For the past several years I have been moving through every part of Japan while contemplating the essence of tourism. The voices that seek a uniform shared experience mediated by social media still hold persistent influence. At the same time it is also true that there are travelers who feel discomfort with that mainstream, and one must not speak of them simply as tourists.

In Japan, traveling to various places to see and learn is called [観光] (Kanko). The term derives from a passage in the Chinese I Ching that reads [観国之光 利用賓于王]. It loosely translates to observing the light of the country, the society, and the people one visits, and learning from it as a guest from elsewhere. To observe the light is at the same time to observe the shadow. One must not lean too far toward either side, and the traveler is required to exercise self restraint and respect for others and other countries.

Placing the thought of yin and yang at the foundation of travel, and bringing oneself into the middle within the streets one has come to. Through this practice one acquires genuine learning, unlike the self serving traveler of the present age. The original meaning of Kanko is learning, not unilateral consumption.

What one learns will differ from person to person. It varies according to each person’s nature, and it must not be swayed by the discourse of others. The original Kanko is input, but it always presupposes output. Output is often misunderstood. It is not posting travel photographs to social media.

After the journey ends and you return to the country, the society, the community, and the relationships in which you live, you take what you have learned and put it into practice in pursuit of a better future. This is the essence of Kanko.

Earlier this year I was approached by people in the tourism industry who had reached an impasse and were looking for ideas to think about “the next form of tourism.” Centered on the Kansai region, I have been making new proposals. The foundation I work from is the essence of Kanko described above, and it differs from the conventional perspective that pursues “numbers” such as visitor counts and sales figures.

For example, the major tourist areas of Osaka where I myself live, including Namba, Shinsaibashi, Umeda, and Shinsekai, were historically beneath the sea. Almost every tourist visits these districts, but the real Osaka is not there.

Here I want to look at the flow generally narrated in the founding history of Osaka, from my own angle.

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The first thing to recognize is that the common belief that Japan possessed an indigenous Shinto before the arrival of Buddhism and Confucianism does not speak the truth. It is more reasonable to see that Shinto acquired its religious quality over a span of more than a thousand years through the influence of Buddhism and Confucianism, both of which had been completed as religions on the Chinese side. In other words, for Shinto to acquire the aspect of standing in opposition to foreign religions like Buddhism and Confucianism, it required strong pressure from Buddhism and Confucianism. Yet no matter how strong the external pressure, faith never disappears entirely. This is the essence of faith and is not limited to Shinto.

Through the On Dogen series I have presented from various angles the transition from the aristocratic government of the Heian period to the warrior government, and an understanding of this era connects directly to Shinbutsu Shugo. From the early period of Buddhism’s arrival, Shinbutsu Shugo had been gradually advancing, but it cannot be said that the “relationship between gods and buddhas” was clearly conscious at that point. It would be more accurate to say that this consciousness emerged gradually over the course of several centuries. The greatest turning point was the appearance of [本地垂迹] (Honji Suijaku).

But this Honji Suijaku doctrine is a difficult problem. Stated simply, it is “the thought of regarding gods as incarnations of buddhas.” Yet through the process of its understanding, propagation, and reception, problems arose one after another, and the situation can rightly be called a period of confusion in faith. Within this confusion of faith, however, lay the seeds of what was to come. These seeds are not limited to Shinto and Buddhism. They are a wellspring that flowed even into cultural-spiritual currents like the way of tea, and they require very careful examination. They are, in a sense, the source of “the heart of Japan.”

The character of the conception of the gods from the Heian into the Kamakura period reveals this confusion vividly. To put it plainly, the incarnation of buddhas as gods was thought to be the ultimate expression of the buddhas’ salvation of sentient beings. Put differently, while holding up the fundamental Buddhist idea of the benefit of sentient beings as the underlying logic, the visible signboard set up not the buddhas but the gods. As you may already sense, the natural question arises of where the superiority of the buddhas lies in such a structure.

In fact this was the most serious problem of the time. The teaching was developed with Buddhist doctrine as its skeleton, and yet what stood at the front was not the buddhas revered by Buddhism but, somehow, the gods of the Shinto side. If one could simply link Buddhist doctrine with the buddhas through faith, that would suffice. But this was not possible. Conversely, this shows how deeply the faith in the gods was rooted in place. For the monks, resolving this problem became the first priority, and from here a complex and convoluted history begins. The Honji Suijaku doctrine within Shinbutsu Shugo was not a goal but the beginning of confusion.

From the Buddhist side of the time, the buddhas and bodhisattvas had already appeared before sentient beings in their own forms and were in fact bestowing various benefits upon them. Yet the monks of the Buddhist side were facing an essential problem that this alone could not solve, and they devised the Honji Suijaku doctrine in an attempt to break through. What were the monks treating as a problem? Honestly, the truth is that they themselves did not know.

What must not be overlooked here is that the Honji Suijaku doctrine, beyond bringing benefit to the Buddhist side, in fact opened a direct opportunity for the Shinto side to take the path of independence. As the name Shinbutsu Shugo suggests, this was actually a complex phenomenon that produced benefit on both sides. It was the greatest occasion through which Shinto in particular acquired doctrine and theology. Without this process, modern Shrine Shinto and State Shinto could never have been born.

Where then is the origin of Shinbutsu Shugo placed? In general, it is placed in the Nara period (710–794). The capital at that time was Nara, which had entered the golden age of Buddhism. Temples were built one after another and Buddhist statues were produced in great quantity. In the midst of this, an interesting phenomenon called [神身離脱] (Shinshin Ridatsu) was occurring.

Shinshin Ridatsu is the thought that the gods themselves had given an oracle declaring that “we suffer in our state of being gods and wish to be saved by the Buddhist Dharma.” It is the doctrine of gods seeking salvation from the buddhas, and it is the key to understanding the later Honji Suijaku doctrine. At this point, however, just as the phrase “gods seek salvation from the buddhas” indicates, the gods were clearly placed as beings inferior to the buddhas. The gods were also placed as one type of sentient being suffering within Buddhist samsara, where they were depicted as beings who heard the Dharma and wished through practice to escape their state of being gods. It is fascinating, but a great many problems are visible. It expresses the early confusion of Shinbutsu Shugo.

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In practice, when you visit a shrine and ask the priest “what is a shrine?” the answer you usually receive is the fixed response “a dwelling where gods are enshrined.” But this is the correct answer for “Shinto” and says nothing about the origin of the shrine itself. Why does everyone give the same answer in unison? No one explains.

The background involves the existence of only two universities in Japan where one can train to become a shrine priest. One is Kokugakuin University in Tokyo and the other is Kogakkan University in Ise, Mie Prefecture. The two appear to be independent, but in fact they are priest training institutions directly under Jinja Honcho. At these universities students study Shinto, classical texts, and ritual technique in accordance with the doctrine established by Jinja Honcho, and upon graduation they are granted the qualification of shrine priest by Jinja Honcho. Only by passing through this process can one become a priest. In other words, it has nothing whatsoever to do with faith.

What matters is that Jinja Honcho is not a public organ of the government. It is clearly a religious corporation. Jinja Honcho is a new religious movement that “reveres the Grand Shrine of Ise as its sovereign shrine,” and it contains none of the pluralistic tolerance of faith that Shinto originally possessed. It is an organization with a pyramidal power structure that places the Grand Shrine of Ise at the absolute apex and oversees eighty thousand shrines nationwide directly beneath it. From this alone the reality emerges that Jinja Honcho, which holds the licensing system for priests, is carrying serious problems. In fact, Jinja Honcho uses this vested interest to provide quite direct backing to conservative Liberal Democratic Party legislators and deploys the Shinto Political League as its lobby organization.

In plain terms, they collect funds from shrines across the country and channel them into political movements aligned with their own religious doctrine. The logic of the conservative camp, including that of the current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, fundamentally stands on their intentions, and they still hold considerable influence. But what this article seeks to question is not the political problem of Jinja Honcho. Rather, the issue is that the existing content disseminated in line with Jinja Honcho’s intentions can answer “what is a shrine?” but has no power to answer “what was the shrine?” I want to open a path for resolving this discomfort.

To state it clearly, the answer to the question above is the textbook answer taught at university institutions. Directly, it is the view of Jinja Honcho. Seen from a slightly sharper angle, the answer strongly embraces the history of modern Shinto and retains remnants of early modern Shinto, but carries the problem of being virtually devoid of the history, culture, and spirit that preceded it. What I find discomforting above all is that their answer defining a shrine as “a dwelling where gods are enshrined” is incapable of saying anything about the Shinto that existed before. To give a more striking example, it is completely severed from the historical phenomenon of Shinbutsu Shugo (the syncretism of gods and buddhas). This fact reveals that neither priests nor Buddhist monks actually possess an answer to this fascinating phenomenon.

