日本の深い文化の層への構え（見出し行なし。英語の H1 から付けた題）Approach to Japan's Deep Cultural Layers

On my research trip late last month, I showed that what is now Shimane Prefecture was once divided into Izumo Province and Iwami Province, whose languages and temperaments differ greatly. Indeed, when I did fieldwork around Oda City in the former Iwami Province, local people said with one voice that the vowel systems and accents of the Izumo and Iwami dialects are strikingly different, and that understanding one another is hard.

Seen through fudo (風土), the climate and land of a place, Iwami belongs mainly to the culture sphere that feels most like island Japan, squeezed between the sea and steep mountain ranges. Izumo, by contrast, was a culture sphere of agriculture and water transport, surrounded by a broad basin and the great Lake Shinji. In ancient times, moreover, not only Lake Shinji but also Lake Jinzai, much smaller now, was vast.

Archaeology confirms that from the Yayoi period on, a number of groups from across the sea settled in layers along the coast of ancient Izumo and around present-day Matsue, and this “mixture of many tribes” may have fostered, in tension with each other, Izumo’s own openness and conservatism. Within Iwami, however, the area around Oda City lies on one of the main routes of arrival from the Korean Peninsula, and place names and shrine enshrinements still show clear influence from the peninsula. Walking Iwami’s coast, I myself saw many drifted objects washed ashore from across the sea in the direction of the peninsula. Now as then, the sea of this region is connected to the Korean Peninsula.

There is no doubt these ancient layers existed, but another era in which Iwami formed its distinctive spirit must not be overlooked: the Sengoku period.

In 1527, before the Sengoku daimyo had achieved national unification, the discovery of large quantities of silver at Iwami Ginzan, the Iwami silver mine, became a great turning point. The discoverer was a man from Hakata in Fukuoka, so the news reached the Ouchi clan, a Sengoku daimyo house that then ruled the region as far as here and held considerable power. The Ouchi had their base in Hakata, Fukuoka Prefecture, and had extended their power along the Sea of Japan coast to the Iwami Ginzan area, holding the strongest position among the daimyo of the time. The source of their great wealth was trade with China and Korea, which they accelerated.

In 1533, under the Ouchi clan’s protection, miners and refiners began to flow from Hakata into Iwami Ginzan. Using the advantage of trade with foreign lands, silver began to be refined on the spot with techniques of Korean origin, and the place became a center of contact among many dialects within Japan, which would have a great effect on later ages. But because it was the Sengoku period, wars over the silver mine held by the Ouchi occurred often, and fierce fighting went on especially from the end of the 1530s into the 1540s. The Ouchi therefore built several castles around the mine and kept hold of silver, their new source of power.

When the Ouchi fell in an internal conflict in the 1550s, the Amago clan, a Sengoku daimyo house based in Izumo, took the mine. Their hegemony did not last either: in 1562 the Mori clan, daimyo of Aki, to the south, took control of Iwami Ginzan with overwhelming force. Hegemony over silver thus shifted from one hand to the next, as was the way of the Sengoku period, until in the 1580s the Mori came under the rule of the Toyotomi, then foremost among the unifiers of Japan, and hegemony over Iwami Ginzan passed to the Toyotomi.

Then it changed again: Ieyasu Tokugawa, the Toyotomi’s most powerful daimyo, turned against them, won the civil war of 1600 and destroyed the Toyotomi, and hegemony shifted. Because Tokugawa hegemony went on to build the Edo period, this was the first time the shifts of hegemony settled. In particular, after Ieyasu opened the Edo shogunate, he took the gold and silver mines of the country from the daimyo, and real control of Iwami Ginzan passed to the Tokugawa house, that is, the Edo shogunate. Local accounts say that afterward many settlers came to Iwami from many places, and when I heard the details from elderly people of the area and priests at temples during my fieldwork, I became convinced that this history was real.

So before the Meiji era, when Japan as a unified state and the single category of “the Japanese” took ideological form, differences among large culture spheres, before they were merged into today’s 47 prefectures, were alive and stirring, and they are quite difficult to understand. In other words, what is called “Japanese culture” does not actually exist. This is the point.

Now let me move the viewpoint to Osaka. As of May 1, 2025, Osaka Prefecture has a population of about 8.77 million and is the largest city in western Japan. Because it has the advantage of easy access to Kyoto and Nara, many tourists come to Osaka, but so far I have not met anyone who understands the differences among Osaka’s culture spheres. What matters in reading Osaka is that it was composed of four dynamics: three culture spheres, each a large province of its own, and a distinctive hollowed-out enclave among them. The three are Settsu, Kawachi and Izumi.

In brief, Settsu in northern Osaka borders southeastern Hyogo and southern Kyoto and has been a hub of transport and government since ancient times. In terms of the temperament of Osaka people today, it is therefore quite a different culture sphere, and much influenced by Hyogo and Kyoto. Kawachi in eastern Osaka is a mixed farming and commercial area along the Yamato River, marked by its own Kawachi dialect and festival culture. Because it drew on trade along the Yamato River, Kawachi mixed culturally with Yamato, the main axis before Heian-kyo. Izumi in the south has the Senshu culture of ports and fishing at its core, with sharp accents and varied endings, and is known as the roughest in temperament in Osaka. The danjiri (だんじり) festival, typified by Kishiwada, is its foremost example.

These three different culture spheres went on to make today’s Osaka, but at the crossing of the three provinces an enclave arose, and from that hollow a culture sphere of its own was born. That is Sakai, my hometown. Traced to its origin, the word sakai means less today’s 堺 than 境, a boundary, and in a sense it played the role of a kekkai (結界), a barrier, that kept the three provinces from opposing one another. I believe the existence of Sakai cushioned the conflicts among Settsu, Kawachi and Izumi. This fourfold structure, with the boundary city of Sakai added, is the basis for understanding Osaka today.

In the late Muromachi period Sakai developed a self-governing body called the egoshu (会合衆), and its residents had an autonomous spirit and governed themselves. Even after Nobunaga Oda fortified the city and strengthened its harbor, Sakai kept its autonomous structure, and its port, a base for trade with other lands, was an important place where advanced technology and culture flowed in. Sakai lay in the heart of Osaka at a hub of distribution where the sea routes linking Nankai, Hokuriku and Setouchi crossed the land routes to Yamato and Kyoto, which gave it a distinctive “open conservatism” (開放的保守性) and became the source of the great power it later gained.

From Sakai, then, roads were laid south through Senshu to Koyasan and Wakayama, north through Settsu to Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s Osaka Castle and on to Kyoto, and east through Kawachi to Yamato, and it became a key point that the most prosperous Sengoku daimyo had to make an ally. Note that today’s Sakai City has grown much larger than it was then. Just as there is a small region that is the true Kyoto, enclosed by a kekkai, the true Sakai is limited to a small stretch of the coast enclosed by one. Place names still carry traces of the old layers. Mikunigaoka, a place in Sakai, means the hill where Settsu, Kawachi and Izumi meet. Hochigai Shrine carries the meaning of avoiding misfortune by “changing direction” (方を違える), and as a signpost for choosing one’s course at the border of the three provinces it has played an important role for people.

Not only in Japan: it is only by looking at the places we visit from this basic viewpoint that we reach a deep understanding of culture. The fundamental attitude, as I keep saying, is to see that there is no such thing as Japanese culture, the Japanese people, or even Japan as a single concept, and doing so brings a richer experience than a mere traveler has.