A (semi-personal) essay on a Japanese festival for the dead

[Tokugawa Sexgod Ieyasu]

I've been reluctant to post this until now because of the somewhat chatty and hence potentially somewhat embarrassing register in which it is written but I've decided that I really want to make a contribution to this subforum that isn't arguing with Joe Republic or making a fool of myself in front of afleitch. This is a partially personal, partially journalistic, partially philosophical essay that I wrote this summer in Aomori, Japan, after getting back from a visit to a Buddhist temple called Bodai-ji on Mt Osore on the Shimokita Peninsula, during a festival for the dead called Inako Taisai in which spirit mediums come to the mountain to channel the souls of worshipers' deceased family members.


The Division between the Devoted and Devout

Today was Osore-zan day, the beginning of the Inako Taisai. Osore-zan, which my best friend loosely translates Mount Doom and which can be more literally rendered as Mount Dread or Fear Mountain, is a volcano on the Shimokita Peninsula, a hatchet-shaped piece of land that forms the north-eastern portion of Aomori Prefecture and hence the north-easternmost extremity of Honshu. It is in the city of Mutsu, which like many Japanese cities is incorporated in such a way as to include a lot of land that nobody would call urban and which in the United States would likely be part of other municipalities or unincorporated land in the city’s county; Mutsu takes up most of the peninsula and much of it is in turn taken up by the Shimokita Hantō Quasi-National Park (hantō means peninsula and quasi-national parks are those administered by prefectural governments). It has about sixty thousand people spread over about the same land area as Kyoto. Osore-zan is a range of peaks in the middle of the city and the middle of the peninsula, only accessible by winding roads full of sets of multiple hairpin turns in quick succession. The peninsula itself is reached by the JR Ōminato Line, which uniquely among JR lines has no links to the rest of the system because the old line between Aomori and Hachinohe was sold off to the Aoimori Railway when the Shinkansen to Shin-Aomori was completed; Japan National Routes 279 and 338; and a ferry from Hakodate, which is considered an extension of 279 and 338. My parents and I took the Ōminato Line to Shimokita Station in the actually urban part of Mutsu. In order to do this route the train had to go from Aomori to Noheji on Aoimori Railway tracks and then from Noheji on JR tracks even though it was the same, JR train all the way through; one can ride the Aoimori Railway for free with a JR Pass, which we have, if one only gets on or off in Aomori, Noheji, or Hachinohe but such was not the case for us and so we had to pay six hundred and sixty yen apiece for the first portion.

Each part of this trip had, for us, two stops. There is an Ōminato Line that only goes between Ōminato (which is in Mutsu) and Noheji and stops at each station but the one that goes to and from Aomori becomes an express when it gets on the JR tracks. It took us, in all, about an hour and a half to get to Shimokita Station, most of which time was passed amidst the tall straight trees and the green shrubs and deep blue hydrangeas or between such magistracies and those of the flat blue-silver sea. We got to the station at about eleven in the morning, whereupon there was a bus to Osore-zan and the temple Bodai-ji. These buses always run but they are more frequent during the festival, to which a lot of the people who had been on our train—it had been more crowded than we had expected—were headed.

The bus ride took about forty minutes. It got disorienting at points. I think this area might, in addition to the Inako Taisai, have been or be having its equivalent, if any, of the Nebuta Matsuri. All sorts of places around Aomori do; Asamushi-onsen’s seems to happen twice, once in July and once in August. In Mutsu the bus passed by a gaggle of children and families pulling a float. This might just have been a small thing, since there was just the one float, but it did look an awful lot like a Nebuta float.

