When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane's Ethnography of the Other World

Notes

Notes All Japanese-language works are published in Tokyo unless otherwise indicated. Introduction 1. See Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830 (Stanford , Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1952 and 1969); Donald Keene, Some Japanese Portraits (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1978); Carmen Blacker, “Supernatural Abductions in Japanese Folklore,” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. XXVI-2 (1967): 111–147; or Carmen Blacker, The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975). 2. I am using nativism as a general rubric that includes the Tokugawa Japanese kokugaku movement. Kokugaku is a specific term designating a number of different schools in Japan during the Tokugawa period that held in common a focus on Japanese antiquity. 3. These are the amatsukami, a distinct classification of Shinto kami most often associated with creation myths. 4. Hirata Atsutane, “Kodò taii,” in HAZ, vol. 1, 22. This work is particularly valuable when studying Atsutane’s claims for Japanese superiority, and it provides a general overview of his basic polemic, as the title, Essence of the Ancient Way, would suggest. 5. The various types of Chinese studies will be explained in detail elsewhere . 6. The most common image of the tengu today would be the long-nosed, red-faced, supernatural trickster who is usually dressed like a yamabushi. Some versions might even be winged and have birdlike facial features. The Chinese characters literally mean “dog from the heavens,” and in the ancient Chinese Records of the Historian (Shi ji) (first century BCE), and the ancient Japanese Chronicle of Japan (Nihon shoki) (720 CE), the word appears to refer to a type of shooting star that was said to be a kind of dog when it landed on earth. By the Heian period, as evidenced by the word’s usage in the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), it had come to mean a supernatural trickster living in the mountains. We can see by the early twelfth century Tales of Time Now Past (Konjaku monogatarishu) that the word had developed an association with deluded Buddhist priests who worshiped tengu and eventually turned into them. The Kamakura period saw a clear association of tengu with wicked Buddhist priests, with even the most eminent monks depicted as corrupt birdlike tengu in the well-known Tengu zòshi from 1296 (see Wakabayashi Haruko, “Tengu zòshi ni miru Kamakura bukkyò no ma to tengu,” in Emaki ni chûsei o yomu, ed. Gomi Fumihiko and Fujiwara Yoshiaki (Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1995)). From that time on, tengu came to be more closely associated with yamabushi and their practices. Eventually in popular religion tengu even came to be recognized as mountain kami. Atsutane’s specific descriptions and ideas concerning tengu will be explained in detail in the next chapter. For more on the fascinating history of tengu, see Komatsu Kazuhiko, ed., Tengu to Yamamba, in Kaii no minzokugaku 5 (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2000); or Chigiri Kòsai, Tengu no kenkyû (Hara Shobò, 1975). 7. Although supernatural has proven to be a particularly problematic term, culturally and temporally determined as it is, I beg my readers’ indulgence on this issue. I trust they will be aware that many Japanese of this time period, in particular Atsutane, believed in the existence of tengu and other such creatures not found in our daily experiences, and therefore might have considered them to be more natural than supernatural. I use the term with the sensibility of a twenty-first-century American who does not believe in ghosts but who has a healthy fear of them under the proper circumstances. 8. This intellectual movement, founded by Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), is a “new nativism,” an attempt to glorify rural Japanese culture spurred on by fears of urbanization in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has been criticized for attempting to create an essential image of Japan based on stereotypes of agricultural communities. 9. This association of Atsutane with emperor worship is certainly not without basis, but it is by no means his defining life’s work. In fact his thoughts about the centrality of the emperor were understood to be directed at political objectives within Japan, not toward an image of Japan on the world stage. The circumstances surrounding his exile to the countryside bear this out. In 1840 he was ordered to leave Edo and stop publishing. Early the next year he returned to his home province of Dewa where he died two years later, devastated that he had fallen from eminence and could...