Viewed from the perspective of Japan, against the “buddha” as a later arrival there was the “god” as the originary presence. Everyone agrees on this. The problem is that when a shrine is defined in the modern sense as “a dwelling where gods are enshrined,” the history of how heterogeneous beings crossed becomes invisible. To give the example of Shinbutsu Shugo, Amaterasu enshrined at the Kotai Jingu within the Grand Shrine of Ise (the sovereign shrine of Jinja Honcho) is considered the incarnation of Dainichi Nyorai on the Buddhist side. The logic of this claim is clear. But what I truly wish to know is the following.

Why was it possible for such heterogeneous beings as god and buddha to syncretize?
What was the cultural spiritual soil at the origin that made this possible?

Laid out simply it is brief, but the moment one attempts to discuss it, it becomes extraordinarily difficult. Put differently, when considering the reception and interpretation of the heterogeneous arrival of Buddhism in Japan, what must first be illuminated is the reception and interpretation of the gods that formed the soil. Yet few people turn their thinking this far. The reason is clear. The reception of the gods by the Japanese as an ethnic people is taken for granted as a tradition continuous from antiquity. But is this really so?

If even that answer is merely the view of Jinja Honcho, then the inconvenient fact emerges that in truth no one knows anything. No one knows anything, yet everyone acts as if they do. This is the typical method of new religious movements and says nothing about the essence of Shinto itself. To know Shinto truly, one must move toward a world in which the enormous illusion called Jinja Honcho has been extinguished. As far as I know, the people who have touched the essential horizon of Shinto in modern and later history can be counted on one hand.

Conventional Shinto logic assumes that the act of venerating gods has been practiced across Japan since antiquity. Even where no shrine existed in its present form, in prototype the trees of the forest, rocks, and mountains were regarded as shrines and underwent historical transformation to become what we see today. This is the so-called faith of Yaoyorozu. Typically, the moment this mind that regards nature itself as a shrine underwent transformation is placed with the influence of the transmission of Buddhism, which arrived with the structure of the temple.

Certainly, once the construction of temples began, the construction of shrines to enshrine gods began in opposition. But this happened only in certain regions and cannot be generalized to all of Japan. The theory that an indigenous Shinto worldview was erected in opposition to the foreign Buddhist worldview is also quite suspect. Because this idea depends on the unverifiable fantasy that Shinto existed from antiquity. Stated skeptically, it is an ideology.

The idea that countless gods dwell within nature itself contains a certain truth, but I feel discomfort with making this the origin of Shinto. That trees, rocks, and mountains themselves were divine bodies and the prototypes of shrines is likely fact, given that traces remain across the country to this day. But even this nature faith must have had an origin of its own. When you reach this discomfort, you must confront an extremely troublesome body of thought. That is the history of interpreting Shinto as Kamunagara.

The modern reading of [神道] as Shinto is a new convention that took hold only in the modern era. In the past it was read in various ways, including Kamunagara and Kannagara. The orthography itself derives from the Nihon Shoki (completed in 720) which uses the notation [惟神].

Regarding the meaning of [惟神], the original annotation in the Nihon Shoki explains it as [惟神者 謂隨神道亦謂自有神道也]. Because the Nihon Shoki is written entirely in Chinese style classical Chinese, this kind of notation becomes the original source. Monks, priests, and scholars from before the early modern period have proposed various interpretations of the term [惟神], so it is a fact that the term was historically valued. The interpretation cannot be translated into English, but forced into approximation it reads as follows. “Kamunagara means following the way of the gods. It also means the state in which the way of the gods exists naturally.” Put differently, this conveys the form of Shinto, but the understanding is extremely difficult.

First, the troublesome quality of the Japanese must be resolved. The point of focus is a single term in the original annotation, the character [自].

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No word conveys the heart of the Japanese as they once were more vividly than Fudo. Conversely, any account of Japan or the Japanese people offered by someone who does not understand Fudo and has never known Fudo is nothing more than armchair speculation. When I consider Japanese history as a whole, I notice without exception that the Japanese history conventionally narrated has been constructed by people who do not know Fudo. And people who do not know Fudo have for some reason always thought about history, the very foundation of a people’s identity, behind closed doors. Whether those doors belong to a university, a parliament, or anywhere else, the people who speak of history from Fudo with sincerity have always been few. In most cases the history of a people has been decided and narrated in closed rooms. This method is practiced worldwide, but it is not history. It should not count as having said anything about a people. My discomfort with this is where I begin.

The Japanese word [風土] is composed of [風] (Fu/wind) and [土] (Do/soil or earth). Conventionally [風] is understood as wind and [土] as soil. I will carefully undo this misunderstanding. As the single compound Fudo conveys, the entirety of a people’s history, culture, spirit, and customs can be understood through [風] and [土]. But that understanding is not an understanding achieved in the head. It is something that happens only when you travel to the land, feel the wind that blows there, and set foot on the soil. Without doing so we cannot claim to have truly understood anything. And yet, strangely, the history we are given in the conventional sense carries neither the comfort of wind nor the smell of earth. History that does not know Fudo is meaningless. It is equivalent to having said nothing. In truth, there is no way to disclose the essence of a people other than by thinking about history and culture from Fudo.

From this perspective it goes without saying that anyone who wishes to examine Japan must feel the wind and tread the soil in every part of the country. This is an absolute condition. Reading hundreds of books on Japanese history amounts to knowing nothing at all. As the Ming Confucian scholar Wang Yangming taught through his principle of [知行合一], a principle that has continued to exert enormous influence on a segment of the Japanese population since the Edo period, understanding cannot be claimed unless knowledge and action are united. In practice, the reason I travel across Japan with various themes in mind is to absorb the Fudo of Japan into my own bodily experience. Sometimes I return to a place many times for this purpose, because Fudo is not something that enters you simply by going there. It permeates slowly, becoming internalized over time. The people who truly understand a country and its people are those in whom Fudo has seeped. What they say about the country and its people can be trusted. In this sense it is clear that understanding Japan or the world is something utterly impossible within a single lifetime.

The problem is that Fudo as it is conventionally discussed in Japan has been reduced since the modern era to a set of tedious scientific markers: the climate, weather, topography, geology, and scenery of a place. That the original Fudo cannot be confined to a scientific category is clear from the following.

When the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki were compiled in 712 and 720, the 43rd Emperor Genmei, who had issued the edict to preserve oral traditions in written form, simultaneously issued an edict ordering that the traditions surviving in each region be compiled into place-specific documents. This project was originally called [解] (Ge) but came to be known as [風土記] (Fudoki) by the Heian period. Tracing its origins, the compound [風土] is a term of Chinese origin. Its original meaning referred to the vital force of the land as it responds to the cycle of the seasons. As early as the second century, Chinese geographic texts bearing the title [風土記] appeared. The term eventually reached Japan. But this does not mean that the idea of Fudo did not exist in Japan. The Man’yoshu, the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, suggests otherwise.

The words in the Man’yoshu are written not in the Sino-Japanese vocabulary that was standard at the time but in the distinctive yamatokotoba, the native Japanese language. A complication arises here. Yamatokotoba was not a language used across the entire Japanese archipelago. It was the indigenous language of the Nara region, specifically the everyday language of the court. In the poetry of the Nara period there is almost no room for Sino-Japanese compounds to intrude directly. The poems are composed in yamatokotoba, and from that language arise the yohaku, the breathing spaces.

Because Fudo is a Sino-Japanese compound, the term [風土] does not appear in the Man’yoshu. But the spiritual world of the Man’yoshu is richly inhabited by the sensibility of Fudo. More precisely, the Man’yoshu can be said to be a work that sings of Fudo. The Fudo of the Man’yoshu resides in a geographic and climatic sensibility that sings of mountains, rivers, the spirit of the land, and the particularities of each place. In other words, the Chinese concept of Fudo and the Japanese sensibility of Fudo merged and were refined within the Man’yoshu into a world of its own.

On the other hand, the Fudoki project carried out officially as a court enterprise was primarily structured around five items: changing the names of provinces, districts, and villages to “favorable characters” considered auspicious; cataloguing products; recording the fertility of the soil; documenting the origins of the names of mountains, rivers, and plains; and preserving the oral traditions of the elders. This was partly motivated by the court in Nara seeking to understand the circumstances of other provinces and gather material for policies aimed at political unification. But beyond that, the Fudo of each province was compiled as important evidence of the origins of the ancient clans involved in the court. Because the origins of the ancient clans were dispersed across the land, and the rich memories held within their unique traditions constituted an ineradicable legitimacy of authority. Few records from this period survive, but the very fact that the court ordered the compilation of Fudoki suggests that pressure from the ancient clans was being brought to bear on the emperor. The power of each province was that strong. In effect the court was operated under a system in which it was elevated and sustained by the clans of each province.

According to the ritsuryo system of the time, the court recognized the existence of more than sixty provinces across the Japanese archipelago. It is therefore believed that approximately sixty Fudoki were produced. The great majority have been lost. Only five survive to the present day. The sole complete text is the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki (the Fudoki of the province of Izumo in Shimane Prefecture), the subject of last week’s article. This fact alone conveys how deep the historical faith in Izumo Taisha has been. The surviving but incomplete texts are the Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki (Ibaraki Prefecture), the Harima no Kuni Fudoki (Hyogo Prefecture), the Bungo no Kuni Fudoki (Oita Prefecture), and the Hizen no Kuni Fudoki (Saga Prefecture). The other Fudoki have been lost, though fragments quoted in other texts have been discovered. The Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki, and a handful of Fudoki have survived to the present, but if all the Fudoki of that era had been preserved, our ability to illuminate the rich picture of ancient Japan would be immeasurably greater. Because the Fudoki project was the act of recording in written form the distinct memories of Fudo that differed from one land to the next.

