvas to save human beings and originally were sacred objects and ritual hand marks related with various buddhas and bodhisattvas. The interpretation of the *nagi* leaves as the symbolic form of Kongō Dōji had a special development of tree worship in the Kii peninsula. In the medieval period Kumano pilgrims used *nagi* leaves in their sleeves and hats as protective talismans (*gofu* 護符) for a safe trip (*dōchū anzen* 道中安全), and warriors did the same with their armour and helmets to dispel adversities (*sainan yoke* 災難除け).

The *nagi* leaves were believed to bring harmony between husband and wife (*fūfu enman* 夫婦円満). Because this leaf is narrow and full of parallel veins, it is easy to tear it horizontally, but it is difficult to do the same vertically. Therefore, it is called "power grass" (*chikara shiba* チカラシバ). Because the word *nagi* echoes the flat calm on the sea (*nagi* 凪), the same leaf was used to protect ocean voyages (*kōkai anzen* 航海安全). Itinerant female preachers (Skt. *bhikkhunī*) of Kumano (Kumano *bikuni* 熊野比丘尼) spread the belief in Kumano by distributing ox-bezoar talismans, *goōhoin* and *nagi* leaves. In the *Kii zoku fudoki* 紀伊続風土記 (1839) it is written that Kumano *bikuni* had their headquarters at Kirime no Ōji (Niita 1970).

It is highly probable that the belief in *nagi* leaves originated in the Kirime no Ōji area and subsequently spread to Kumano. At Hongū the pilgrims were given ox-bezoar talismans together with *nagi* leaves to protect them during the trip. The ox-bezoar talismans displayed the characters of the issuing temple's name in the guise of crows, snakes, hawks, pigeons, or scolopendra, which were seen as emissaries of the Gongen, and were printed on rice paper using charcoal and wooden blocks. The red seal (*shuin* 朱印) of the ox-bezoar talisman was a source of incantatory power and reproduced the shape of a Sanskrit seed-letter (*shuji bonji* 種子梵字), in which resided the spirit of a specific deity. The ox-bezoars, which were melted in the ink, were thought to be powerful healing substances that protected against diseases. *Nagi* leaves and ox-bezoar talismans formed a sort of talismanic set that originated in the religious beliefs focused on the trees of the Kii peninsula. This type of talisman was not simply apotropaic or protective but was also a material representation of the emissaries of Kongō Dōji, Gohō Dōji, and other tutelary deities that contributed to spreading faith in the *ōji* of Kumano as Gongen's divine messengers (*shieki rei* 使役霊).

I would now like to turn to the transition from the Gongen cult to the Ōji cult, and from *engi* to *kagura*.

#### **4.5 Kirime and Kakko-Kirime: The Localisation of Kirime no Ōji**

Sacred dances such as *Nareko-mai* 馴子舞 are performed at Kirime no Ōji and the *Kii zoku fudoki* describes the top of the hill close to the old shrine dedicated to Kirime no Ōji as the 'residence of the drum' (*taiko yashiki* 太鼓屋敷). There was a deep connection between Kirime no Ōji and the drum, which reverberated in the place name where the ritual and festivals (*matsuri* 祭) on the behalf of this deity were held. Nevertheless, the *kagura* dedicated to Kirime no Ōji are few in number.

