The Aratae of the Daijosai｜Awa Inbe Cloth Traced to the Kogo Shui and Revived in the Taisho Era

This week, from among the woven cloths of ancient Japan, I turn to a legendary hemp cloth bound up with the rites of the emperor.

Last week I wrote that, since the Jomon period, the Japanese have woven cloth from a great many plants, among them wisteria (fuji), Japanese linden (shinanoki), kozo and kaji, two kinds of paper mulberry, kudzu, hemp (asa), ramie (karamushi), and fiber banana (basho). Today, most of our clothing is made from synthetic fibers derived from petroleum, and we seldom have the chance to touch natural cloth, yet if we look at the history of the Japanese people as a whole, natural materials were in use for 99 percent of it.

The craft of spinning thread from the bark of wild plants and weaving it into cloth already appears in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, both completed in the early eighth century. Woven cloth was in use as far back as the Age of the Gods, and among such cloths there is one legendary fabric that has been held sacred above all others. It is the Aratae, the cloth that an heir to the throne wears in the most secret rite of the Daijosai, the ceremony through which he becomes emperor.

The history of the Aratae begins in myth, in the story of Ama no Iwaya, the Rock Cave of Heaven. Amaterasu, the ancestral deity of today’s emperors, can no longer bear the violence of her younger brother Susanoo, so she opens the door of the rock cave and shuts herself inside. Because the world is plunged into darkness, the troubled gods gather and, under the direction of Omoikane, the god of wisdom, carry out a plan to draw Amaterasu out of the cave.

Many measures are taken, but the ones I want to look at here are the shiranikite [白丹寸手] and the aonikite [青丹寸手]. These are the spellings of the Kojiki, and the Nihon Shoki writes them as 白和幣 and 青和幣. Both were flat, cord-like strips of cloth, the shiranikite made from kozo, the bark fiber also called yu, and the aonikite from hemp, and the god who offered the two of them was Futotama, called Futotama no Mikoto in the Kojiki and Ame no Futotama no Mikoto in the Nihon Shoki.

The clan that later worshipped this Futotama as its ancestral god was the Inbe. Also read Imube or Imibe, and written 斎部 from the Heian period onward, this ancient clan had already lost the power struggles at court by the time the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki were completed, so it does not stand out much in history. Many will remember from history class Nakatomi no Kamatari, later known as Fujiwara no Kamatari, who launched the Taika Reform (645), and the Inbe were defeated precisely because the power of the Nakatomi had grown so great.

In fact, real control over the rites concerning the emperor at the ancient court was held by two wings, the Inbe and the Nakatomi. As the Nakatomi rose, however, they took over even the rites that had originally been the Inbe’s charge, and the very survival of the Inbe came into doubt. As his death approached, Nakatomi no Kamatari, head of the Nakatomi, took the surname Fujiwara with the consent of Emperor Tenji, his ally in launching the Taika Reform. After Kamatari’s death, the man behind the full rise of the Nakatomi-Fujiwara line was Fujiwara no Fuhito. Fuhito’s sons, the four Fujiwara brothers, eventually took hold of both the court, which held political power, and the imperial house, which held ritual power, and they became the driving force that carried Japan into the Heian period, sometimes called “the age of the Fujiwara.”

In these straitened circumstances, Inbe no Hironari, who is called the last head of the Inbe, set down the legitimacy of his clan in a text called the Kogo Shui (807). In it, Futotama is placed as the Inbe’s ancestral god, and four gods led by him are recorded (in Japanese, gods are counted with the word hashira, “pillars”).

◯ Ame no Hiwashi (天日鷲)
→ ancestral god of the Awa Inbe, in present-day Tokushima Prefecture
◯ Taokihooi (手置帆負)
→ ancestral god of the Sanuki Inbe, in present-day Kagawa Prefecture
◯ Hikosashiri (彦狭知)
→ ancestral god of the Kii Inbe, in present-day Wakayama and Mie Prefectures
◯ Kushiakarutama (櫛明玉)
→ ancestral god of the Izumo Inbe, in Izumo, present-day Shimane Prefecture

Myths have three kinds of structure, one in which gods are born, one in which gods come into being of themselves, and one in which a god leads other gods. The gods of the Inbe belong to the third kind, which means that a variety of groups of craftsmen were united under Futotama.

