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C H A P T E R 1 Constructing Japanese Identity Senkyō ibun Ethnography of the Afterlife Carmen Blacker’s translation of Senkyò ibun is “Strange Tidings from the Realm of Immortals.” The word “immortals” is one standard translation for the Chinese character sen commonly found in combination in Japanese as sennin.1 The tradition of the so-called immortal comes from classical Daoism. In its most general sense, it refers to a man who may or may not leave civilization for the mountains, but who performs special ascetic and/or ritual practices for the purpose of attaining a transcendent state of being. Atsutane’s text will extensively refine that definition into a specific class of humanity, and that refinement will be discussed in detail in later chapters. For now it will suffice to identify the immortals of the title as a small class of Japanese males with religious aspirations. Atsutane’s realm of immortals is an actual physical space, the sparsely populated mountains of Japan. Specific mountains are named in the text, many of which are still centers of ascetic or cultic activity. This realm also consists of spiritual space, but to reach the spiritual space the physical space must first be traversed. The “strange tidings” of the title comes from the fact that the book is Atsutane’s retelling of approximately eight months of interviews with a Japanese boy who claimed to have been spirited away to the mountains by one of their immortal inhabitants. The descriptions of that world given by the boy Torakichi and recorded and commented upon by Atsutane were not all fantastic; many of them were quite ordinary. Many of his other stories about that world were not new but rather were “customized” retellings of legends from past ages. The novelty of Torakichi’s strange tales, what made them truly different, was that they were supposedly firsthand reports from a living person who was willing to submit to questioning about them. There has been a tendency to think of this work as a collection of ghost stories or folk tales, but that is mistaken. The reader who seeks to 18 Constructing Japanese Identity find only weird or traditional tales will come away disappointed, as Carmen Blacker can verify. This is not to say that these stories do not contain ghosts, demons, monsters, and magic; they do, and in healthy portions. Nevertheless, these are not stories meant to entertain the village folk, the neighbors, or even the nuclear family on a dark and stormy night. These stories have been collected by Atsutane as part of a scholarly endeavor to educate and inform other scholars and students about a new source of vital information concerning the true nature of Japan. Therefore, Torakichi is not to be likened to some precocious child storyteller and entertainer; his situation is more akin to that of the sole survivor of a shipwreck washed up on the isolated shores of nineteenth-century Japan. His culture seemed to be alien to the Japanese people because he claimed to be from a land little known to the common citizen. Atsutane asked Torakichi about subjects we would certainly deem to be supernatural , but just as often he asked him about the food, clothing, lodging, entertainment , and education in his land. For example, one strange tale from the realm of the immortals included instructions for hemorrhoid relief remedies in their world. Atsutane had long suspected, believed in, and theorized about the existence of this Other World. H. D. Harootunian writes about this as follows: Atsutane posited that there was another world within the tangible and visible world in which humans normally lived. His faith in the verity of certain stories from the most ancient Japanese texts suggested to him that such a world did exist. For Hirata [Atsutane], kamigoto [affairs of the kami] represented an unseen reality. An invisible domain where the gods carried out their affairs, it concerned the creation of heaven and earth as well as the sacred affairs of the world of darkness and concealment. Elevation of this realm to equivalence with the world of the living provided authority to his argument concerning consolation. “It is difficult to accept the old explanations that dead spirits migrate to the land of yomi. But where do the spirits of people who have died in this country go?” If this question were not clarified there would be no chance for achieving genuine happiness. The question was rhetorical, since Hirata had already established the coexistence of...

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