The article compares the belief structures around yama no kami of townsfolk versus forest-dwelling hunters in rural Nagano Prefecture around the turn of the 19th century. The townsfolk viewed the Mountain Gods with fear and were loathe to enter the forests lest they incur their wrath. Interestingly, the tribe of hunters who lived in a separate settlement further in the mountain forests dismissed the townsfolk's beliefs as superstitious. This is not to say that the hunters did not believe in spirits. Their beliefs were quite strong, and they observed rituals of respect when climbing the sacred peaks. They, however, did not believe the mountain spirits to be vindictive as did the townsfolk. (Please note, I am paraphrasing a great deal and leaving out many subtle nuances carefully crafted in the article for brevity's sake.)
The development of this belief is one that I have encountered before in Louis Perez's History of Japan (1998). Perez links the development of Mountain = God = Scary belief to the formation of permanent settlements away from the coast. What's so important about the movement inland? In Carmen Blacker's Catalpa Bow, Blacker links the geographic transition to changing concepts about the world of the dead. In ancient times when cultural centers were located on the coast the spirits of dead ancestors were said to live in a land across or beneath the sea. The movement inland altered these beliefs. Land is cleared for the building of structures and wild plants tamed for agriculture. Most hunter-gatherer societies have a more integrated relationship to their surroundings. Whereas permanent farming settlements further solidified the boundaries between the human world (village/fields = cultivated) and the spirit world (forest/mountain = wild). Instead of the ocean, mountains and their surrounding forests became the land of the spirits.
Irontown. Film still.
I was immediately reminded of Miyazaki's film Mononoke Hime and the differing views held of the forest by the Irontown residents and Ashitaka. Like the hunters in the article who live outside of "town," the Emishi in Miyazaki's movie regard the forest and its spirits in a very different light. The binary becomes even more fascinating as Miyazaki adapts it to speak from an environmentalist perspective: town/forest; transformation/resistance; modern/ancient; destruction/creation.
It's ironic that, much like the forest is transformed by the influx of the Irontown humans, the 1880s Japan referenced in the article is soon to be transformed by the influx of Western modernism. As Lady Eboshi tried to kill the Spirit of the Forest in hopes of transforming the Gods back into mere animals; ssimilarly, modern Japan brought about the death of yokai and other fantastic spirits. Mandated by the Meiji Restoration, which ended almost 300 years of Tokugawa isolationism, a great deal of traditional culture was rejected and bulldozed under in the name of bunmei kaika (文明開化), civilization and enlightenment. Almost overnight the spirits that once terrified humans suddenly ceased to exist, dismissed as the superstitions of an uneducated, irrational past.
Sources
Blacker, Carmen. The Catalpa Bow : a Study in Shamanistic Practices in Japan. Richmond: Japan Library, 1999.
Schnell, Scott. “Are Mountain Gods Vindictive? Competing Images of Japanese Alpine Landscape.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 13, no. 4 (January 1, 2007): 863–880.
Perez, Louis G. The History of Japan. Greenwood Press, 1998.
Schnell, Scott. “Are Mountain Gods Vindictive? Competing Images of Japanese Alpine Landscape.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 13, no. 4 (January 1, 2007): 863–880.
Perez, Louis G. The History of Japan. Greenwood Press, 1998.