I realise I have not defined what the Inako Taisai actually is. The Inako Taisai is a five-day festival in which Bodai-ji at Osore-zan plays host to as many surviving itako as are available. Itako are blind miko who function as spirit mediums, channeling and relaying messages from the dead. The festival is not well-known outside that part of the Japanese population which believes strongly in the transmigration of souls, and the itako are few and fading. An informational pamphlet given out at the temple claims that among the people of the Shimokita Peninsula the belief has sprung up that all people go to Osore-zan or some mystical equivalent of it when they die. The temple is said to have been built by the monk En’in in the ninth century at a site selected because its location and prominent features—eight surrounding peaks, a shimmering lake, a hundred and eight pools of boiling water and mud, a river—matched those of a description of the afterlife transmitted to him in a dream, and it is supposed to be a liminal place, the border of the next world itself. Hence Inako Taisai being here.

On the bus there was a public-service advertisement encouraging that the people of Aomori ‘believe in their vote’ in the House of Councillors election, which is tomorrow now, and I pride myself in having managed to transcribe the whole thing in the notebook that I was borrowing from my father because I had neglected to bring my own.

My mother described the part of the road going up the mountain with the hairpin turns, past endless trees, as feeling like a road to ‘nowhere’, like we were going towards the hotel in The Shining. I imagine one must also have a certain type of personality to live in a place like this; one of the few houses that we passed had an astonishing amount and variety of lawn and façade ornamentation, including what looked like it might have been ‘Rocky’ from Rocky and Bullwinkle and what my possibly-lying memory—we passed by before I could take a photograph—records as a crazy-eyed horse statue of some description.

On the bus, as we approached the temple, we were serenaded with dirgelike chants played in the same female voice that said the recorded announcements. I could make out about half of these announcements because of the general commotion of the bus. They were analogues of the ones in which the P.V.T.A. used to pronounce Amherst with the h said. The chants were really quite lovely and when they started we knew that we were getting closer.

We came to the lake. Its colours were striated, from light golden near the shore through green to remarkably intense blue beneath the forests of the surrounding peaks. The temple was on the further shore and the parking lot was crowded when the bus got there.

Such is the impression of Bodai-ji on the first day of the Inako Taisai, beyond just its physical layout: The air smells powerfully of sulfur, which is in all the water and in some cases flows in its own little streams, including through channels in the main court of the temple. White banners are, or were on this day, flapping in the weak, creaking heavily and rattling on their poles. The itako were—was, as it turned out—set up in a tent in a sort of forecourt leading off on one side to a welter and waste of gravel and slag, into which tent a very long queue proceeded immensely slowly. From outside they—she, as it turned out—could be neither seen nor heard. There was another, empty tent set up next to this one, and some people not in line sitting around in that vicinity. On the other side of the main gate—other side in both senses: To the right rather than the left and outside rather than inside—are places to eat and go to the bathroom. Somewhere over there are also dormitories for monks and pilgrims. For pilgrims it is not free, not any more if it ever was, but is very reasonable and includes two meals. There is no real possibility of doing that on this trip for us.

This took place on a very bright but not humid or brutally hot day. I got a sunburn on my nose even so. The sky was filled with cirrocumulus wisps and the crying of crows over the slag heaps and hills and buildings of the temple, and the flapping of the banners and the squealing of the pinwheels left on the cairns. I stood in line at first for half an hour meaning to talk to somebody but instead I began to feel profoundly out of place (although far from actively unwelcome) and overpoweringly shy. I had no idea how I was supposed to do this and I had to go to the bathroom. I left and cried and established that I was hungry and ran away to stand behind a line of Jizō statues away from mortal eyes for a few minutes—Jizō being the main object of veneration at Bodai-ji, he who makes a sulfuric wasteland in the midst of a beautiful paradise itself a part and parcel of that paradise and peacefulness—and went and ordered lunch. In eating, I began to feel a lot better.

I ended up talking at length to two people about Bodai-ji, Inako Taisai, and the itako. One I sat next to during lunch; the other I stood next to in line for a little while again afterwards. The former had been coming to Inako Taisai for many years; the latter was here for the first time.

