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Abstract
In November 1928, Hirohito became the emperor of Japan through a series of rituals, beginning with the emperor's presentation to the world. Afterwards the emperor soul, transmitted from the sun goddess through the preceding generations of emperors to the current one, is rejuvenated and pacified by attaching different gods (kami) to it. Then, in his full presence as a living-kami, the new emperor enters a finely balanced structure to partake of sacred rice with the kami. Within the Japanese cosmos, the world at large, the domain of humankind, and the realm of the kami are situated along a continuum. In such a world, the forces of homology can, through meticulous ritual, connect between those realms and harness one plane for the improvement and augmentation of another. By means of the rites of succession, the emperor activates the forces of homology, yielding a dynamic yet precarious world, as the kami forces of peace and harmony are harnessed for the well-being of all Japan.
Notes
Historians such as Ginzburg, who claims that all history is “about particular cases” (Citation1980: 16), have analysed historical documents in cosmological terms, and anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney has looked at the histories of Japan's cultural symbols in a similar vein.
Modern Japanese eras are named according to the reigning emperor's declared posthumous name. Hirohito's posthumous name was Shōwa, and the Shōwa era spanned from the death of Hirohito's father Taishō in 1926 to Hirohito's death in 1989. The posthumous name of Akihito, the current emperor, is Heisei.
On 1 January 1946, following Japan's defeat in the Pacific War, Hirohito announced that he was abdicating his title of living god. Of course “living god” is not a title to be abdicated, but rather a ritualistic role; and the manifold rituals generating a living kami, such as the daijōsai which will be described here, are still practiced today. The current emperor, Akihito, performed daijōsai on 24 November 1990.
All citations from the Japanese press in this article were translated and published by The Japan Times.
The niiname, the new rice ritual, is performed by the emperor every year, while the “great” ritual is performed only once in an emperor's life.
Since the Meiji restoration, changes have been introduced in imperial ceremonies, particularly funeral rites. Before Meiji, Buddhist monks would carry out the imperial funerary rites; as part of the effort to make Shinto a state religion, these were replaced by Shinto rituals. The renewed funerary rites were in turn borrowed from ancient chronicles (Ohnuki-Tierney Citation1992). The succession rituals, part of the agrarian Shinto rituals, were more continuous over time.
Nevertheless, the displayed image is known to have been fake, so that, the emperor still remained invisible, I thank the reviewer of History and Anthropology for this remark.
The very narrow Japanese archipelago stretches many hundreds of kilometers from north to south, encompassing different climates and cultural traditions. Dividing it into East and West yields two halves that contain the diversity of Japanese geography in each.
No photos of the constructions were taken, but drawings made from a distance were published in the press, and a drawing depicting the two halls featured on a stamp issued for the occasion. For close-up photos of the exterior of the halls constructed in 1990 (in Tokyo), taken immediately before they were dismantled, see Mayer (Citation1992).
Up to the early reign of Meiji at the end of the nineteenth century, the emperor could not be seen. He was consulted while hidden behind a bamboo screen and his words carried by a messenger (Keene Citation2002).
Persons looking at the emperor were said to lose their eyesight or even their lives.
See for instance the journal Homology, Homotopy and Applications.
Historically, the emperor was effeminated not only during this sequence of rituals: he was dressed as a girl in childhood, his teeth blackened and his eyebrows plucked and repainted in the middle of his forehead in imitation of current female fashion. Moreover, the gosho, the imperial palace in Kyoto, housed mainly women. Behr (Citation1990) shows a photo of the young Hirohito wearing a Western lace dress and hat. Thus the imperial children were prepared from a young age to become ritual beings, both male and female.
Like the emperor who is full of both male and femaleness, rice is also auto-sufficient, a world unto itself, as it is self-pollinating.