In the *Ōmoto kagura* 大元神楽 performed at the Ochi 邑智 district (present day Gōtsu 江津 city) in Shimane 島根 Prefecture there is a *kagura* dance called the *kakko-kirime* 鞨鼓切目 (刹面). In the Genna 元和 1 (1615) record of the *Ōmoto mai jukusho no koto* 大元舞熟書 の事 the name of Kirime is written with the homophonous characters *kirime* 切女 (literally, 'cutting woman') (Ōchigun Ōmotokagura Hozonkai 1982, 175). In the present *Ōmoto kagura* the person who performs the role of Kirime no Ōji is called *ichi* 市, which indicates a female shaman (*miko*) that reveals her true identity while narrating the origin of the five elements (*gogyō* 五行). The drum (*kakko* 鞨 鼓) descends from the sky to bestow harmony, while Kirime no Ōji, together with a celestial nymph (*tennyo* 天女), softly rings bells (*suzu* 鈴) and performs a dance to spread peace on earth (*tenka taihei* 天下泰平). A sacred poem (*kami-uta* 神歌) reads: "Stroking the bow's string (*tsuru oto* 弦音) of Tamaki no miya 玉置の宮 at Kumano, demons (*akuma* 悪魔) draw back". This lyric refers to the purificatory function attributed to the sound of the bowstring's vibration. In the *Iwami kagura* 石見神楽, which is performed at the Hamada 浜田 city in Shimane Prefecture, a female shaman at the service of Kirime no Ōji explains the origin of the *kakko* drum that descended from the heavenly plain (*Takamagahara* 高天原) and became the Kumano treasure. When Kirime no Ōji appears, the female shaman dedicates some sacred poems to him and the deity reveals that his name is "trace deity" (*suijaku*). Striking the drum with a drumstick, Kirime no Ōji performs a dance for peace on earth, for the stability of the country (*kokka annon* 国家安穏) and puts a *nagi* leaf in a talisman. The sections dedicated to Kirime in the *Ōmoto kagura* and *Iwami kagura* can be regarded as ballads (*tan* 譚) about the origin of the first Japanese drum, the feminisation of Kirime (whose name is written as *kirime* 切女, 'cutting woman'), and sacred dances for the realisation of the vows (*gan jōju* 願成就) thanks to the drum percussion performed by female shamans. Even if the *kakko* was a Chinese percussion instrument played in Japanese court music (*gagaku* 雅楽), in the *Iwami kagura* 石見神楽 it is depicted as an ordinary drum. The peculiarity of the *Iwami kagura* ballad is that the origin of the drum is revealed by Kirime no Ōji. This feature points to the creative transformations of the Kumano Gongen cult that took place when it spread by various activities of nuns called *bikuni* and male preachers (*oshi* 御師).

#### **4.6 Kirume and Mirume: The Localisation of Kirime no Ōji**

Every year in November in the Okumikawa 奥三河 area (Aichi 愛 知 Prefecture) there is a ritual (*Hana matsuri* 花祭) called '*kagura* of the eleventh month' (*Shimotsuki kagura* 霜月神楽).2 The most important deities in the *Shimotsuki kagura* are Kirume no Ōji and Mirume no Ōji 見目王子. In this area the name of Kirime has slightly changed into Kirume. *Hana matsuri* were probably produced by Shugendō practitioners who came from Kumano and Suwa 諏訪 areas in the late medieval period. The model for the present *Hana matsuri*, which lasts for one day and one night, was the early Edo-period (1600-1868) *Ōkagura* 大神楽, which performed on four days at the special village involving various areas. It seems that the Shugendō practitioner Manzōin Suzuki family 万蔵院鈴木家 from the Toyone 豊 根 village and his disciple Rinzōin Moriya family 林蔵院守屋家 were involved in organising *Ōkagura* (Yamamoto 1993, 98). The *Ōkagura*'s aims were the realisation of vows, the divine protection of newborns during growth (*umareko* 生まれ子), gratitude for reaching adult age

2 The concept of *shimotsuki kagura* is discussed in Suzuki 2011.

and becoming a member of the ritual group of the village (*kiyomari* 清まり), entrance into the sixty years old class-age, and pray for rebirth in the Pure Land (*jōdo iri* 浄土入り). *Ōkagura* was an important rite of passage for individuals through these three initiation-stages (Yamamoto 1993, 174).