[Tokugawa Sexgod Ieyasu]

(continued)


The former was a woman of about sixty who made a habit of coming to see the itako in order to speak to her dead family members, of whom, being about sixty, she has quite a few. She was there with her husband this year but I wasn’t sitting next to the husband and my father, who was, can speak maybe half a dozen words of Japanese by now. I didn’t get this woman’s name so I’ll call her Setsuko because she looked a little bit like Hara Setsuko at the end of her career, plus a presumed few years. She was very gracious and explained things in very clear, slow Japanese. She said that she felt a profound sense of peace whenever she came to Bodai-ji, even independently of being with her loved ones again, and had adopted it as a preferred temple to which she said she comes whenever she can make it, although considering how remote it is I can’t imagine that this is very often unless she is a Shimokita Peninsula local, which she might be. She believes that death is directly analogous in a spiritual sense to sleep and the itako are able to briefly stir the sleepers. Setsuko was very interested to hear that I was here out of an academic interest in Japanese religion because her granddaughter, as it turns out, is currently a university sophomore studying Western religion in the United States! Setsuko had conservative attitudes to the extent that she seemed proud and vaguely surprised that her granddaughter would be doing this even though she is female. She was having the same shrimp soba that my mother ordered and was very gracious in continuing to talk to me for a few minutes after she and her husband had finished.

The latter was Yuki, who looked to be about thirty, was here for the first time but seemed well-versed in the ins and outs of the religion and folk beliefs involved already, and imparted to me more information about the modern practice of religion in Japan, Buddhism, Shinto, her personal relationship to said things and her family’s history with them, her strongly negative opinions of summer’s heat and winter’s cold, her high regard for the Emperor, her recent trip to the Ise Grand Shrine, and her praise and recommendation of mugwort-flavored ice cream than my command of the Japanese language permitted me to take in or know what to do with. My conversation with Yuki had about three stages: The first, in which we discussed the weather, my reasons for being here, and the mechanics and recent history of the festival; the second, in which we discussed her reasons for being here and her relationship with her recently deceased mother; and the third, in which she showed me pictures from Ise, we discussed food and agriculture, and we tried to explain different sayings and proverbs to each other. My mother was there and a little bemused but more interested in seeing how much of the general goings-on around us she could pick up on than anything else. Eventually I did somewhat awkwardly end my conversation with Yuki to join her—my mother—for a stroll along the lake, whose sulfurous waters support sedges and dragonflies around the edges.

The specific information I got from this conversation goes a little something like this: Yuki’s mother would come to the Inako Taisai and instilled in Yuki a strong interest in Buddhist and Shinto traditions and festivals, but Yuki had never actually made the trip to Bodai-ji until this year. She made it this year because her mother had died at some point in the time since last summer’s Inako Taisai. There is only one itako this year but Yuki had heard that as recently as last year there were two, the other of whom was extremely elderly even compared to her compatriot and died very shortly after that Inako Taisai, possibly from a combination of stress and the sweet cold confectioneries offered here (although this had all the hallmarks of a rumor and being only Yuki's personal theory). Yuki seemed to think of this more as a simple personal tragedy of the loss of a life and its store of wisdom than as anything else, anything culturally or subculturally disastrous, at least at this point in the conversation—she started to seem more worried later on. There may or may not be other itako or younger blind women who may become itako who simply happen not to be involved in Inako Taisai but nobody involved in this conversation seemed to be sure—I certainly haven’t seen any clear indications either way. In Yuki’s account of the mechanics of the spirit channeling the itako is held to temporarily recapitulate the form of the soul of the departed into her own body and serve as a medium not in the sense of an interlocutor between the living and the dead but in the sense of offering her own voice for the dead to speak with. There did seem to be some confusion on this point, and she emphasized that although there was philosophical speculation on the nature of the metempsychosis and the involvement in it of both itako and Osore-zan itself it was really primarily pietistic and fideistic in the way that it was conventionally understood. She seemed irritated at a real or perceived lack of interest or even active disinterest from the Japanese government in maintaining the traditions of the itako, even though local entities and religious institutions take great pride in Inako Taisai and in Osore-zan. She also pointed out that despite the attraction of the itako—for whom she and others in the line had some pity for how incredibly challenging these days must be for her—the temple and festival are also about Jizō and Jizō’s guardianship of the loved ones’ souls. The pinwheels, and the food that I saw at the bases of many cairns and statues went I went exploring amidst the scree and smoking welter afterwards, are votives, the pinwheels in particular for children.

