Contents

• Building, Building
• Hita and the Coffee Garden
• The Space Between
• Kanzaki, part one: Kushidagu
• The Lay of the Land

Category: Away

Kanzaki, part one: Kushidagu

Main shrine, Kushidagu

Kanzaki is in the eastern part of a broad fertile plain, which stretches from the shores of the Ariake Sea to the mountains southwest of Fukuoka. This is farm country, and has been for a very long time. Wet rice culture came to Japan during the Yayoi period (c.300 BC to c.300 AD), and Kanzaki contains some of the most significant Yayoi remains in the country. The area is also well situated with respect to several natural communication routes running through northern Kyushu. Although Kanzaki has never been a fabulously important place, it has always marked a local junction point on the path of events, people, and ideas. These days the name ‘Kanzaki’ is most closely associated with a particular kind of somen – noodles made from wheat flour – and with Yoshinogari national park, built to preserve the Yayoi remains. Because I like to look for big things in small places, I plan to make extravagant claims about Kanzaki. A certain kind of philosophy imagines that each part of the world always contains a summary or version of the whole world, and of the whole of human history. If we suspend a bit of our disbelief, we can find remarkable things in otherwise unremarkable rice paddies. This essay takes up the story with reference to the history of Kushidagu: Kanzaki’s principal Shinto shrine.

All Shinto shrines can be called ‘jinja’ in Japanese; this word usually appears as a suffix to identify a place as a shrine of some sort. Like most things, however, there are ranks of shrines: a ‘jinja’ is a basic shrine; shrines at the next level up use the suffix ‘gu’; and the top level shrines are called ‘taisha’. For many centuries, Kanzaki’s Kushida shrine was a ‘jinja’ but in the 1960s it was promoted up to the ‘gu’ level. This was, in part, a recognition of its historical relationship with the currently much more famous Kushida shrine in Hakata: the records show that long ago Hakata’s Kushidajinja was a subsidiary of Kanzaki’s. We could call both shrines ‘Kushida Shrine’ in English, but it is both more accurate and more historically satisfying to stick with Kushidagu (Kanzaki) and Kushidajinja (Hakata). Many generations of local rivalries and politics are embodied in that suffix.

Kushidagu’s origins reach back into ancient history, and ancient history is a complicated business in Japan. Reliable written records emerged quite late in comparison with our neighbours: ‘prehistory’ extends down to about 300 AD, followed by a ‘protohistorical’ period of some four hundred years before the chronicles start to be contemporary with the events they describe. A brief introduction to Kushidagu’s historical background is not the place for a discussion of the politics of history in Japan. That said, I cannot avoid at least a glancing mention of two issues. The first is a tendency in the oldest chronicles to compete with Chinese and Korean sources, and thus to push back dates in Japanese history to make everything look older than it was. The second is that distinctively Shinto religious historiography is a fairly new development – dating back at most about two hundred years – and is involved with a host of intensely political debates about Japan’s past and present. Given this background, I feel compelled to be a bit sceptical about the claim that Kushidagu is about 1,900 years old. However, it is obvious that the Kanzaki area has been under continuous occupation for at least that long, and it is not so much of a stretch to acknowledge Kushidagu as the inheritor of the spiritual centre of this community. In this sense, 1,900 years looks more credible.

Whatever date one chooses to celebrate as the shrine’s founding anniversary, records exist to suggest that Kushidagu as an institution has been part of the political structure of Kanzaki since the protohistoric period. From some point in the Kofun period (c.300-710) and continuing through the Heian period (794-1185) Kanzaki formed part of a large system of manors providing income to the Imperial court. Together with two other shrines, Kushidagu oversaw a system of approximately one hundred eighty-nine tributary shrines. In this period, shrines and temples were important components of the emerging state structure. It is also important to remember that shrines and temples were joined at the hip until the nineteenth century, and it is within living memory that the Buddhist temple on the grounds of Kushidagu went its own way as a separate institution. In these early times, Kanzaki appears to have been fully integrated in the Imperial administration system. It was also a stop on an overland route connecting international trading ports in northern Kyushu with the domestic ports to the northeast.

Kushidagu’s fortunes began to dip in the Kamakura period (1185-1333), for reasons of wide significance to Japanese history. During this period, military clans gained effective political power at the expense of the Imperial aristocracy. In the late thirteenth century, Kublai Khan launched two unsuccessful attempts to invade Japan; both attacks were directed at Kyushu, and defensive battles took place in the vicinity of contemporary Fukuoka. After the invasions, lands that had been part of Kushidagu’s tributary production area – crudely put, this refers to land the shrine was entitled to tax in order to support itself – was divided among the national government’s soldiers. When the Mongol threat was at its height, one of the shrine’s treasures was moved to a tributary shrine in Hakata. This transfer of part of its divine authority and its loss of tributary lands combined to diminish Kushidagu’s power and prestige.

Kyushu’s principal international trading ports have always been on the northern coast, facing Korea. The transportation system linking these ports to the political and commercial centres of ‘mainland’ Japan historically followed two routes. The more important was maritime, from port to port, past Shimonoseki and through the Inland Sea; the secondary route passed through Kanzaki on its way to the Inland Sea ports. This latter passage shaped the modern history of Kanzaki and Kushidagu: it was the route that Dutch traders followed on their way from Nagasaki to Edo – now Tokyo – to offer tribute to the Tokugawa shoguns. These communication routes continued to develop through the Edo period (1600-1868) and into contemporary Japan.

Like every other rural community in Japan, Kanzaki has undergone a profound transition over the past fifty years. Unlike more remote areas, Kanzaki never ceased to be a place where people wanted to live. As a result, the traces of its Edo past – in architecture and urban planning – have all but disappeared. Shrines and temples have a special place in this landscape of change. They, too, change, as no doubt they always have; but change is slower in sacred spaces – new things accumulate among the old rather than replacing them outright. Kushidagu is thus, among other things, an open-air museum: preserving elements of its community’s past from over the past two thousand years. Its principal buildings date back to the Edo period, but today’s Kushidagu is a shrine of the twentieth century rather than of the eighteenth or nineteenth. Within the shrine grounds, the juxtaposition of periods is surprisingly comfortable. To be part of a living community is the essence of a religious site in Japan. I imagine that this area – this institution – has been serving a similar function in Kanzaki for centuries.

2002/05/29

C.F. Ryal, 29 May 2002