Kirume plays the role of chief-deity (*shushin* 主神) in the *Ōkagura* and *Hana matsuri*. The first two written sources that mention Kirume in relation to these sacred representations are "Kirume Ōkami no inori" きるめ王神祈 section in the *Mikagura nikki* 御神楽日記 (Tenshō 天正 9, 1581) (Toyone-mura Kyōiku Iinkai 1985, 15-20), and the *Kagura goto* 神楽事 (Keichō 慶長 12, 1607) (Toyone-mura Kyōiku Iinkai 1985, 20- 32). During the *Hana matsuri*, cutting-paper ritual decorations (*yubuta* 湯蓋; *byakkai* 白開) are placed over a cauldron (*kama* 竈) in the middle of the dancing stage (*maido* 舞処) where the religious practitioner (*hanadayū* 花太夫) makes a hot water ritual (*yudate*) in order to offer hot water to the deities. Various dances take place around this cauldron and at the end purification and rebirth (*umare kiyomari* 生 まれ清まり) are achieved, with hot water being sprinkled on the people. In the first moments of the ritual performers purify their bodies under a waterfall and collect the water for the ceremony. Before entering the ritual lodge (*hana no yado* 花宿) religious practitioners make purificatory rituals such as the *Takane matsuri* 高嶺祭り and the *Tsujigatame* 辻固め outside to dispel evil influences and, once inside, the sequence of sacred dances follows this order: *Kami-iri* 神入 り; *Kirume no Ōji*; *Ama no matsuri* 天の祭り; *Shime oroshi* 注連おろし; *Yamadate* 山立て; *Shima matsuri* 島祭り; *Narimono* 鳴物; *Kamado harai* 竈祓い; *Yudate*. The Shintō priest (*negi* 禰宜), nowadays the *hanadayū*, brings masks and a staff with sacred strips of cutting paper (*gohei* 御幣) to the 'deities' room' (*kanbeya* 神部屋) where he presents offerings, makes magic gestures for protecting the body (*kuji goshinbō* 九 字護身法), and invites *kami* and buddhas to descend (*kami oroshi* 神降 ろし) reciting invocatory formulae (*saimon* 祭文). The first deity that is invited to take a place within the paper strips for lodging the *kami* (*kamiza* 神座) during the *kami-iri* ritual is Mirume. The second is Kirume, who stands in opposition to the first one (Hayakawa [1930] 1971, 103). The deities that are considered to be particularly important for the *Hana matsuri* are the Mirume of the Sakauba 坂宇場 village, the Dragon King (Ryūō 龍王), and the mountain ascetics called *hijiri* 聖 of the Futto 古戸 village. Mirume is not only enshrined on *kagura* sites but also in front of few shrines specifically dedicated to his cult (Suzuki 2018, 85).

After inviting Kirume to descend to the *kamiza*, the paper strips are soaked in a sake cup and used to sprinkle sake on the bodies. In the past this ritual was performed after placing a white cotton curtain along the three corners of the *kamiza*, keeping the open side facing the northwest (*inui* 戌亥) (Hayakawa [1930] 1971, 109). Kirume is understood to be a deity who comes from outside and protects the *kagura* performers as a supreme deity. On the other hand, Mirume lodged within the five-coloured paper strips (*goshiki hei* 五色弊) dangling from the ceiling of the *kagura* site and watched over the accomplishment of the entire ritual. Kirume is an invisible deity that is invited thanks to the magic power of invocatory formulae, while Mirume is visible thanks to the five-colours paper strips in which he resides. Kirume has the authority of a visiting deity (*raihōjin* 来訪神) coming from abroad, while Mirume manifests his omnipresence inside as well as outside the village. The *kiru* 切る and *miru* 見る parts of their names refer to the capability to cut (*kiru*) demons and visualise (*miru*) deities. They both constitute the centre of the *Hana matsuri* because of their enormous magical powers.

#### **4.7** *Ama no matsuri* **and** *Yudate***: Ritual of Heaven and Hot Water**

A feature of the *Hana matsuri* is that the ritual invitation of Kirume no Ōji and the *Ama no matsuri* dance take place at the same time. During the invitation of Kirume no Ōji in the Kobayashi 小林 village, a *negi* climbs up to the inner space between the ceiling and the roof of the *hana no yado* holding a five-coloured paper strip and a longhandled spear (*kenboko* 剣鉾). In this place he performs the *Ama no matsuri* and presents to the deity a set of seventy-five offerings (*shichijūgozen* 七十五膳) together with a sacred torch (*tōmyō* 燈明). Until the following day, when the ritual ends, these two *negi* take care of the fire in turn. In the past, the man who watched over the fire behind the ceiling during the night was often possessed by the deity (*kamigakari* 神がかり) due to the smoke and scarcity of oxygen. The *Shichijūgozen* ritual serves to venerate the mountain spirit, which is portrayed as a long-nosed goblin (*tengu* 天狗), providing offerings to all the mountain deities. On Mount Akiba 秋葉山 in the Enshū 遠州 province (present-day Shizuoka 静岡 Prefecture) during the night of the fifteenth day of December a secret ritual is performed in order to present *shichijūgozen* offerings to Sanjakubō Daigongen 三尺坊大権現 and all his retinue. When the last offering cup is donated to the deity, the wind starts blowing from the mountain. All the violent deities of the mountain are tamed thanks to the offerings on the behalf of the *tengu* that take place during this Shugendō ritual. Seventy-five (75, *shichijūgo*) is a symbolic number referring to the multitude of deities in the mountain area and to the concentration of mountainous forces. The *Shichijūgozen* ritual shows that the terrific power of nature still manifests itself through Kirume no Ōji and the seventy-five deities of the mountain that are venerated on this occasion.