The Kogo Shui tells the myth of the Rock Cave of Heaven, which I described above from the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, in far greater detail. It agrees with them up to the point where Omoikane gives Futotama his orders, but what it describes is in substance a great project in which Futotama, as leader, brings together gods of many different skills. The aonikite and shiranikite appear within it. According to the Kogo Shui, the aonikite were made by Nagashiraha of Ise Province, and their material is given as hemp. Ame no Hiwashi, ancestral god of the Awa Inbe, on the other hand, sets Tsukuimi (津咋見) to planting kaji trees and has the shiranikite made, and their material is given as yu.

We should be careful here, because the ancient “ao” (blue) and “shiro” (white) were nothing like the colors we picture today. In Ao to Shiro no Genso (The Fantasy of Blue and White), the maverick folklorist Kenichi Tanigawa writes, “In antiquity there were only four names for colors, red, black, white, and blue.” Indeed, nothing is harder to grasp than the ancient understanding of color. Ao, for example, did not simply mean the blue we know, but was also a word for the places where the dead were laid out for wind burial (place names such as Aoshima are a trace of this). So the aonikite and shiranikite that appear here are not blue and white as we imagine those colors. Even now, the Japanese keep traces of this, describing lush green plants as “aoaoshii” and calling the green traffic light the “ao” light.

Because myth is not built on linear time running from past to present to future, it can be hard to approach at first, and in fact nothing at this point yet suggests a link between Tokushima and hemp or kaji. Later in the text, however, the Kogo Shui records that Ame no Tomi, Futotama’s grandson, led the grandsons of Ame no Hiwashi in search of fertile land and in the end planted kaji and hemp seed in Awa Province. Their descendants, it says, were still living in Awa in Inbe no Hironari’s own time, in the eighth and ninth centuries, and in each year of a Daijosai they offered yu, hemp cloth, and other goods. It also says that the cloth woven from the yu and hemp of Ame no Hiwashi’s descendants was called, in the old language, Aratae [阿良多倍]. Remarkably, these “descendants” still live today deep in the mountains around Mount Tsurugi in Tokushima. They are the Miki family.

This means that when Inbe no Hironari wrote the Kogo Shui in the early ninth century, “Aratae” had already become an old name. From the Heian period on it was written in many ways, as 麁布, 荒妙, 麁服, and so on, and in truth the history of this ancient cloth grew more tangled the further the Inbe declined, so that it was most likely already wrapped in mystery by the Heian period. When the era name changed to Reiwa, a Daijosai was held once more, and once again a great project was carried out in a hamlet deep in the mountains around Mount Tsurugi, centered on the head of the Miki family, descendants of the Awa Inbe, to grow hemp, weave it into cloth, the Aratae, and offer it to the imperial house.

That said, romanticizing the Aratae is also a mistake. The Daijosai itself has not always been held. It lapsed after 1466, the year before the Onin War broke out in 1467, and was not revived until 1687, in the Edo period. Since then it has been performed at every imperial succession, yet the custom of the Awa Inbe’s descendants offering the Aratae from Tokushima did not return with it.

The custom came back only after the Meiji era, when Tokushima revived it as a prefecture-wide undertaking at the enthronement of Emperor Taisho, which was, in today’s terms, a form of regional revitalization. It was carried on in the Showa, Heisei, and Reiwa eras, but for this reason each time it began almost from nothing, feeling its way. Heisei and Reiwa were all the harder because, after World War II, under American pressure, growing hemp itself was made illegal except under license, and Japan’s hemp cultivation, which a century earlier had covered an area equal to the whole of Paris, fell away drastically. In Tokushima, hemp growing died out after the war. Making the Aratae in the Heisei and Reiwa eras was therefore extraordinarily difficult. For Reiwa in particular, the village had to raise the budget on its own. It gathered investors to fund the work, invited growers from Tochigi Prefecture who knew how to cultivate hemp to come with their tools, hired police at its own expense, and began with the growing of the hemp under twenty-four-hour guard.

The passing of time has been cruel as well. Descendants of the Awa Inbe they may be, and their family home, the Miki Family Residence, is designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan, yet with the young leaving the countryside for the cities after the war and the depopulation that followed, even the present head of the family was working as a banker in Osaka. He later came back to live in the Miki house and took part in making the Aratae, but it is probably right to say that antiquity has already been lost to modernity.

Last year, I went to Koyadaira, deep in the mountains around Mount Tsurugi, and heard the head of the family speak. I will share those stories, along with the history of ancient woven cloth, in future issues.