The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan

Introduction

introduction Death is an event of cataclysmic separation. The deceased, once appropriately disposed of, cannot be seen, touched, conversed with. So we use rituals and ritual objects to help bridge the gulf, suture the wound to the collective body of family and of community, and overcome a sense of powerlessness in the face of death. This study looks at the way these special objects functioned in Japanese death rituals of the early medieval period. The first half examines case studies, culled from written records, that illustrate how elite members of Japanese society negotiated the boundary between the living and the dead through their funerals and memorial services. The second half deals with various types of funerary structures, painted and sculpted images, and other ritual articles that served in such negotiations, and analyzes their crucial roles in the performance of mortuary rituals. Ritual Studies “Ritual” is a charged concept, and one that has been well explored by anthropologists , religious historians, and scholars in other disciplines. Much has been written about death rituals, but this is the first study in any language to analyze the critical role of material objects in the practice of medieval Japanese death rituals. In the West, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ritual became an area of special interest to scholars in the newly developing field of anthropology.1 In the mid-1970s a fully interdisciplinary discussion of ritual emerged and the field of ritual studies was born, engaging scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including religious studies, anthropology, theology, history , performance studies, literature, and the visual arts. Among these later scholars, S. J. Tambiah, Catherine Bell, and others have noted that words not 2 Introduction only describe rituals but are part of the performance itself.2 Likewise, I argue that ritual objects are not simply visual appendages to the ritual sequence but are part of the structure and performance. My way of interpreting the objects that accompany the rituals of death in this study is similar to Jessica Rawson’s characterization of the ritual function of Shang and Zhou bronzes in China: “. . . all rituals communicate through physical structures and objects. Indeed, the whole impact of a ritual must depend on a close fit between the objects, physical structures and location of the ritual and the ritual procedures that are used.”3 Physical objects, then, are crucial components of the actions performed . As the real focus of my study is not the rituals themselves so much as the relationship between the rituals and physical objects, I use the word “ritual ” in its broadest and most obvious sense, as a series of prescribed actions that form part of a religious ceremony. I also employ the terms “ritual” and “ceremony” more or less interchangeably throughout. Certainly, much more could be done to elucidate the construction and meaning of the rituals themselves , but I leave this to other scholars. Material Culture Scholarship on the material things that people use in their daily lives is relatively recent, much of it written in the twentieth century. Broadly defined as “all data directly relating to visible or tangible things such as tools, clothing, or shelter which a person or persons have made,”4 material culture is an approach relevant for most disciplines in the humanities, but one of special interest to scholars in anthropology, archaeology, and art history, because artifacts are essential source material in these disciplines. Although objects play important roles in forms of religious activity, historians of religion have tended, in general, to privilege religious texts over images and artifacts.5 Scholars in Japan became interested in material culture in the 1970s as a way to better engage in the debate between Marxist and non-Marxist economic historians.6 Their publications ultimately helped to make material culture and the lifestyles of common people acceptable subjects of academic study in history and related disciplines.7 Scholarship on the material culture of death in any period of Japan’s history is negligible. But the topic of death per se in premodern Japan has been well researched , and many such studies include details about the built structures and ritual objects that accompany the dead. Although these publications straddle the line between ritual studies and studies of material culture, none has focused on the interaction between material culture and the rituals of death. Among the most comprehensive studies on death are Haga Noboru’s Sôgi no rekishi (1970) and Gorai Shigeru’s Sô to kuyô (1992). Both trace Japanese funeral practices...