The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki occupy a clear position as centralized documents of the court. The Nihon Shoki in particular was produced with the intention of imitating the Chinese imperial historiographical system. It is written entirely in classical Chinese. This was intended both to establish within Japan the legitimacy of rule that the Chinese imperial system possessed and to present an appropriate face to the international community. In the East Asia of that era, compiling a history in classical Chinese was proof of civilization. The Samguk Sagi of the Korean Peninsula, completed in 1145, was born from the same impulse. Among the compilers of the Nihon Shoki are two figures who appear in historical records around 691: Tsuzuki no Morugon and Satsu no Hirokaku. They were scholars who had emigrated from China and naturalized in Japan. Their deep involvement in the classical Chinese composition of the Nihon Shoki is documented. Without the practical contribution of Tang intellectuals the Nihon Shoki could arguably not have come into existence.

The Kojiki, by contrast, is not written in classical Chinese. It is composed in a special technique called hentai kanbun and man’yogana. No foreign practitioners were involved in its compilation. It was produced by an intensely Japanese method. My own view is that the Kojiki occupies an intermediate position between the Nihon Shoki and the Fudoki and carries a highly distinctive context. When looking at a single myth or historical account, what you see from the Nihon Shoki and what you see from the Kojiki are entirely different. Even though the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki appear to record the same myths, traditions, and events, their worlds and their thought are fundamentally different. To put it in extreme terms, the Nihon Shoki is a document compiled through the thought of Tang scholars. The Kojiki is a document free from that influence. The fact that the court pursued both projects simultaneously is evidence that a serious attempt at intellectual independence from China was under way. Considering the history of how these texts came into being, it is clear that by the first half of the eighth century the idea of Fudo was already mature.

Above all, Fudo is not a matter of scientific markers. It contains everything about the people who lived on that land. From the will and feelings of unnamed predecessors, their faith, their daily acts, their gestures, their words, their gaze, to the cycles of nature, Fudo transmits an enormous range. It exists in as many forms as there are places on earth where people have lived. But since the modern era we have dismissed and erased this indigenous quality of Fudo. What matters is that Fudo is not simply a scientific account of wind and soil. Fudo is a “transmission device for memory” built up by predecessors, activated only when you feel the wind that has not changed for millennia and set foot on the soil. I believe Fudo is Japan’s true capital and the basis for being Japanese. But this does not mean in the sense of a single ethnic group. The true Japanese are a pluralistic people who have lived on the archipelago and remained connected in a state of non-separation. The world changes depending on which place you look at.

Put differently, Fudo is not activated unless you go to the land, feel the wind, and tread the soil. This is why history that does not know Fudo is entirely meaningless no matter what authority it wears. In present-day terms, because the great majority of Japanese people do not know Fudo, they interpret to their own convenience a “Japan and Japanese people that do not exist” fabricated in the head, and the country is accelerating in the wrong direction. In practice, what is commonly spoken of as Japan and the Japanese within Japan is from my perspective entirely armchair speculation. It exists only in the brains of a handful of scholars. That nearly every person who loudly proclaims Japan and the Japanese today does not know the Fudo of Japan is an enormous problem that is never discussed. Countries that have fallen into xenophobia are carrying the same problem to varying degrees.

First, Fudo is subject to the absolute condition of being regulated by place. For this reason, within the “space” constructed in modernity, the space of Japan as a unified state or the Japanese as a single ethnic group, the true Japan does not exist and the true Japanese do not exist. As I have noted, the space of modernity is always constructed behind closed doors. It exists only in the heads of rulers. It carries no wind blowing through and no feel of soil. In the modern world it is strangely permissible for people who have never been to Japan and have never spoken with a Japanese person to say whatever they please about Japan and the Japanese. But in truth this is an absurd farce. Because what is being spoken of is not Japan, and the sources on which it is based are not Japan. This is equivalent to no one having said anything.

This attitude is prevalent not only regarding Japan but worldwide. The result may be the global confusion of today. People who do not know the Fudo of a country or a people interpret it as they please and plunge the world into chaos. It is a natural consequence. Put differently, the land where you felt the wind and soil and the Japanese people with whom you spoke are your Japan. I believe that alone is wonderful. Even I, a Japanese person, cannot claim to have understood the history and culture despite having traveled across Japan to this extent. Even through a lifetime of research I will most likely never arrive at any answer. I am certain that the idea of Fudo can serve as a valuable resource for the people of every country that has experienced modernity, including Japan, as they search for what lies beyond the present impasse.

At the heart of Fudo’s structuration lies culture. This does not mean that Fudo possesses a specific predetermined structure. Rather, a structured system is what we call Fudo. Multiple pluralistic elements are involved in Fudo, and it is generated through the balance of their transformations and mutual influences. The invisible force that holds these pluralistic elements in a state of non-separation rather than separation is place. This is why Fudo can only be realized in place. The moment you try to think about it within the contentless space of the state, it separates immediately.

In the Japan of an earlier era, leaving one village and entering the next meant encountering a different Fudo. Because Fudo is regulated by place, the same Fudo can never be generated twice. This complex reality is the true nature of the pluralistic world and the essence of a Japan that has now been lost. Modern history ignored and erased this essence. From that point onward, Japan and the Japanese were shaped as molds within a monolithic space. The arrival of the unified state called Japan and the single ethnic group called the Japanese. But such things never originally existed.

Fudo is pluralistic and its complex reality refuses definition itself. Because it has already transformed by the next instant and never settles into a fixed state. And the substance of Fudo also differs depending on which person, carrying which context, activates it. This is why different people feel different things in the same place.

The reason is that the other elements are moving in a way that structures the culture at the core of Fudo. The main forces that generate and nurture this sphere are history, language, body, and technology. Each element acts upon the others in a state of non-separation, vibrating through resonance. Among them, the element that serves as the source of the force forming the sphere itself is language. For example, what kind of linguistic forms a people hold and how they deploy their language in speech become critical. Because these are the driving force that generates culture, and from them history, body, and technology are born. Seen from this perspective, the Japanese language as a unified national language ceases to exist. Because it never existed in the first place. And at the same time, the Japanese culture that most people speak of also ceases to exist. Put differently, Japanese culture exists only within the uniformly prepared space. In place, Japanese culture has no reality.

The reason is that the foundation at the core of culture is place. Beneath Fudo lies place. On that place, human beings who deploy language in every form conduct their daily lives, and what is formed over immense spans of time is Fudo. Whether the place is an office district in Tokyo, a mountain valley in Hokkaido, a remote island in Okinawa, or the deep mountains of Nagano, the Fudo you experience will differ. The Fudo experienced there can never be expanded into a generalized Japan. Here lies the core of the pluralistic world. Put differently, Fudo is the gods of Japan themselves. In this profound world lies the prototype of the ancient faith of Yaoyorozu, the word that expressed the infinite, or rather the totality. In other words, the gods of Japan are not in essence things to be reified or defined. This is precisely why the gods transformed and eventually merged with the buddhas of Buddhism in the extraordinary phenomenon known as shinbutsu shugo.

Let us consider one example. Okuninushi, the deity of Izumo Taisha discussed in last week’s article, is written [大国主]. [大] means great and [主] means lord or ruler. But what is [国] (kuni)?

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When the Meiji era began in 1868, the new rulers of the Meiji government set about negating the entire Edo period in order to lend legitimacy to the hegemony they had seized from the Tokugawa shogunal house through violent revolution. The target was the Japanese-style Confucianism that had wielded immense influence during the Edo period. The government was searching for a new philosophical foundation for the regime. Buddhism had built an era of its own but had rapidly lost its power after the onset of the Edo period. Confucianism was too closely associated with the Edo era to adopt. It was at this point that the Meiji government turned its attention to Shinto. But Shinto had no clear definition then and has none now, and the Meiji government adopted it without understanding it. Only one thing can be said with certainty. The Meiji government adopted something other than Buddhism or Confucianism. This new direction would later transform into Shrine Shinto and State Shinto, opening the curtain on a complex modern history of Shinto.

Having decided to adopt Shinto as the philosophical basis of the new regime, the Meiji government next began demanding centralized control over Shinto. But Shinto, though its origins are uncertain, possessed prototypical forms of faith that long predated the arrival of Buddhism in Japan. Even today the gods are called Yaoyorozu (the myriad deities). The faiths associated with these countless gods exist in as many forms as there are places on the Japanese archipelago and in as many forms as there are natural phenomena. They are far beyond the capacity of any central government to manage in a unified manner. But because this would not serve the new government’s purposes, two coercive measures were imposed. These were the Prohibition of Hereditary Shrine Priesthood in 1871 and the Shrine Consolidation Order of 1906.