After the ritual invitation of Kirume no Ōji during the *Shime oroshi*, the names of the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the five directions (Yakushi 薬師, Kannon 観音, Amida 阿弥陀, Shaka 釈迦) are invoked and a sacred rope (*shime*) is symbolically set up. The term *shime* has the important meaning of 'protective deity' (*shinmei* 神明). Then, five Cleriya trees (*sakaki* 榊) are placed at the five cardinal points of the site. This ritual is called 'creation of the mountain' (*yama tate* 山立 て) and serves to transform the ritual site into an imaginary mountain. The sacred dances continue from the 'purification of the cauldron' (*kama barai* 竈ばらい) to the hot water ritual (*yudate*) during which hot water is offered to all the deities and for purificatory purposes. At this moment the hot water is humanised and after this it is called hot water father (*yu no chichi* 湯の父) and hot water mother (*yu no haha* 湯の母). This hot water ritual, which brings purification and rebirth (*umare kiyomari*), also has strong ties with Kumano. The invocatory formulae (*saimon*) of Kumano Gongen and Kirume no Ōji are recited during the *Yudate* ritual. During the *Yudate* performed in the *Ōmoto kagura* at Iwami and the *Izanagi-ryū* いざなぎ流 tradition at Tosa 土佐 specific invocatory formulae and divine poems are recited in order to create a conflation (*mitate* 見立て) between the hot water used in the ritual and the hot water of Kumano (Suzuki 2012, 247-69). Originally Kumano was called *yuya* ユヤ (literally, 'hot water field') and the sacred place at Hongū was called Ōyunohara 大湯 原 because of the geographic and semiotic connections with the thermal springs (*onsen* 温泉) in the area. In the term *yu* there is also the meaning of 'preserving purity to serve the deities' (*itsuku* 齋) that underlines its sacred nature. Thanks to the diffusion of the *Yudate* ritual and its various meanings, the Kumano Gongen cult spread far.

#### **4.8 Mt. Shirayama: The Pure Land Entrance**

The term *kirume* キルメ is deeply related to the origins of the *Hana matsuri*. According to the description of *Ōkagura* in *Mikagura nikki*  (1581), the "room entry" (*heya-iri* 部屋入り) ritual was repeated three times during which the invitation of Kirume no Ōji took place. The *Heya-iri* consisted of "entering the room holding a wooden staff with pendant strips of cutting paper (*gohei*) to pray toward the five directions". Thanks to the supernatural power of the *negi*, Kirume no Ōji was induced to escort the souls of the devotees (*ryūgansha* 立願 者) toward the Pure Land of bliss (*hana no jōdo* 花の浄土). In the description of "Heya-iri" section in *Kagura goto* (1607), the *negi* stood in front of the people who prayed for rebirth in the Pure Land. He recited invocatory formulae and invited all the deities of the five directions while chanting the name of Kirume no Ōji as a specific ceremony to praise this deity (*tonozuke* 殿付). After the last *Heya-iri*, there was the ritual of 'bridge veneration from afar' (*hashi no haiken* 橋の 拝見) during which the souls of the devotees crossed the Sanzu River (Sanzugawa 三途川, river between this world and other world) and entered the Pure Land in Mount Shirayama 白山 (literally, 'white mountain'). The invocations say:

Behind a screen of golden characters [*konji* 金字] the admirable ascetic called Matashirō 又四郎 descends from the sky and enters the room of a monk called Kegyō Shōnin 加行上人 [ascetics under practice] to take care of Matashirō, to take care of Matashirō.

