Ritual Practice in Modern Japan Ritual Practice in Modern Japan Ordering Place, People, and Action Satsuki Kawano University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2005 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States ofAmerica 10 09 08 07 06 05 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kawano, Satsuki. Ritual practice in modern Japan : ordering place, people, and action /Satsuki Kawano. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN0-8248-2877-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN0-8248-2934-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Rites and ceremonies—Japan—Kamakura-shi. 2. Festivals— Japan—Kamakura-shi. 3. Fasts and feasts—Japan—Kamakura-shi. 4. Kamakura-shi (Japan)—Religious life and customs. 5. Kamakura-shi (Japan)—Social life and customs. I. Title. GN635.J2K392005 306.4'0952'136—dc22 2004026559 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by University ofHawai‘i Press production staff Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Kami,Buddhas, and Ancestors 21 Chapter 2 Embodying Moral Order: Acting Bodies and the Power of Ritual 38 Chapter 3 Emplacing Moral Order: Ritual and Everyday Environments 54 Chapter 4 Constructing Kamakura in Everyday Life and City Festivals 75 Chapter 5 The Sakae Festival 95 Chapter 6 Reconsidering Ritual 114 Notes 121 Bibliography 133 Index 147 Acknowledgments A lthough many people helped me to com- plete this work, I am particularly indebted to my mentors for their nurturance. L.Keith Brown has been an everlasting source of encourage- mentand intellectual challenge at every stage. Andrew Strathern, Rich- ard Scaglion, Thomas Rimer, and Akiko Hashimoto provided valuable guidance and support, and I am deeply grateful. I would like to acknowledge a number of fellowships and grants that made it possible for me to work on this project. During the initial stage, the Japan Council of the University of Pittsburgh provided a travel grant to conduct a pilot study and to purchase research equipment for field- work. The Japan Foundation generously funded my fourteen months of fieldwork in Kamakura between 1995 and 1996. An Andrew Mellon Pre- doctoral Fellowship (1996–1997) and a Social Science Research Council DissertationWrite-upFellowship(1996–1997)supported the initial writ- ing stage of this project. A senior fellowship (1998–1999) at the Divinity School at Harvard University provided me with an opportunity to con- vert my dissertation into an early version of the book manuscript. While working on this project I received assistance from a number of guides, colleagues, and friends. During fieldwork, Professor Suenari Michio kindly arranged my affiliation at the University of Tokyo. I would like to thank Lawrence Sullivan for providing me with a wonder- ful interdisciplinary working environment at Harvard University. Misty Bastian has provided me with much encouragement and friendship since we met in Cambridge. The final stages of this work could not have been completed without the generous support and intellectual stimula- vii viii Acknowledgments tion of my colleagues and students in the anthropology department at the University of Notre Dame. Among them my special thanks go to Susan Blum and James McKenna for their guidance and encouragement. I would also like to thank John Traphagan for many years of friendship and input. This book has benefited greatly from Don Yoder’s copyediting work. Anonymous reviewers provided constructive comments and sug- gestions,for which I am also grateful. And my deep gratitude goes to Patricia Crosby at the University of Hawai‘i Press for her professional- ism and support. Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to the people who participated in this study. This book would not have been possible without their kind- ness and generosity. Introduction O ne warm afternoon, Suzuki-san and I were sitting in a small café in Kamakura, a medium-sized city near Tokyo. Suzuki-sanis a thirty-eight-year-old man who works for a phar- maceutical company in Tokyo. He told me: “I do not believe in Shinto or Buddhism. I do not go to shrines or temples for religious reasons. Chris- tian doctrines taught me that I should follow God, but not kami[deities, often associated with Shinto] and hotoke[buddhas and ancestors].” Having converted to Christianity when he was in college, Suzuki- sanmaintains no domestic altars enshrining ancestors and tutelary kami at home, the central sites for ritual activity in Kamakura. Suzuki-sanis exceptional, not only because Christianity is a minor religion in Japan (just 1.4 percent of the entire population are Christians),1 but also because he believes that his ritual actions must be supported by his per- sonal faith. In contrast, most of the people I met in Kamakura tended to downplay personal faith in specific religious doctrines when explaining their ritual actions, such as praying to the tutelary kamior ancestors for health and protection. In fact, Japanese people today are known to emphasize “the primacy of action” over belief in explaining their ritual actions (Reader 1991, 15, 20). It is customary for families to belong to Buddhist temples, and many value memorial rites conducted by Bud- dhist priests to venerate ancestors. Nevertheless, it is not unknown for people to lack knowledge of the Buddhist tradition (shü) to which their family temple belongs.2 In Kamakura, too, ritual actors are more fre- quently concerned with praying for the well-being of themselves and those close to them, both living and dead, than with theological issues. The attitude of “do it and see if it works” is widespread. And perform- 1 2 Introduction ing rituals might eventually lead to personal commitment to religious ideas and doctrines. The primacy of action is also evident in recent survey results. They indicate that there are many more ritually active people than those who say they believe in religion or kamiand hotoke.Typically, only one-third or fewer report that they have a religion/religions in which they believe, and approximately two-fifths believe in the existence of kamior hotoke.3 Yet many more respondents reported that they visit Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines during New Year holidays and family graves, often located in Buddhist temple compounds, at least once a year.4According to the 1998 NHK (Nihon Hösö Kyökai, or Japan Broadcasting Corpo- ration) survey, some 81 percent of the respondents reported that they reverently face (ogamu)or pray to kamiand hotokeat least once a year (Onodera 1999, 55). The 2001Yomiuri Newspaper survey indicates that some 78 percent of its respondents maintain domestic altars to kamior hotoke(Yomiuri Newspaper, 28 December 2001, 15).5 Thus we cannot assume that religious rites are expressions or con- firmations of belief in the doctrine regarding supernatural entities and powers. Rather than treating belief and ritual action as self-evident ana- lytical categories and assuming that the former causes the latter, their relationship must be investigated as being culturally constructed and socially generated. In Kamakura, rather than a prerequisite, a personal conviction of or belief in kami’s or hotoke’s power is just one of the pos- sible consequences of ritual practice. Ritual’s persistence and relevance owe much to ritual forms that can create an elevated context infused with a sense of moral order pervasive in daily life. Common ritual actions per- formed in Kamakura can simultaneously engage ritual actors in special contexts set apart from daily life while evoking moral personhood cul- tivated in mundane bodies and environments. When commenting on the small number of believers in religion compared with the number of ritual practitioners, some argue that Japan is a completely secular society, and thus that religion has little relevance to people’s lives, while others say ritual practitioners lack awareness that they have a religion because it revolves around conventional rites inter- twined with daily life. Neither a meaningless formality nor mere custom, ritual potentially, rather than automatically, provides contemporary urbanites with culturally significant ways of constructing meaning and power. In short, this book aims to demonstrate that people’s ritual bod-