Historically the management of shrines took many forms. A specific clan might serve as chief priest and venerate the deity, or a village community might collectively maintain the rites. But at major shrines governing entire regions the influence was powerful enough to resist even government directives. The priestly clans of shrines with particularly ancient origins were assumed to hold lineages spanning more than a thousand years, and because their historical relationships with the imperial house were also involved, they maintained immense influence in their local communities. The Meiji government sought to nullify this regional influence of the shrines and bring them under central control. Its method was to prohibit hereditary succession and thereby absorb faith into the bureaucratic apparatus. This was carried out from the perspective of creating a national populace, which was indispensable to the modern state. As a result, the great majority of shrines lost their regional influence and many were excluded from shrine administration.

Having confirmed the effectiveness of dismantling the influence of major shrines and placing them under centralized management, the Meiji government then moved to concentrate faith entirely within the state. This was the second measure, the Shrine Consolidation Order. It aimed to forcibly merge and reorganize the diverse shrines that had been dispersed across the land into a system manageable by the central government. In essence it was a measure for bureaucratic administration. What matters is that both measures used faith and Shinto as their pretext while the substance was the establishment of a modern bureaucratic system.

These two acts of state-level destruction caused the ancient faiths to enter a state of unease. But without these measures, something as undefinable as Shinto could not have been deployed as a state philosophy. Through this process the great majority of shrines had their hereditary priesthoods prohibited and expelled. The vacancies were filled by central government officials. Eventually the situation reached the point where qualification as a shrine priest required a degree from a Shinto university, and today ninety-nine percent of shrine priests are people who came through this system. But even in such an era, a small number of shrines possessed the authority to refuse the government’s demands. The foremost among them was Izumo Taisha. The clan of Izumo Taisha managed to survive the impact of the Meiji-era prohibition on hereditary succession. In accordance with customs dating to antiquity, a specific clan continues to serve as chief priest through hereditary succession to this day.

This is not possible through mere historical antiquity alone. It requires having gathered deep faith from the local community and having earned the people’s strong trust. In my own experience, having visited countless shrines across Japan, no shrine inspires faith as deep as Izumo Taisha. It remains a source of spiritual support for a great many Japanese people. Geographically it stands in a remote area far from the major cities, yet I visit once a year to pay my respects.

The fact that a small number of shrines survived the pressure of the Meiji government and continue their hereditary succession to this day transmits the strength and resilience of the faith that the Japanese once held. What then is the origin of Izumo Taisha, a shrine of such extraordinary spiritual power?

Regrettably this is almost never discussed. In this piece I will draw on perspectives developed through my own research and unravel the story by crossing mythology with ancient history.

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The common language prescribed by the center is then disseminated to children through a national education system and schools across the country. Simultaneously with the creation of a populace comes the creation of a state. Because the state must present an easily comprehensible narrative to an undifferentiated mass, indigenous character is inevitably discarded. If the indigenous histories, cultures, and spiritual traditions of each place were individually incorporated, a unified modern state could never be established. In the process of modernization, the context of place is ruthlessly destroyed. Place after place is discarded and a fabricated space controlled by the center is erected in its stead. This is the typical method of modern state creation. What is invariably born in this process is what I call “hollow history.” By hollow history I mean a formation in which only the outer membrane of the thing called history has been shaped by the politicians, bureaucrats, and scholars positioned at the center of the modern state, while the interior remains empty. In a sense, modernity can sustain itself only by fabricating a history without content and disseminating it relentlessly. This proved remarkably effective.

Behind the emergence of this structure lies the form of intellectual authority that was rapidly established after the Meiji period. Japan’s modernization, or Westernization, began in the Meiji era from 1868 onward. The core actors who erected the outer membrane of the entity called “Japan” were graduates of the Imperial University, the present-day University of Tokyo. At the time, attending university was itself a rarity, and Imperial University professors held an authority virtually equivalent to divinity. In the preceding Edo period, education was delivered through Confucian study. No national school system existed. Across the country, countless private academies called shijuku operated as places where individual teachers taught the people of their village. This was not education in the modern sense. It was learning between human beings, master and disciple facing each other directly. In the Japanese Confucianism of the Edo period, outstanding teachers who gave each person the opportunity to think existed in great numbers in every region. The university system introduced after Meiji concentrated authority in specific professors. Because it was grounded in elitism and was not open to everyone, it inevitably reinforced hierarchies of authority. In other words, Japan possessed a tradition of excellent education, but the Meiji government forcibly abolished it. The purpose of that abolition was the creation of new authority by the new rulers.

In this process the “Japan” they narrated as hollow history was promoted primarily by Imperial University graduates and professors. It shaped the national image that would lead to the Second World War and eventually became fixed as the common understanding of the populace. The greatest problem of modern scholarship comes down to the blind conviction that its authorities adopted on their own, the belief that there must be nothing they do not know. The results produced by this meaningless delusion were devastating. It became the wellspring from which the rich cultural spirit of Japan was systematically extinguished.

From this point onward, discourse that spoke of “what is not Japan as Japan” was installed at the center of history without question, underwritten by institutional authority. This is a structural problem of academia, but the violence born in early modernity did not exist in the Edo period. Personally, I have always trusted what I feel on the ground when I move on my own feet and arrive at a site, more than any theory advanced by some authority somewhere. I am certain that nothing is more trustworthy. Anyone who goes to the actual site can easily see how far off the mark history in its conventional sense has landed. From this vantage point, the Japanese are not a single ethnic people, and Japan is not a unified state. The essence of what Japan is cannot be disposed of with the word “diversity.” It must be called a “pluralistic world.” To read the richness of Japan as a pluralistic world requires looking at it sincerely from an angle that is not the existing framework of “Japan.” In a sense, this is the negation of the historical image constructed by modern Japan.

Within this problem-consciousness there is one theme I want to address in this article. It concerns the conventional wisdom surrounding the routes by which people crossed the sea to reach the Japanese archipelago. In standard Japanese history, the movement of immigrants across the sea is stated to have departed from the southern Korean Peninsula, passed through Tsushima and Iki Island, and arrived in northern Kyushu. Northern Kyushu was certainly a strategic coastal zone from ancient times, and the area was dotted with multiple powerful clans. Representative among them were the Munakata clan based in Munakata City in Fukuoka Prefecture and the Azumi clan based on Shikanoshima island in Fukuoka. They were descendants of early powers that had mastered the sea, leveraging their geographic advantage to seize trade interests with China and Korea and rise to prominence. Before the prototype of a unified state emerged in the southern part of the Nara Basin in a later era, there was an age dominated by clans who controlled the seas of northern Kyushu. This has been forgotten by history. Most people underestimate the importance of understanding sea routes, but given that Japan is surrounded by sea on all sides, the impossibility of understanding Japan without this perspective is self-evident. This is not limited to ancient history. It is a major theme running through the entirety of Japanese history to the present, and without firmly holding this perspective, the cultural transmissions of every era cannot be decoded.

Since the traces of seafaring peoples vanish beneath the waves, they are difficult to detect through the terrestrial evidence of archaeology and similar fields. Put differently, virtually everything narrated as Japanese history is history seen from the perspective of the land. It harbors the enormous problem of lacking the perspective of the sea, which is an even more critical factor. To touch that world, let us begin with these two clans. The key to understanding the Munakata lies in their enshrined deities. The key to the Azumi lies in the distribution of their name and the form of their worship. And an intriguing tendency shared by ancient sea-related clans must not be overlooked. The pattern of venerating trinities of deities appears repeatedly. To regard this as mere religious ornamentation is a mistake. From the number three, the memory of the very act of crossing the sea can be read.

At Munakata Taisha, the home shrine of the Munakata clan, a goddess is enshrined on each of three islands within the sacred domain. Tagorihime at Okitsu-miya on Okinoshima, Tagitsuhime at Nakatsu-miya on Oshima, and Ichikishimahime at Hetsu-miya on the mainland side. Okinoshima lies 50 kilometers offshore from the Kyushu mainland, Oshima 11 kilometers, and Hetsu-miya was once a separate island but is now connected to the mainland. I believe this arrangement of three shrines is not simply a matter of religious sanctuaries. It transmits in stages the memory of the sea route taken when crossing from the Korean Peninsula to the Munakata side. Arrivals would call at each island in sequence, performing purification rituals at each stage. Only after completing the final purification could they land at the Munakata headquarters. A protocol of “three purifications” existed along the ancient sea route. Only those who had fully purged the defilement of a foreign land could merge with the local deity and be recognized as kin. It goes without saying that the peculiar modern concept of “race” did not exist at the time. A person who had crossed the sea became one with the deity of the land at the moment the purification was complete. The remnant of this concept of spiritual kinship survives today as the three-shrine system of Munakata Taisha. Okinoshima, the site of the first purification, remains a sacred domain where entry is still forbidden.