Villagers entered Mount Shirayama as the imaginary Pure Land. Kirume no Ōji descended from Heaven with majestic forms after being ritually invited, and Kirume no Ōji faced Matashirō. But who was Matashirō? He can be interpreted as the supreme guide to escort the souls of the devotees to the Pure Land entrance or a visual representation of the religious concept of becoming a buddha in this actual body (*sokushin jōbutsu* 即身成仏) among lay people. According to the invocatory formula of *Hana no hongen* 花のほんげん (Hayakawa [1930] 1972, 437), the devotee who wants to be reborn in the Pure Land takes the seventy-five offerings (*shichijūgo zen*), overcomes all the obstacles and sufferings, safely crosses the Sanzu River, and gives these offerings to a buddha called Matashirō who is waiting in the central court of the golden *maṇḍala* (*ōgon no mandara* 黄金の曼荼羅). Yamamoto Hiroko 山本ひろ子 supposes that anointing rituals (*kanjō* 灌頂) such as the *Jingi kanjō* 神祗灌頂 or the *Kechien kanjō* 結縁灌頂 were performed in the recesses of Mount Shirayama. Nevertheless, Mount Shirayama had various meanings. It could be an abode for buddhas and *kami*, a mandalised territory, the other world, or the source of everything. The *kagura* stage was symbolically equated with a mountain (*yama* 山) and in the *Ōkagura* there was a sequence of sacred dances such as the *Yama odate* 山を立て, *Yama wo matsuru beshi* 山をまつるべし, *Yama wo tazune* 山をたづね, or the *Yama wo urikai koto* 山を売買事 in which *oni* (fierce deity of mountains) came out of the mountain (see the text of *Kagura goto*). Nature, and in particular rough mountains, were represented as the fundamental source of the *oni*'s power. For the Shugendō practitioners the *kagura* site represented a mountain for performing Shugendō ascetic practices who were empowered and could control multitudes of spirits and deities as well as bring believers' vows to fruition.

Kirume and Mirume were personifications of fierce deities in mountains. They were transformed into serving spirits (*shieki rei* 使 役霊) that cut (*kiru* 切る) evil influences (*mamono* 魔物) and look (*miru* 見る) new worlds. Kurume and Mirume became the complementary deities with the functions of cutting and looking. The foreign deity Kirume no Ōji arrived at Kumano and formed a whole with the local tutelary deity realising the vows of the devotees. Kirume no Ōji combines the power of Buddhism with the power of nature. This hermeneutic discourse favoured a transition toward a different worldview that reconstructed the fierce power of nature through a Buddhist lens (Suzuki 2018, 9-10).

#### **4.9 Transformation of Ox-bezoar Talismans**

Ox-bezoar talismans (*goōhōin* 牛王宝印) are intimately related to Kumano. Toward the end of the Heian period Kumano pilgrims received ox-bezoar talismans and *nagi* leaves as protective talismans for safe voyage (*dōchū shugo* 道中守護). The text of "Kumano Gongen no Koto" 熊野権現事 in the *Shintō shū* (Shintō Taikei Hensankai 1988, 35) reports that "the supernatural power (*gen* 験) is the jewel (*hōin* 宝 印) for the pilgrimage". Therefore, ox-bezoar talismans were material proof of the Kumano pilgrimage that absorbed its force. The site for distributing these talismans was called Yuko 油戸 ('oil door') and was close to Hongū. This place was also called 'turtle's tail' (Kame no o 亀の尾). The *Ryōbu mondō hishō* reports that Yuko was the site where the turtle poured oil from its tail. It is possible that Kame no o was regarded as the place from which the essence of the mountain emanated. Ōyunohara at Kumano Hongū corresponded to the diamond altar (*kongō dan* 金剛壇), where the Buddha reached enlightenment in India, and Mount Ōmine was Vulture Peak (Ryōjusen 霊鷲山), where the Buddha preached the Dharma and which flew from India to Japan. The entire territory of Ōmine was compared to a turtle of which Yoshino was the head and Kumano the tail. The ox-bezoar talismans condensed the sacred authority (*reii* 霊威) of Ōmine and Kumano, which were equated to the land of the original Dharma in India, and which spread to various regions and resulted in multiple interpretations.

