Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan (review)

Andrew Watsky's monograph is a model art history, interweaving formal analysis of the visual and material elements of a composite architectural site with an erudite exploration of the larger context of patronage, production, and use. My primary concern is that the book will not be as widely read as it deserves to be. The problem is that Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan contains so much more than is advertised. The title introduces the three elements foregrounded in this iteration of Watsky's study, based on his 1994 Princeton University Ph.D. dissertation. "Chikubushima" is the name of an island propitiously located in Lake Biwa, home to one of several structures that the author analyzes in detail. "The sacred arts" emerges as Watsky's analytical modus operandi. And "Momoyama" is of course the name of that exhilarating period in Japan's premodern history much employed by Japanese cultural and art historians. It is my contention that three much more compelling issues—the patronage of the Toyotomi, one of the most influential warrior families of the period; the notion of shōgon, or "adornment that proclaims and celebrates the divine" (p. 36); and the mobility and modular qualities of premodern (rather than only Momoyama) art and architecture—make this a landmark study that deserves the attention of not just art historians of Japan, but a wider audience of historians and cultural scholars from around the globe.

Let us examine each element of the title in turn. Chikubushima and its Benzaiten Hall are indeed the focus of the book's art historical enquiry, but the larger and more interesting story is Toyotomi Hideyoshi's prodigious construction of architectural ensembles in and around Kyoto with overlapping memorial and political functions. Most of these massive architectural projects are lost today, but Watsky describes them and the ramifications of their production in vivid prose and with full explanation of historical precedents. The author's description of Hideyoshi's construction of Hōkōji and its Great Buddha in Kyoto, for example, becomes an opportunity to analyze Tōdaiji and its Great Buddha in Nara. This in turn leads to explanation of the rituals deployed by Hideyoshi at Hōkōji with personal, familial, and national salvific objectives. Most prominent is the "Ritual of One Thousand Monks" which was held frequently after the construction of Hōkōji; Watsky argues that this rite "not only constituted veneration for the Toyotomi ancestors but also produced benefits for Japan, which cast Hideyoshi in the historically resonant role of sponsor of Buddhism's protective powers" (p. 84).

It is not only Hideyoshi's desire for power and recognition that is on display here, but his belief in the possibility of intervention in the world of deities and deceased spirits. This is particularly clear in Watsky's discussion of another key site, the memorial temple Shōunji that Hideyoshi built after the death of his beloved toddler son, Sutemaru. Watsky carefully argues that one of the core structures of this memorial temple was a small but lavishly decorated temporary building used, perhaps, to mark one of Sutemaru's death anniversaries. The Toyotomi family, after the death of Hideyoshi, dismantled the structure and relocated it to the island of Chikubushima, where it became the core of a larger ensemble structure dedicated to the worship of the Buddhist deity Benzaiten. These acts of construction and reconstruction lead us, in the end, to Chikubushima in Lake Biwa, but it is less this small island than the grand acts of patronage and production that occupy our attention.

The next key phrase of the title, "the sacred arts," refers to the attempts of the Toyotomi and their peers to affect spiritual destinies using art, or "how the secular sought to transform the sacred" (p. 50). Though "sacred" is briefly defined, "secular," unfortunately, is not, and the exact relationship between these apparently oppositional terms is never explored with reference to any kind of useful theoretical...