The Munakata faith is called the faith of the three goddesses, Tagorihime, Tagitsuhime, and Ichikishimahime. The worship of these goddesses extends across the entire country. Famous examples include Itsukushima Shrine on Itsukushima in Hiroshima Prefecture and Enoshima Shrine on Enoshima in Kanagawa Prefecture. These transmit the traces of the Munakata clan’s movements. The fact that the three Munakata goddesses are enshrined in locations throughout Japan reveals that the clan were not merely gatekeepers of the Genkai Sea off northern Kyushu. They were a people who expanded over a wide area through the sea routes.

At Shikanoumi Shrine, the home shrine of the Azumi clan, the approach differs from the Munakata. Rather than enshrining three deities on three islands, they divide the sea itself into three layers, Soko, Naka, and Uha (bottom, middle, and surface), and enshrine a deity at each.

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It was not a single thing. It was born from many tributaries flowing into one. In this piece I want to look at the great current that formed the source itself. The figure who must be spoken of here is not a Japanese painter but a Chinese one. His name is Muqi.

Muqi was a Rinzai Zen monk who lived from the late Southern Song dynasty into the early Yuan period in the thirteenth century. He came from the mountainous province of Sichuan and later moved to Shaoxing, where he is said to have entered the school of the eminent Zen master Wuzhun Shifan (1177–1249). Wuzhun Shifan had deep ties to Japan. He was the master who produced a number of outstanding Japanese monks who went on to spread Rinzai Zen within Japan, foremost among them Enni Ben’en. Enni took the Rinzai teaching transmitted directly from Wuzhun Shifan as his foundation, but rather than adhering exclusively to Zen he blended it with Japanese esoteric Buddhism and spread Zen in Japan from his own distinctive vantage point. His contributions, however, were not limited to religion. After studying in Song China and returning to Japan, Enni founded temples in Hakata on Kyushu and in Kyoto and became one of the leading figures in the propagation of Zen. In his later years he returned to his hometown, and this gave rise to a culture that continues to this day. That culture is Shizuoka tea.

Enni’s hometown was in what was once called the province of Suruga, present-day Shizuoka City in Shizuoka Prefecture. Shizuoka Prefecture still possesses some of Japan’s most renowned tea fields and ranks among the top producers in the country. Shizuoka tea is traditionally said to have begun with Enni. When he returned to his hometown of Shizuoka in his later years, he had the tea he had brought back from Song planted and promoted tea cultivation. Enni himself drank tea daily and followed the belief of the time that tea possessed the power to extend life. Through Zen, Enni exerted a major influence on the cultural development of his homeland. Unlike those driven by self-serving ambition, Enni genuinely wished for the future of the place he came from and lived seriously for that purpose. This was a culture born through Zen, and I feel this perspective is critically important. Zen is the entrance, not the destination. I have long believed that Zen is something that envelops life, not an answer in itself. The spirit of Zen resides in each individual act of living daily life. It is something anyone can practice without undergoing special training at a temple. Historically, outstanding Zen monks have shared this perspective. But behind them, I cannot help sensing the influence of Wuzhun Shifan in China.

What I want to draw attention to here is that among Muqi’s fellow students under Wuzhun Shifan were Mugaku Sogen (Wuxue Zuyuan , 1226–1286), who would later travel to Japan, and Gottan Funei (Wuan Puning, 1197–1276). Both were Rinzai monks and both had a major impact on Rinzai Zen in Japan. Gottan Funei also studied under Wuzhun Shifan and is believed to have interacted with Enni during his period of study. In fact it was Enni who invited Gottan Funei from Southern Song to Japan in 1260. Gottan Funei was appointed as the second head of Kencho-ji in Kamakura at the request of Hojo Tokiyori, the supreme leader of the Kamakura shogunate. Hojo Tokiyori was a leader deeply committed to the spread of Rinzai Zen. Since Kamakura and Shizuoka are neighboring provinces, the influence of Rinzai intensified in this corridor. What matters is that the Zen monk Wuzhun Shifan stood as the spiritual pillar behind this entire religious and cultural milieu. He was most likely a generous-minded leader with a deep understanding of culture, one who did not cling to any single teaching. It is Japan’s good fortune that this Rinzai lineage flowed into the country, and it is no exaggeration to call it the lineage of Wuzhun Shifan. This lineage would go on to connect directly to the history of Suibokuga.

Muqi too is thought to have absorbed Wuzhun Shifan’s generosity of spirit through his interactions with fellow monks. And what is important is that although Muqi himself never visited Japan, the Chinese monks who had studied alongside him were later invited to Japan. Through these connections Muqi’s name became known within Japan. The enormous popularity of Muqi’s Suibokuga in Japan was made possible because the network of Chinese and Japanese monks centered on Wuzhun Shifan had built a direct tributary flowing into Japan. Behind the transmission of Muqi’s paintings to Japan lay not a simple commercial transaction but the existence of the Rinzai Zen religious network itself. In the course of Rinzai Zen’s spread within Japan, Muqi’s Suibokuga achieved such popularity that by the mid-fourteenth century countless forgeries were being produced. And above all, Muqi’s Suibokuga were not valued in China.

To understand Muqi’s Suibokuga, it is essential to grasp the Zen thought that lies behind it. As I have already written, Suibokuga is not simply a product of artistic talent. It is the reflection of Zen as a way of living daily life itself. Without Zen there would be no Suibokuga, and yet Suibokuga is not a tool for propagating Zen either. This sensibility may be difficult for peoples and nations with a strong religious consciousness to grasp, but the essence of Zen resides precisely here. Zen is not something that is taught, nor something that is learned. In the presence of a good master, the true worth of Zen manifests in the smallest gesture of daily life. There is no need for sermons. The history of Zen in Japan is rich with anecdotes of this kind.

One of the fundamental principles upheld by the Rinzai school is [不立文字]. This is the conviction that enlightenment cannot be transmitted through written characters or spoken words but only through the direct encounter between master and disciple. It is fundamentally different from the older Buddhist position that sought to learn the Dharma by reading scriptures and interpreting texts, and it was a reaction against the monopolization of Buddhist teaching by a limited few. Stripped of complexity, the idea is that the truth of the Dharma is already present in the ordinary daily contact of master and disciple, face to face. And this is not confined to the Zen relationship of master and disciple. It is open to everything. I suspect that Wuzhun Shifan understood and practiced this truth more deeply than anyone, and that this is why his disciples emerged and left a mark not only on China but on the history of Japan. In Zen it has long been held that rationalized systems of language and formalized rules are precisely what obstruct the attainment of enlightenment. In the present day this is something difficult to realize. It is not limited to Zen. It is simply a matter of looking seriously at the one person in front of you. But nothing is more difficult in the modern world than this simple act.

The thought of [不立文字] is naturally reflected in Muqi’s Suibokuga. His paintings contain none of the three-distance compositional methods that the orthodox Chinese ink painting of the time prescribed, none of the precise texture-stroke techniques, none of the strict bone-method brushwork. According to orthodox technique, mountains were to be rendered with texture strokes that expressed material quality. Muqi grasped the mountain together with the atmosphere surrounding it using nothing but the bleeding and tonal gradation of ink. To call this simply “a rebellion against form” is insufficient. It can be understood as the result of pursuing a direct apprehension that does not pass through form at all. The very idea of “rebellion against form” may function within the Western art-historical context, but it is an evaluation that does not reach Muqi’s lineage. If Muqi had thought about “form” and intentionally deviated from it, he would not have moved the hearts of Japanese painters. Nor would he have captured the hearts of the Rinzai monks who transmitted his works. The absurdity of thinking about Suibokuga through the lens of form is concentrated precisely in this point. There was no form in Wuzhun Shifan’s Zen.

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All religions, not only Buddhism, carry a certain limit. Whether that limit is covered over by drowning in the lust for power that comes with expanding the faithful, or confronted head on, depends on the person and the institution. This was precisely the challenge that the history of Japanese Buddhism faced after the end of the Heian period and the beginning of the Kamakura. The reality of people dying at a pace that overwhelmed the intentions of powerful monks who had seized control of politics, economics, and military power through the authority of the existing religious establishment could only expose their incompetence to the world.

It is in circumstances like these that the communal illusion disintegrates. The more entrenched a communal illusion, the more sudden its disintegration and the more devastating its impact on the people within it. Because they believed the illusion was the world. And as I have traced through the historical overview in this series, the movement to search for something outside the communal illusion began from within the Tendai school at Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, one of the driving forces that had shaped the communal illusion of Heian-kyo for centuries.

Some monks who left the incubator of the communal illusion on Mount Hiei and entered the city were confronted with a world beyond words. They faced the fact that secluding themselves on the mountain to practice was an act of selfishness that ignored the world entirely. They grew disillusioned with themselves. And they began to ask whether there was anything they could do to stand alongside the suffering of the people. The foremost figure in this history was Honen, but given the era, others must have emerged as well.

Why the most important lineage in this context moved toward what would come to be called Jodo (Pure Land) Buddhism is not easy to understand. In terms of the actual force that drove the expansion of this tradition, Shinran of Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land) contributed more than Honen. Both schools share the word Jodo in their names, meaning they belong to the same broad lineage of Pure Land faith. But the problem is that the crisis of faith in this era was so deep that the relationship between master Honen and disciple Shinran cannot be treated as a simple succession. It was precisely because the situation was so muddled that Shinran alone was able to see through to the essence.

