Japanese mountain deities

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

The hariban's space is contiguous with the street. Its position dominates the entire procession of the festival wagons and controls all the rules of conduct for wagons entering its neighbourhood. Thus, although it is a temporary structure, it still maintains an aura of dominance in the minds of the participants who, by ritual re-enactment of the procession through the neighbourhood, understand a hierarchical relationship of the spaces of the town, which is a product of the collective memory of the participants in the festival.

On the third day, 9 September, the Dionysian struggle of the festival reaches its highest point, at which time the young people, hoarse from shouting, exhausted from pulling their wagons and inebriated with rice wine, let the wagons collide into each other in the middle of the night. When these monsters of six tons, propelled by 50 to 100 people, collide, a tremendous energy is released over the entire town. This is preceded by many hours of manoeuvering and negotiations, and often a lengthy period of waiting, of tremendous anticipation (reminding me of the words matsuri and matsu, 'to wait'. This ritual wagon fight allows each participant, as a holy fighter, to transcend his limited existence in an ecstatic union with the gods and his comrades. In the grey of the morning, as the wagons are returned to their neighbourhoods, a tremendous silence falls over the town and with the first rays of the morning sun the gods return to their mountain residence. "The festival has come to an end, the energy of the town has been recovered and renewed.

Kaiwai

Through the examples of Shiraiwa and Kakunodate I began to see how the Japanese might think of physical spaces, through the way of everyday activity and the way of the festival as a fluctuation of spaces which are defined by their activities rather than their visual order.

Kaiwai, or 'activity space', unlike the visually defined spaces of the West, is an amorphous sense of space which changes with the activities of its users and their intentions. Kaiwai which takes one form during the day, might take on another form at night. The change in pattern, however, is most noticeable through the recovery of Shinto myths and rituals in the form of linear movements through the streets of towns and villages at the time of matsuri.

The street is the locus of the matsuri experience on the day of hare and gains its form from the memory imprinted on it by the people of the community. The street is not seen simply as a corridor of vehicular or pedestrian traffic, but as the connector of private and social space. It is a spatial mode of social integration, characterised by layering function and experience, the basis and culmination of which is the 'magical' experience of matsuri during which the environment is charged and infused with the mystical kami energy. The public spaces are the streets rather than a central square because the Japanese perception of street and private spaces is a part of an integral space-time continuum or ma. Life is seen as a process of ebb and flow, rather than as a series of events; it changes metamorphically just as nature does from season to season, age to age, birth to death, in endless rhythms of renewal.