When Japan Was Born
Reading the Archetype of the State through the Philosophy of Fudo
Throughout my years of traveling across Japan I have experienced many times the difference between places that feel right to me and places that do not. For a long time I thought about where this groundless sensation originated. Recently I have found one answer in an old idea. That idea is [風土] (Fudo). Fudo is something that resists being put into words. And my own understanding of Fudo differs entirely from the standard Japanese interpretation. In this article I want to look in detail at the background from which the idea of Fudo was born.
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)?