Because we cannot avoid viewing these movements as history, we tend to conduct our examination of Jodo in a continuous line from Honen to Shinran. But I believe the issue lies elsewhere. If the problem of Jodo had simply been a matter of doctrinal gravity, the Jodo tradition would never have achieved its overwhelming position in Japan. What then is the thing that must be perceived in this era? It is in fact not a complex problem. It comes down to answering a single simple question. That question is death.

The movement of a new Buddhist lineage from Honen to Shinran was born precisely to think through this simple question of death with total rigor. Put differently, in the thoroughness with which they engaged the problem of death, the religious worldviews of Honen and Shinran diverge at the root. They cannot be equated. Shinran was certainly influenced by Honen, who had likewise grown disillusioned with Mount Hiei and begun his own independent teaching in Heian-kyo. But to call Shinran the legitimate successor of Honen on that basis is precarious. It is better to consider Shinran as having created an entirely different religion. In what is commonly described as his negation of the Jodo tradition, he pushed the gaze upon Jodo further than anyone.

From Shinran’s perspective, even the master Honen’s thinking about Jodo was sloppy and soft. Shinran systematically negated the Buddhist tendency to reify death, prayer beads, the nenbutsu, and Jodo. This is an ultimate and final position for a religion to take. When everything has been negated and pushed to its furthest point, what form of religion remains at the end? This is the world Shinran challenged, and in this respect he stands alone.

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Historians commonly say that when Buddhism first arrived on the Japanese archipelago, the indigenous people who had never before seen idol worship, the statues, the monks, the temples, were either captivated by the splendor or seized by awe. But we need to question whether this account is sound.

The circumstances under which Buddhism reached the Japanese archipelago were far from simple. Official and unofficial transmissions of Buddhism were entirely different affairs, and the unofficial side has vanished into historical darkness because it left no written record. But it strains common sense to believe that Buddhism was transmitted directly to ancient Yamato, situated deep in the interior of the archipelago. What is important is that the people involved in this transmission were neither Indian nor Chinese. They were Korean. In the official sense it was Seimei, king of the ancient Korean kingdom of Baekje, who dispatched Buddhist statues, sutras, and monks to the Yamato court.

Seen from another angle, Buddhism had already advanced as far as the Korean Peninsula. If so, I believe the likelihood is high that Buddhism had been brought to the Japanese archipelago through the complex ancient sea routes, still not fully understood, that connected the Korean Peninsula and the Chinese coast to the Japanese side. These routes were not one-directional. People from the Japanese archipelago may have crossed and brought Buddhism back. Unless we turn our attention to ancient maritime traffic, this dimension will remain invisible.

The conventional dates proposed for Buddhism’s official transmission have long been either 538 or 552, and 538 is now considered the more probable. Behind this lay not the religious prestige of Buddhism but the political situation on the Korean Peninsula. At the time the peninsula was divided among Baekje, Goguryeo, and Silla, three kingdoms frequently at war. King Seimei of Baekje, which had maintained close ties with the Japanese side since antiquity, sent Buddhist statues, sutras, and monks in an effort to forge a stronger alliance with Japan. But this “Japan” refers only to Yamato, not the entire archipelago. The transmission of Buddhism was not a pure religious exchange. It was a diplomatic act born of peninsular power dynamics.

The gift from Baekje was not welcomed from the start. Emperor Kinmei showed interest in the arrival of the statues but exercised caution over their acceptance. He entrusted them to his senior minister Soga no Iname with instructions amounting to little more than “try worshipping them and see what happens.” This anecdote reveals that the emperor’s personal embrace of the new faith was heavily constrained by the political dynamics of Yamato. Both the Baekje side and the Yamato side understood the transmission of Buddhism as an intensely political matter, specifically one of domestic politics. This continues to be ignored, but in the dynamics of ancient East Asia the movements of China, Korea, and Japan were linked. When China wavered, Korea and Japan wavered. When Japan wavered, Korea and China wavered. This triplet relationship is important for reading the current East Asian situation, yet this perspective is routinely dismissed.

When a massive epidemic struck Yamato during Emperor Kinmei’s reign, the anti-Buddhist faction led by the Mononobe clan petitioned the throne. The Buddhist statues were cast into the canal at Naniwa and the temple buildings were burned to the ground. At the root of this violent resistance lay the internal conflict between the pro-Buddhist Soga clan and the anti-Buddhist Mononobe. In 587, during the reign of Emperor Yomei, the Mononobe were destroyed. Buddhism was formally accepted. Riding the current of the new era, Prince Shotoku rose to prominence and laid the foundations for Buddhism’s flourishing by constructing Horyu-ji and Shitenno-ji. A persistent view holds that Prince Shotoku never existed as a historical individual. The portrait attributed to him is shrouded in doubt, and the court rank associated with him did not exist at the time. The current prevailing view is that the prince did exist but that everything attached to his image was fabricated by later generations.

Seen from yet another angle, the acknowledgment of Prince Shotoku’s existence may be inconvenient for certain parties. The reason remains unclear, but my own view is that something problematic lay in his bloodline and that later generations altered the record to conceal it. The flourishing of Buddhism was in fact constructed as a triangle among the Soga, a rising clan that had consolidated power by uniting naturalized immigrant groups, the Emperor Yomei whom they installed, and Prince Shotoku, said to be Yomei’s son. My personal view is that Prince Shotoku was the child of immigrants. The movement of this new immigrant-backed faction to seize control of the imperial court provoked a fierce backlash from the old-guard clans, the Mononobe, the Nakatomi, and the Otomo. The Otomo, however, were the first to defect to the immigrant side, betraying the old guard in exchange for interests on the Korean Peninsula, and were eventually destroyed by the Mononobe for their treachery. In this era, if we limit our view to Yamato, the forces led by indigenous clans and the forces led by immigrant clans were locked in fierce conflict over domestic governance. A new dynamic was being born. Without grasping this dynamic the true significance of Buddhism’s arrival cannot be perceived. To say merely that people were captivated by splendor is to say nothing at all.

With this background in view, the historians’ interpretation of Buddhist reception as “captivation by splendor” is revealed as hopelessly superficial and meaningless. People died in great numbers over these statues. Temples were burned. A political and spiritual shock of that magnitude ran through the people of this archipelago. The foundation of the problem was not Buddhist faith itself. It was the process by which, confronted with the choice of acceptance or rejection from the standpoint of maintaining domestic hegemony, they ultimately took Buddhism in. It is in that process that the prototype of the complex emotion the Japanese have held toward Buddhist statues can be found. At that moment a transmission of Buddhism occurred that transcended political calculation.

How do you look at a Buddhist statue when you stand before one?

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This is a proverb that has been used in Japan since ancient times. It means that a rumor does not spread without cause. If a rumor arises, there must be some factual basis behind it. The proverb applies not only to rumors but equally to legends that have been transmitted in various parts of the world.

Even now, believing in such things is considered foolish or irrational. But that is because people place excessive blind faith in science. Science at best arrives considerably late to confirm as fact the location of a fire that was already burning. Science is not absolute truth. It is merely a supplement to what has already been told. But it is precisely in this role as supplement that the true purpose and power of science resides. When we stop treating science as the protagonist, the reality in what has been dismissed as unscientific, whether rumor or legend, becomes something anyone can feel.

I have been independently surveying the pluralistic world of Japan through fieldwork across the country. In the course of this work I have repeatedly encountered a legend that spans multiple regions. It is the legend of Xu Fu [徐福 (Jofuku)]. The origin of the Xu Fu legend lies in a record found in the Shiji, the most important historical document in Chinese history, compiled by Sima Qian. The Shiji is thought to have been completed around 91 BCE during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Former Han dynasty. The Xu Fu legend, however, reaches back to the preceding Qin dynasty.

The Xu Fu legend is deeply connected to Qin Shi Huang (r. 221–210 BCE), the first emperor to unify China. More than a century separates the events from the compilation of the Shiji, and the upheaval of the transition from Qin to Han intervened. It is reasonable to assume that by Sima Qian’s time these events had already taken on the character of legend.

The Xu Fu legend holds that Xu Fu, seeking the elixir of immortality to present to Qin Shi Huang, set out for a land across the eastern sea, leading as many as 3,000 people to the Japanese archipelago, where some of them settled. The exact number varies by version but the common understanding is that several thousand people crossed. The land across the eastern sea is the ancient Japanese archipelago.

On the Japanese side, the story begins with the aristocratic and monastic elite of the Heian period, who had access to Chinese texts and knew of Xu Fu as a matter of book learning. Of particular note is a record preserved on the Chinese side stating that Kanpo [寛輔], a monk of roughly the tenth century, told a Chinese monk that Japan possessed Mount Horai, the mountain Xu Fu had been seeking, and that it was Mount Fuji. Kanpo is almost unknown in Japan, but his account appears in the Yichu Liutie [義楚六帖], compiled in 954 by Yichu during the Later Zhou (951–960) of the Five Dynasties period. According to the text, Yichu heard the story directly from Kanpo in 958. The apparent discrepancy in dates is explained by the fact that the work was not actually published until around 973 during the Song dynasty, and the account was added during the intervening period.