The conversation after this turned to the Ise Shrine, other things to do in the world of Japanese religious sites and observances, and the apples, dairy, and maple syrup of Vermont and western Massachusetts as compared and contrasted to the seafood of coastal New England and the apples and seafood of Aomori Prefecture.

After this, I went and walked around some more, first at the lake and then in the welter, and then I ordered the mugwort ice cream, really more of a heavily packed shaved-ice sort of concoction but flavored much more strongly throughout and served in an ice cream cone, that Yuki had recommended. I ate this while waiting for the bus back to the station and I would describe it as—interesting. Certainly it’s an acquired taste. I had no problems finishing it but I might not seek it out again. It is however more likely that I will decide to do so and decide that this is something that I want to come to like than it is in the case of nattō. Sadly, it strikes me as a lot less likely that I will ever be able to find mugwort ice cream (or whatever else the consistency of this concoction allows it to be called) anywhere else than it is that I will be able to find nattō.

The train back was the one that did stop at Noheji, where we thus had to change trains and tracks. I looked around the station a little bit; it’s nice. Noheji looks nice and pleasant. Their high school is having its cultural festival this weekend. When we got back to Asamushi-onsen we had a dinner of rice crackers, cheese squares, bananas, and tea, which we excused with reference to the size of our breakfast and lunch. The breakfast that they serve at this ryokan is really spectacular—always a mix of Japanese and Western foods and food sensibilities, different every day, served by a woman whose particular type of Tōhoku-ben I have a hard time making out—and today’s involved, of all things, tomatoes segmented and prepared in such a way that they could be eaten with chopsticks. The lunch was varying kinds of soba, served in very large bowls by people whose feelings about working in a support role at a place like Bodai-ji it would be interesting to inquire about sometimes if I could overcome the level of shyness that attempting or intending to do so would surely engender in me.

I do want to go back at some point over the next few days if I can, if only to look around some more, but it may not be possible considering how out-of-the-way Mutsu is and how much else my family has going on—my mother is actually going back to the United States on Tuesday, to which I am not looking forward. Even so I will try my best. I did not actually see or talk to the itako and will probably not be able to stand queuing for long enough to do so even if I go again and I am less than a hundred per cent sure what to make of this fact. On one hand, it seems like a little bit of an incomplete effort, considering the fascinating nature of the vocation and the possible-to-likely imperilment of its continuation. On the other hand, the thoughts and opinions of the two devotees to whom I spoke seem somehow to be of more salience. I could not have walked up to the itako and started interviewing her; that is not what she or this festival are there for. I do not need the services that she offers because all of my dead relatives are Catholics who would much rather be prayed for in Purgatory and would probably be angry at me for attempting to contact them through Japanese spirit mediums. What’s there is the faith that they, those people waiting in a line that both Setsuko and Yuki estimated to be two or three hours at least on this day, have in the itako’s ability to get at least a little bit of the way through the fog that separates the harbor from that dark shallow sea on which all our ships must after all move out.

[Sic Semper Fascistis]

I will try to read this as soon as I have sufficient time (probably somewhere around Christmas).

[afleitch]

A very interesting read. It's good to hear it spoken about and experienced so intimately. Will need to read about in greater depth but there seems to be shades of Socrates.

[Tokugawa Sexgod Ieyasu]

A very interesting read. It's good to hear it spoken about and experienced so intimately. Will need to read about in greater depth but there seems to be shades of Socrates.

Yes, there definitely seemed to be something Platonic or perhaps Pythagorean about the popular conception of what's going on in this festival, which struck me as odd in the context of Japanese Buddhism and I suspect may differ, perhaps dramatically, from how things are officially explained. I'll need to read over the temple's official literature again; once I've done that I can let you know what has to say if you're interested.

I'm glad you liked it. Thank you for reading.