For the Inbe, Hemp and Kozo Were One and the Same Act｜The Nigite of the Kogo Shui and the Place Name Awa

Keep digging one hole long enough, and you sometimes come out, in a place you never expected, into another. That experience has stayed with me lately.

One of my research themes last year was the ancient history of hemp in Japan, running from the cords of the Jomon period to the aratae, the hemp cloth of the Daijosai enthronement rite, and on to the ancient clans who spread it and the people who moved across a sea that history does not speak of. Recently, though, the depths I had been exploring, as if drawing in a single fiber hand over hand, brought me out at a point where I needed to understand washi, Japanese paper. And anyone who deals with washi ends up at kozo [楮], the paper mulberry.

As plants, hemp and kozo are entirely different things. One is an herb that withers where it stands within a single year, the other a tree with a woody trunk. On the shelves of modern taxonomy, they are not even neighbors. Yet in Japan’s ancient traditions, the two were carried by the hands of the same clan and led by the same god.

That clan was the Inbe. Yet by the beginning of the Heian period, the Inbe had already lost their former power and were withdrawing from the main stage of history. It was in 807, amid this decline, that Inbe no Hironari, the last head of the Inbe, presented a book to Emperor Heizei. That book is the Kogo Shui, or Gleanings from Ancient Stories.

The text records how the gods of the crafts were gathered under Futodama, the ancestral god of the Inbe, and how they carried out a great undertaking when Amaterasu shut herself away in the Heavenly Rock Cave. It is here that two nigite, offerings of cloth, make their appearance. They are called Aonigite and Shiranigite.

Aonigite was hemp, and Shiranigite was kaji, the paper mulberry. The text goes on to say that Ame no Hiwashi, ancestral god of the Awa Inbe, the branch that moved to the basin of the Yoshino River in present-day Tokushima, had kajinoki, which is to say kozo, planted and had Shiranigite made from it. Hemp and kaji. Already at this stage, the two belong to a single office.

Later in the text, we are told, Ame no Tomi, Futodama’s grandson, led the grandchildren of Ame no Hiwashi eastward in search of fertile land. Their eastern route followed the sea, and it is the trace of a history of people who traveled with the seeds of hemp and kaji in hand, bringing them to one land after another.

Setting out from Tokushima, they rounded the Kii Peninsula, entered the Ise region, passed through Tokai, pressed on into Kanto, and at last reached a certain place. Because the hemp they planted in that new land grew thick, it came to be called Fusa [総], and because the Inbe who had crossed over from Awa settled there, it was called Awa [安房] after the land they had left. This is present-day Chiba Prefecture.

In other words, the name Boso comes from the hemp of Tokushima, and the sound “Awa” has carved the migration of ancient people into the names of the land.

This was the one thing that astonished me as I dug into hemp. I had thought I was talking about plants, and before I knew it the talk had turned to place names, then to the migrations of a clan, then to the gods enshrined at shrines. The one doing the digging never sees these connections until the very end, and cannot even tell whether things are connected at all. And by the time you do see them, you are already standing somewhere else.

Then there is kaji, or kozo. In the old language, the fiber made by splitting kozo bark was called yu [木綿], written with the characters that today stand for cotton. Yet it was not the cotton we picture now. Cotton of Indian origin took root in Japan only much later.

The bast fiber of kozo is long, tangles readily, and is astonishingly strong, which is exactly why it was used as cloth. In Kito, in the town of Naka in Tokushima Prefecture, tafu, a cloth woven from kozo, is still handed down today, a living witness to that ancient layer.

Into this ancient layer came the new technology of paper. The Nihon Shoki records that in the eighteenth year of Empress Suiko’s reign, 610, Damjing, a monk from Goguryeo, brought the methods of making ink and paper.

This is generally told as the starting point of papermaking in Japan. But we need to pause here for a moment. The technique certainly came across the sea, but the material it worked with was already in this land, and what is more, as a material set at the center of sacred rites. The Inbe had by then spent hundreds of years repeating the same sequence of handwork, stripping the bark, soaking it in water, beating it, and teasing the fibers apart.

That is why paper did not enter as something foreign. It was received instead as “another form of cloth.” We are told that ancient documents have survived for more than a thousand years because kozo fibers are long, but if we go one step further, the act of handling fiber was already part of daily life before paper arrived. As an act, as a technique, it was already complete. Water was simply poured into a vessel that was there first.

Moreover, to regard hemp and kozo as “different materials” is nothing more than a bad habit that has clung to us since the modern era. Mashiho Chiri, the foremost scholar of Ainu studies, established that the Ainu language of earlier times had no word for “the plant itself.”

Last year, as I continued my research with this insight of Chiri’s kept in a corner of my mind, I came to understand that ancient people did not give names in order to identify “things.” It was “acts” that had names. People used a certain part of a certain plant in their daily work to bring something into being, and it was that whole sequence of acts that received a name. This is the subjectless state I wrote about in this week’s Forest of Thought.

Seen from this vantage point, the reason hemp and kozo were carried by a single clan becomes clear. Stripping, soaking, beating, spinning. As acts, the two are identical. There are differences, of course, but for ancient people, whose craft fitted one and the same technique to each material, there was no difference of the kind we imagine. It was not that the materials differed. There was no concept of “material” at all. What existed was the act of handling fiber itself, and the god who presided over that act.

Now, in a separate project, I have come to need to work with washi. And at that moment it suddenly struck me, all over again, that what I had learned in last year’s research concerned “hemp and kozo,” a pairing bound together since ancient times.