Mount Horai is the mountain of immortality in the Chinese tradition. What matters here is that Kanpo equated Mount Horai with Mount Fuji. Among a segment of the Heian-kyo elite, the understanding that Xu Fu’s destination was Mount Fuji had begun to circulate. This can be regarded as the starting point of the Xu Fu legend’s narrative on the Japanese side. Mount Fuji, however, has no actual connection to Mount Horai. The association was newly created around this period. The reason is relatively clear. In Japanese texts concerning Mount Fuji that predate this tenth-century source, there is not a single passage linking the mountain to either Horai or Xu Fu.

For example, the Fujisan Ki written in his later years by Miyako no Yoshika (834–879), an aristocratic scholar of the early Heian period, depicts Mount Fuji as a divine realm where celestial maidens dance at the summit. But it makes no mention whatsoever of Horai or Xu Fu. The famous Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, whose date of composition is uncertain but is believed to have been completed by the early tenth century at the latest, also portrays Mount Fuji in association with the thought of the immortals, yet says nothing of Horai or Xu Fu.

In other words, Kanpo’s anecdote was based on a new current that emerged in the late Heian period and was limited to the Heian-kyo elite. The background to why Mount Fuji began to be deified in this way will be addressed separately. For now the essential point is that this was something intellectuals began discussing on the basis of book knowledge. What truly sustained the Xu Fu legend was the oral tradition actually inherited in local communities. The Xu Fu legend in Japan has two distinct lineages. One is the Xu Fu image developed by the elite, who took knowledge from Chinese texts and connected it to the ideology of the ruling class. The other is the Xu Fu image held by non-elite peoples who transmitted from generation to generation the belief that they were Xu Fu’s descendants.

In the Heian period the Xu Fu legend was nothing more than a piece of knowledge. But in the Kamakura period that followed, the legend gained reality. The reason was the emergence of an ideology that would later become the source of Kokugaku, the nativist school of thought with its anti-foreign bent that flourished in the Edo period. The foremost figure behind this ideology was Kitabatake Chikafusa (1293–1354), a court noble and historian. Kitabatake lived during the peculiar Nanbokucho period in which two emperors existed simultaneously, each waging civil war over the claim to legitimacy. The Northern Court and the Southern Court were established as rival imperial lines, and the power struggle among the ruling class played out around each. Kitabatake Chikafusa was a major figure on the Southern Court side and its de facto leader.

In the end it was the Northern Court that is regarded as having prevailed. But it is now widely known that legitimacy actually belonged to the Southern Court. The Northern Court’s imperial line and its ruling class usurped the throne from the Southern Court, which held the rightful claim to succession, and then declared themselves legitimate. The proof of imperial legitimacy in Japan’s imperial line is a set of treasures inherited since the mythological age known as the Three Sacred Treasures. The Southern Court’s line possessed them.

Because the Three Sacred Treasures guaranteed imperial legitimacy, the Northern Court fabricated replicas, and a fierce struggle over legitimacy escalated between the two sides. At this juncture Kitabatake Chikafusa, the effective leader of the Southern Court, wrote a book to argue for the legitimacy of the Southern Court’s imperial line. That book was the Jinno Shotoki [神皇正統記], completed in 1339. In the section on the reign of the seventh emperor, Korei, Kitabatake included a passage to the effect that Xu Fu came from Qin and died in Japan.

Emperor Korei is one of the early emperors whose historical existence is doubted, and his dates of reign are unknown. One conventional dating places his reign at 342–215 BCE, but this is based on the modern fabrication that positions the enthronement of the first emperor Jimmu in 660 BCE and cannot be directly trusted. However, it is a fact that some figure corresponding to Emperor Korei was placed in the approximate era of Qin Shi Huang’s reign and linked to the Shiji’s record that Xu Fu came to Japan. It goes without saying that the Western calendar (Gregorian calendar) was not in use during Kitabatake’s lifetime. These dates were determined by scholars from the Meiji period onward and have nothing to do with him.

But this is not mere fantasy. What matters is that through a work written by Kitabatake Chikafusa to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Southern Court, the Xu Fu legend was incorporated into Japan’s official historical narrative. From this point forward the legend took root in Japan, meaning it has captivated a segment of the Japanese people for nearly seven hundred years.

As consciousness of the emperor’s legitimate lineage intensified among the ruling class during the Nanbokucho period, the legend of Xu Fu dispatched by Qin Shi Huang became linked to Japan’s official history. This generated a question driven by curiosity. If Xu Fu died in Japan as Kitabatake claimed, who are his descendants?

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Ti Jun, the Wei envoy who landed in northern Kyushu in 240, and Zhang Zheng, who stayed in Yamato for several years beginning around 247. The oldest records of the Japanese side dating to the 240s are the observations of these two men, transmitted through the Wei military’s effective control of the Daifang Commandery on the northern Korean Peninsula to the Chinese imperial court.

What can be determined at this point is only that the Wei envoys set foot in the specific regional confederation they had long called the Wa kingdom [倭国] and met the Wa people [倭人] they called the Wa [委/倭]. But the Wa kingdom does not mean present-day Japan, and the Wa people do not mean present-day Japanese. An uncanny fusion of illusions was taking place in mid-third-century Japan, and as this series has shown, that fusion was perfectly synchronized with the movements of the Three Kingdoms period on the Chinese side.

In the history of the hegemonic struggle among the three kingdoms of Wei, Wu, and Shu, the Gongsun clan had risen to power on the Liaodong Peninsula by threading the gaps between them. They eventually came to control parts of the Lelang and Daifang commanderies on the northern Korean Peninsula and expanded their influence. The rise of the Gongsun on the Liaodong Peninsula was welcome news for Wu, which needed at all costs to advance into North China to contain Wei. Wu promptly dispatched envoys to demand that the Gongsun pledge submission to the Wu emperor. But for the Gongsun, diplomacy with the great power of Wei next door was a far more pressing concern than a distant state with no shared interests. The Gongsun executed the Wu envoys and presented their remains to Wei.

This act of vile discourtesy and betrayal toward Wu’s diplomatic overture sent immediate shockwaves from the ancient Korean Peninsula all the way to the ancient Japanese archipelago. We underestimate the historical awareness of the ancients out of our own selfish arrogance, but this region of East Asia has been connected since antiquity. The notion that each area developed its history in isolation is an impossibility.

The Gongsun’s recklessness transformed the geopolitical situation in ancient China. In 233 the Wu emperor Sun Quan had dispatched a massive fleet carrying 10,000 soldiers and a fortune in treasure to Liaodong, offering the Gongsun patriarch Gongsun Yuan the title of King of Yan and seeking to conclude a formal military alliance. For Wei, whose operations had been based primarily in North China, this was a geopolitical crisis. Until that point Wei had only needed to watch Wu to the south in the Yangtze region and Shu to the west in the Sichuan Basin. Wei controlled the northern half of the Yellow River basin including the Central Plains, the historical heartland of Chinese civilization, and held a relatively advantageous position for monitoring both Wu and Shu. But Wu’s scheme to ally with the Gongsun behind Wei’s back meant that Wei would be surrounded on virtually all sides. If a military alliance among Wu, Shu, and the Gongsun were concluded, it would be the end.

In this precarious situation, Wei was saved by the betrayal of Gongsun Yuan himself. But it was now forced to make a major shift in its strategy for unifying China.

First, on the iron principle that a man who betrays once will betray again, the Wei emperor Ming immediately appointed Gongsun Yuan as Grand General and extracted a pledge of loyalty to the Wei throne. For Gongsun Yuan a direct war with Wei was not realistic, so he allowed himself to be co-opted. But simultaneously in 238 Wei ordered its key minister Sima Yi to lead a force of tens of thousands in a military invasion of Gongsun territory. Combat began in Liaodong around June of 238. The Daifang and Lelang commanderies on the northern Korean Peninsula were swiftly seized. By August Gongsun Yuan had been executed.

Word of this upheaval across the sea in 238 reached Queen Himiko of Yamato almost immediately. Whether the political decision that followed was the product of deliberation among the multiple male kings of the various tribes who held real power within Yamato, or the result of a divine oracle delivered through Himiko’s trance, is uncertain. My own reading, based on the character of Yamato in this era, is that it was the queen’s oracle. What matters is that when the Yamato side detected the upheaval in the Three Kingdoms, what took place was not an immediate political strategy meeting to determine the future. It was a ritual in which the question was put to the gods.

When the oracle delivered its result and Himiko, as the consensus of Yamato, resolved to pledge submission to the Wei emperor, it can be said that Japanese history was set in motion in a certain sense. The queen of Yamato was discarding the possibility of submitting to the emperors of Wu or Shu and publicly declaring a position of vassalage to Wei. Realistically, submission to Shu, far removed from Yamato, was difficult to conceive. But Wu was in close proximity to the southern part of the Japanese archipelago and had maintained intense contact since the Jomon period as a deeply connected region. In the midst of all this, the gods determined that the next hegemon of China would be Wei. Receiving this divine will, Himiko immediately decided to dispatch envoys to the Wei emperor.

