Japanese mountain deities

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1997 by Fred D. Thompson

The September festival of oyama bayashi in the neighbouring town of Kakunodate shows this even more clearly. Kakunodate, after its creation in 1620 by Lord Ashina as a samurai or fortress town, has hardly changed in size since the eighteenth century. The town's festival organisation, separating Samurai from citizens and organising citizens into districts (chonai) and neighbourhoods (kumi) lives on in the administration of the town by its division into population densities, though movement between districts is now much freer.

At the time of festival, the entire town re-organises itself into the chonai/kumi system of the feudal period for the preparation and performance of a grand three-day religious festival. Through this festival, the entire community renews its feudal roots in a way that appears mythical to the modern Western mind.

Matsuri, or festival, according to Harada Toshiaka,[3] is essentially a matter of purification. Through malsuri one is restored to the state of ke, or filled with divine life energy, dispelling the state of ke-gare, the accumulation of impurities through exhaustion. The notion is also related by Yoshino Hiroko[4] to the original Japanese creation myth involving the descent of the gods to the profane world and their subsequent return to the sacred world after death. Matsuri is also a process of political integration, incorporating the Yakushi-do original shrine and the Shinmei-sha subsequent clan shrine erected by Ashina, as well as a state visit to the house of Satake, whose ancestors were the local representatives of the central government during the Tokugawa Shogunate before the advent of the Meiji Restoration.

During matsuri in Kakunodate, professional priests perform ritual acts, prayers and dances, after which there is a three-day procession of huge wooden six-ton festival wagons, called hiki-yama, complete with model holy mountain and other sacred elements, all constructed and directed by the neighbourhoods of the town. Ritual dancers and musicians inhabit the open space on the wagons in front of and under the model mountain.

In addition to the festival wagons, each chonai quarter builds a hariban, a neighbourhood altar, in the street. This corresponds to the temporary field shrine where the god resides for a short time during festivals in farming communities. This is one of the ways in which the myths, icons, and rites of agricultural settlements have been transformed by larger commercial Japanese towns and cities.

In contrast to the route of the gods in Shiraiwa, a route that ran from the mountain shrine past the village shrine to the field shrine, the route of the gods in Kakunodate runs from the mountain to the festival wagon and comes to rest in the hariban. From the hariban the gods are carried about on the festival wagons for the duration of the festival.

This neighbourhood shrine serves as the headquarters for the older men, nen-ban-gumi, who transmit the knowledge of the rituals and the social customs of the festival to the young men of the community and who vigilantly watch the playing out of the ceremonies. The festival stitches a bond between the older and the younger generation, reconstituting a communal spirit that was part of the agricultural tradition.