Japanese mountain deities

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

The procession's route can, as in Shiraiwa, lie at a right angle to the everyday route and in this way the path of the gods is an interruption to the normal activities of the village and therefore lends itself better to a remembrance of the mythical past; the shift to accommodate the gods signals the cleansing of the village from all blemishes and the recovery of the life energy necessary for the period of fertility and growth in the fields. During the festival, workaday time is suspended to renew its original meaning. The Japanese do not experience space and time as objective detached observers, but are fully involved in them. Like medieval man's pilgrimage through that great repository of spiritual memory the cathedral, the Japanese, in experiencing their village spaces sequentially, are renewed and invigorated by the healing actions of the parts as they are magically and mystically subsumed into the human psyche at festival time.

References

1 Unpublished manuscript, The Japanese Approach to Urban Space, Tokyo, 1973, p44.

2 Kojiro Yuichiro, Japanese Communities, Kashima-Shuppan, Tokyo 1977. Originally published as a special edition to SD NO. 7:1975 from the same publisher.

3 'The Development of Matsuri', in Philosophical Studied of Japan, Vol 11, Tokyo, 1960.

4 Matsuri No Genri (Principles of Matsuri), Keiyu-Sha. Tokyo 1972, pp3-4, pp247-248.

5 Arkkitehti 2, 1981, Unity of Time and Space, Fred and Barbro Thompson, pp68-70.

6 Kikutake, Kiyonori, pp10-19, 26-27, World Architecture 2. ed. John Donat. A Studio Book. Viking Press, NY 1965.

7 Itoh Teiji, unpublished manuscript, The Japanese Approach to Urban Space, Tokyo, 1973, p 109.