With the conferral of the title [親魏倭王] (Friend of Wei, Queen of the Wa) by Emperor Ming, Himiko officially entered a status resembling that of a tributary state within the Wei sphere. Wei then dispatched envoys from the Daifang Commandery on the Korean Peninsula to investigate the realities of this Wa kingdom it knew little about. This is better understood as a strategic survey to determine whether the Wa kingdom might become the next Gongsun. The Gishiwajinden is rich in what we would today call ethnographic content, but it must be grasped as one component of an intelligence operation aimed at winning the Three Kingdoms struggle.

Here a powerful question surfaces. Why did Wei need to establish an alliance with a Wa kingdom so far away?

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“I’ll be dead at eighty. But cinema absolutely has the beauty and the power to save the world from war and lead the world to peace. War can be started in an instant, but establishing peace will take at least four hundred years. If I could live another four hundred years and keep making films I would use my cinema to bring the world to peace. But my life is no longer enough.”

These are words that the film director Kurosawa Akira left as a testament to Obayashi Nobuhiko. Passed from a director who defined one era to the director who would define the next, they press upon me now with an extraordinary rawness.

Kurosawa went on to say this.

“How old are you, Obayashi? Fifty, is it? I’m already eighty. But what took me eighty years to learn you could do in sixty. That means you can go twenty years further than I did. And if you can’t make it, your children will. And if they can’t, your grandchildren will carry it a little further. And if someday one of them makes the film that stands four hundred years beyond mine, then at last the power of cinema will have rid the world of war. That is the power of cinema. And it is for that purpose that I learned from the films of those who came before me in Japan, in America, and in Europe.”

The power of cinema…
Does anyone in the present age know this power?
Does anyone truly believe in it?

“Human beings are truly foolish. They still cannot stop making war. There is nothing as foolish as a human being. And yet for some reason human beings created this thing called cinema. Cinema is a strange thing. It was supposed to be a recording device invented by scientific civilization to capture reality faithfully. But for some reason scientific civilization breaks down all the time. Breaking down is what scientific civilization does. And yet thanks to those breakdowns the recordings came out wrong. Figures leapt across the frame. People flew off to impossible places. All kinds of strange images were born. And if you take those and bring them to life, what you get is not fact, not realism, but a truth that transcends fact. What cinema can depict is the truth of the human heart.”

It was around 2017 that Obayashi first shared this conversation publicly as a testament Kurosawa had entrusted to him as the next generation. By then Obayashi had received a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer. Obayashi Nobuhiko was the director who made his explosive debut in 1977 with House, his first commercial feature, a work that earned a cult following as a psychedelic film. Even as he lived without knowing when death would come he continued making films. His anti-cancer treatment proved effective and his condition temporarily improved. Kurosawa’s testament was something Obayashi, sensing his own death drawing near, passed on in turn to the filmmakers of the generation that would follow.

With the time his treatment had bought him he left behind one final film before departing this world. That film was Labyrinth of Cinema. I personally believe Obayashi made this work to carry Kurosawa’s will forward to the next generation. In the entire history of cinema it is the work that has shaken the deepest part of my being. It was through this film that I understood for the first time what Kurosawa meant by “the power of cinema.”

Leaders who openly slaughter the leaders of other nations and topple governments on a whim, clinging to the old ways. When those who must end refuse to end, history always arrives at a devastating conclusion.

Even today, people who have lived for generations in certain small districts of Kyoto speak with pride of the city’s thousand years of history. Within Japan this is generally interpreted as Kyoto pride, but in reality it is the pride of a world confined to an extremely small number of blocks. It cannot be spoken of as Kyoto in general. And even now, as if guarding this small world, Mount Hiei stands to the northeast in the direction of the demon gate.

Throughout this series I have surveyed the powerful system that Mount Hiei built across the Heian period, and I have shown that it possessed dimensions too complex to be dismissed simply as a breeding ground for corruption. The reason Mount Hiei’s history cannot be overlooked is that it served as the matrix from which the Pure Land school emerged, the school that has exerted the greatest influence on the centuries that followed down to the present day. Honen, founder of the Jodo school, was a monk of Mount Hiei. Shinran, founder of Jodo Shinshu, who as Honen’s foremost disciple elevated the Pure Land school to an immense stature, was also a monk of Mount Hiei.

The people of Kyoto do not understand this, but it is a fact that the seeds born on the stage of Heian-kyo, a world that amounts to a single small block when seen against the full expanse of Japan’s territory, became a vital driving force in shaping the thousand years of history that followed. To view this through the spatial frame of present-day Kyoto Prefecture or Kyoto City is already to misread it. The true Kyoto is an extremely small district. Everything outside it is not Kyoto.

Honen and Shinran both founded their religions on the premise of the Pure Land. But in what respects did the two differ? Honen lived from 1133 to 1212 and Shinran from 1173 to 1263. The two lived roughly forty to fifty years apart. In an era when Heian-kyo had collapsed, political authority had been seized entirely by the warrior class, and the shogunate had been established in the distant eastern city of Kamakura, half a century was literally the span of an entirely different world.

The rapid transformations of the age could not fail to exert a powerful influence on the Pure Land faith that connected Honen to Shinran. For Shinran, Honen was the person he respected above all others, yet there may also have been a strong sense that certain aspects of Honen’s teaching no longer fit the times. It was around 1207 that Honen’s faith began to be treated as a serious problem by the old Buddhist establishment centered on Mount Hiei, and campaigns of obstruction and efforts to bring about his downfall commenced.

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On the Chinese side, where writing and documentary techniques were acquired early, the imperative of knowing one’s neighbors grew steadily in importance as a means of maintaining a stable regime anchored in the dynasty, given the reality of a vast territory open on all sides. Out of this imperative the concept of the Four Barbarians eventually emerged, and the world of ancient Japan came to be understood as one of the peoples of the Eastern Barbarians. The earliest documentary source for this understanding is the text now known as the Gishiwajinden. Yet if one attempts to gain insight into the Wa people of the Wa kingdom as the true image of ancient Japan, or into Himiko the queen of Yamatai, a single lifetime will not suffice. The historical confusion involved is so intense and so deeply entangled with the broader history of East Asia that no single interpretation or definitive answer can be clearly offered. Still, with that impossibility as a premise, the journey of cutting through layer upon layer of extraordinary complexity to bring the image of ancient Japan to the surface can be continued on one’s own terms.

The subject of this piece is the relationship between the Wei envoys who visited the Japanese archipelago in the 240s and Himiko. In fact, even the description of Himiko as queen of Yamatai conceals a number of premises that must be questioned. Let me begin with the dimension of sound.

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What deserves particular attention is the fact that the great tide of faith seeking a future beyond Mount Hiei did not emerge from outside that collective illusion but from within it. Without understanding the process that led to this point, the new religious movement that was about to begin cannot be grasped. This is why I have devoted this series to tracing the contours of the era from my own perspective. The culmination of that effort lies in recognizing that everything was reset during the six brutal years of civil war from 1180 to 1185, the terminal convulsion of Heian-kyo. That said, it is a constant of history that the signs of a regime’s collapse always appear slightly before the decisive events themselves. Just yesterday on the Japanese side, a snap general election was held at the behest of the entrenched interests led by self-serving politicians, bureaucrats, and the U.S. military establishment in Japan. The result was the establishment of a Liberal Democratic Party dictatorship succeeding the second Abe administration, an outcome made possible by a majority electorate in a hyper-aged society utterly lacking the capacity to judge its own future. When one surveys the final years of the Heian period in this way, it becomes self-evident that nothing has changed.

It is true that on the level of an individual life it is only human to wish for a lifetime free of upheaval and to hope to live out one’s days in peace. Yet since every system inevitably rots, it is equally true that without periodic resets no light can break through. Moreover, as someone who loves the study of history, I cannot help but feel personally that an ending is not cause for despair but a harbinger of hope for the future. What must end will always end. Put another way, what must end must be brought to an end. The rise and fall of the Taira clan under Taira no Kiyomori, which we have traced up to this point, was eventually passed down through the ages as The Tale of the Heike, and even now the impermanence of that prosperity resonates deep in the heart. For me this series of reflections functions as a kind of mirror held up to the hidden face of Japan today.

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The capital where Himiko resided was a nation called Yamatai, yet the location of this ancient seat of power, sometimes spoken of as a kingdom, remains unknown to this day. This is, in fact, quite strange. By that period, the Chinese side already possessed advanced techniques of surveying and geographical understanding, and the account in the Gishiwajinden [魏志倭人伝], though concise, describes the very route along which the envoys traveled to gain an audience with Himiko. Hearing this alone, one might assume the location of Yamatai could be settled without difficulty, and yet it has never been definitively established. Why has the question of where Yamatai stood produced such confusion?

In this article, we will trace the path toward understanding that mystery.

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