As protective objects, the ox-bezoar talismans dispelled evil influences, cured diseases, brought prosperity to the crops, and were used as writing paper for religious oaths (*kishōmon* 起請文). In the Shugendō tradition, the two first characters (Goō 牛玉, 牛王) of the ox-bezoar talismans are visually disassembled as 牛 + 王 = 生 + 土 to form the word *ubusuna gami* 産土神 ('local deity') (*Shugen hiyō gi* 修験 秘要義, in Nihondaizōkyō Hensankai 1985a, 675-6). Therefore, the oxbezoar talismans served to transform violent local deities (*ubusuna gami*) into protectors of the Dharma and allies of the Shugendō practitioners, who used them as possessing deities to deliver oracles (*takusen* 託宣). According to this process, the local obstacle-deities took refuge in the teachings of the Buddha and became the Dharma protectors (*gohōshin* 護法神) or guardians of temples (*garanshin* 伽藍神).

In the *Hana matsuri* of Okumikawa there is a different development of the ox-bezoar talismans. Concerning this, it is interesting to take into account two invocatory formulae, *Goō watashi* 牛玉渡し and *Shime no goō* 注連の牛玉, of the *Ōkagura* that were performed until Ansei 安政 2 (1855). According to the text of *Kagura goto* (1607), the first day was dedicated to the ritual construction of the mountain, which was followed by the *Umareko* 生子 ritual for childbirth. In the end there was the *Bukki ryō no shime* ぶっきりょうのしめ ritual that served to finish the mourning (*bukki* 服忌) period and marked the birth of new children. The *Bukki ryō no shime* invocatory formula revealed the reason of the entire ritual. At the end of the second day the *Wakago no shime* 若子の注連 invocatory formula is chanted again and the *Shiki no goō watashi* しきの牛玉渡し ritual concluded the performance. During the distribution of the ox-bezoar talismans (*goō watashi*) the performers chanted these verses three times:

Prostrating myself in homage, I make penitence for the harmful behaviour of the six faculties. I request the divine empowerment of Hachidai Kongō Dōji [*namu kimyō chōrai zange zange rokkon shōjo Hachidai Kongō Dōji shintō kaji sanpen* 南無帰命頂礼懺悔懺 悔六根清浄 八大金剛童子 神道加持].

We can suppose that the first day of the performance corresponded to the *Umareko* ritual (or 'placement of the child under divine protection', *miko iri* 神子入り) and the second day to the *Kiyomari* 清ま り ritual (or 'initiation to adulthood', *seinen kai* 成年戒) (Yamamoto 1993, 168). The chanting of the *Goō watashi* 牛玉渡し is the same of the recitation "*Oshime ni Hachidai Kongō Dōji* 御注連に八大金剛童子", which the Shugendō practitioners chanted while climbing mountains with special surplices (*kesa* 袈裟) made of sacred ropes of twisted paper (*kamikoyori no shime* 紙縒の注連). Thanks to the divine protection of Hachidai Kongō Dōji, which resided in the sacred rope, the Shugendō practitioners performed the symbolic mountain climbing as a process at the end of which they would be purified and united with Buddha. Yamamoto Hiroko analyses the songs of the *Shime no goō* 注連牛玉 ritual, which are reported in the *Shoshin kanjō dan* 諸 神勧請段 of *Suwa kagura* 諏訪神楽, and supposes that the term "oxbezoar" (*goō*) was referred to the paper surplice (*koyori-kesa* 紙縒袈 裟) of the Shugendō practitioners (Yamamoto 1993, 169).

During the *Hana sodate* 花育て ritual of the *Hana matsuri* at Yamauchi 山内 (Aichi prefecture) two people appear to bring flowers with ritual wigs (*kōkazura* 神鬘) on the head and a paper strip with the writing "hanging sash" (*kake-obi* 懸け帯) around the neck; this symbolic use of paper strips to symbolise other items of clothing seems to echo the use of the word *goō* as a substitute for *kesa*. In the opening the *Shime wo hiraku* 注連を開く ritual, pollution (*kegare* 穢れ) is purified and the person who performs the ritual of the sacred rope is possessed. In the end he performs ascetic practices on the mountain – like a Shugendō practitioner – in order to obtain new powers and regenerate life (Suzuki 2020, 33-59). *Kagura* is a *mise-en-scène* of the mountain ascetic practices during which the practitioner is protected by ox-bezoar talismans (*goō*), which correspond to Dharma protectors (*gohō*) and also to Kongō Dōji. After the mountain entry (*yama-iri* 山入り) ritual the practitioner performs once again the *Hana no jōdo* ritual to underline his future achievement of rebirth in Amida's Pure Land. All these cases show that a great variety of meanings are attached to the ox-bezoar talismans.

#### 5 Conclusions

The Kumano cult presents various streams. A continuous creative power, which started with *engi* and developed to *kagura*, linked the Kumano cult with the Shugendō tradition and spread it to different areas. The Kumano cult developed different characteristics according to different localisation, and it has a unifying logic that brings together heterogeneous elements, *kami* and buddhas, foreign and local lands, female shamans and Shugendō practitioners, *engi* and *kagura*. It embraces multiple and complex combinations as well as different hermeneutic discourses. The most important way to analyse Japanese culture is to focus on the imagination of hybridity.

#### **Bibliography**

Chiho-shi Kenkyūjo 地方史研究所 (ed.) (1957). *Kumano*熊野. Tōkyō: Geirisha.

Spirit Possession by Gohō). *Bungei gengo kenkyū. Bungeihen* 文藝言語研 究・文藝篇, 13, 70-146.

**Itineraries of an Anthropologist** Studies in Honour of Massimo Raveri edited by Giovanni Bulian and Silvia Rivadossi

# The Multilocality of *Satoyama* **Landscape, Cultural Heritage and Environmental Sustainability in Japan**

Giovanni Bulian

Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia

**Abstract** Using the versatile concept of multilocality, the paper analyses the close interrelation between Japanese landscape, cultural heritage and social construction of spatial meaning in the context of *satoyama* (mountain village). Originally intended as a peripheral space of subsistence within the rural economy, *satoyama* is considered today one of the main expressions of the Japanese local culture guided by identity mechanisms and based on complex discursive constructions of native place-based and environmental rhetoric. At the same time, the *satoyama* landscape has also become a transnational symbol promoted by the Japanese government which is used in national and international research programmes for environmental sustainability. The sense of multilocality of the *satoyama* landscape is here interpreted in its double identity value that can be put to a wide variety of political and cultural constructions of place.

**Keywords** Landscape. Japan. Satoyama. Cultural heritage. Environmental sustainability.

**Summary** 1 Introduction. – 2 Defining a Landscape. – 2.1 *Satoyama* as Cultural Model. – 2.2 The *Satoyama* Landscape as an Environmental Model. – 3 The Concept of *Satoyama* in a Global Context. – 4 Conclusions.

**Ca' Foscari Japanese Studies 14 | Religion and Thought 4** e-ISSN 2610-9417 | ISSN 2610-900X ISBN [ebook] 978-88-6969-527-8 | ISBN [print] 978-88-6969-528-5

**Peer review | Open access 111** Submitted 2021-01-26 | Accepted 2021-03-16 | Published 2021-10-18 © 2021 | cb Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution alone **DOI 10.30687/978-88-6969-527-8/006**

#### 1 Introduction

Evocative, aesthetic and sensuous geographies characterised by intensely undulating mountainous areas, anthropised territories or the convoluted topographies of the coastline continue to be at the centre of a wide network of narratives focusing on the environmental and cultural history of the Japanese archipelago (Berque 1997; Mather, Karan, Iijima 1998; Totman 2014). The iconic rice fields have historically defined the "Japanese space" (Raveri 2006) as a symbol of national and social identity (Ohnuky-Thierney 1993), while the highly aestheticised mountains have played a key role in several religious imageries and ritual practices (Grapard 1982; Miyake 2005; Raveri 2006a; 2006b), also becoming a dominant symbol in contemporary mass culture (Earhart 2011). Regardless of the perspective from which it is approached, the Japanese territory still represents a complex, polysemic and ambiguous reality, often the object of social and cultural negotiations that place it within a broad debate that intertwines the most disparate humanistic and social disciplines focusing on the perception on space (Mather, Karan, Iijima 1998).