心地よい場所と、そうでない場所Places That Feel Right and Places That Do Not
Throughout my years of traveling across Japan I have experienced many times the difference between places that feel right to me and places that do not. For a long time I thought about where this groundless sensation originated. Recently I have found one answer in an old idea. That idea is fudo (風土). Fudo is something that resists being put into words. And my own understanding of fudo differs entirely from the standard Japanese interpretation. In this article I want to look in detail at the background from which the idea of fudo was born.
No word conveys the heart of the Japanese as they once were more vividly than fudo. Conversely, any account of Japan or the Japanese people offered by someone who does not understand fudo and has never known fudo is nothing more than armchair speculation. When I consider Japanese history as a whole, I notice without exception that the Japanese history conventionally narrated has been constructed by people who do not know fudo. And people who do not know fudo have for some reason always thought about history, the very foundation of a people's identity, behind closed doors. Whether those doors belong to a university, a parliament, or anywhere else, the people who speak of history from fudo with sincerity have always been few. In most cases the history of a people has been decided and narrated in closed rooms. This method is practiced worldwide, but it is not history. It should not count as having said anything about a people. My discomfort with this is where I begin.
The Japanese word fudo (風土) is composed of 風 (fu, wind) and 土 (do, soil or earth). Conventionally 風 is understood as wind and 土 as soil. I will carefully undo this misunderstanding. As the single compound fudo conveys, the entirety of a people's history, culture, spirit, and customs can be understood through 風 and 土. But that understanding is not an understanding achieved in the head. It is something that happens only when you travel to the land, feel the wind that blows there, and set foot on the soil. Without doing so we cannot claim to have truly understood anything. And yet, strangely, the history we are given in the conventional sense carries neither the comfort of wind nor the smell of earth. History that does not know fudo is meaningless. It is equivalent to having said nothing. In truth, there is no way to disclose the essence of a people other than by thinking about history and culture from fudo.
From this perspective it goes without saying that anyone who wishes to examine Japan must feel the wind and tread the soil in every part of the country. This is an absolute condition. Reading hundreds of books on Japanese history amounts to knowing nothing at all. As the Ming Confucian scholar Wang Yangming taught through his principle of 知行合一, a principle that has continued to exert enormous influence on a segment of the Japanese population since the Edo period, understanding cannot be claimed unless knowledge and action are united. In practice, the reason I travel across Japan with various themes in mind is to absorb the fudo of Japan into my own bodily experience. Sometimes I return to a place many times for this purpose, because fudo is not something that enters you simply by going there. It permeates slowly, becoming internalized over time. The people who truly understand a country and its people are those in whom fudo has seeped. What they say about the country and its people can be trusted. In this sense it is clear that understanding Japan or the world is something utterly impossible within a single lifetime.
The problem is that fudo as it is conventionally discussed in Japan has been reduced since the modern era to a set of tedious scientific markers: the climate, weather, topography, geology, and scenery of a place. That the original fudo cannot be confined to a scientific category is clear from the following.
When the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki were compiled in 712 and 720, the 43rd Emperor Genmei, who had issued the edict to preserve oral traditions in written form, simultaneously issued an edict ordering that the traditions surviving in each region be compiled into place-specific documents. This project was originally called ge (解) but came to be known as fudoki (風土記) by the Heian period. Tracing its origins, the compound 風土 is a term of Chinese origin. Its original meaning referred to the vital force of the land as it responds to the cycle of the seasons. As early as the second century, Chinese geographic texts bearing the title 風土記 appeared. The term eventually reached Japan. But this does not mean that the idea of fudo did not exist in Japan. The Man'yoshu, the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, suggests otherwise.
The words in the Man'yoshu are written not in the Sino-Japanese vocabulary that was standard at the time but in the distinctive yamatokotoba, the native Japanese language. A complication arises here. Yamatokotoba was not a language used across the entire Japanese archipelago. It was the indigenous language of the Nara region, specifically the everyday language of the court. In the poetry of the Nara period there is almost no room for Sino-Japanese compounds to intrude directly. The poems are composed in yamatokotoba, and from that language arise the yohaku, the breathing spaces.
Because fudo is a Sino-Japanese compound, the term 風土 does not appear in the Man'yoshu. But the spiritual world of the Man'yoshu is richly inhabited by the sensibility of fudo. More precisely, the Man'yoshu can be said to be a work that sings of fudo. The fudo of the Man'yoshu resides in a geographic and climatic sensibility that sings of mountains, rivers, the spirit of the land, and the particularities of each place. In other words, the Chinese concept of fudo and the Japanese sensibility of fudo merged and were refined within the Man'yoshu into a world of its own.
On the other hand, the fudoki project carried out officially as a court enterprise was primarily structured around five items: changing the names of provinces, districts, and villages to "favorable characters" considered auspicious; cataloguing products; recording the fertility of the soil; documenting the origins of the names of mountains, rivers, and plains; and preserving the oral traditions of the elders. This was partly motivated by the court in Nara seeking to understand the circumstances of other provinces and gather material for policies aimed at political unification. But beyond that, the fudo of each province was compiled as important evidence of the origins of the ancient clans involved in the court. Because the origins of the ancient clans were dispersed across the land, and the rich memories held within their unique traditions constituted an ineradicable legitimacy of authority. Few records from this period survive, but the very fact that the court ordered the compilation of fudoki suggests that pressure from the ancient clans was being brought to bear on the emperor. The power of each province was that strong. In effect the court was operated under a system in which it was elevated and sustained by the clans of each province.
According to the ritsuryo system of the time, the court recognized the existence of more than sixty provinces across the Japanese archipelago. It is therefore believed that approximately sixty fudoki were produced. The great majority have been lost. Only five survive to the present day. The sole complete text is the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki (the fudoki of the province of Izumo in Shimane Prefecture), the subject of last week's article. This fact alone conveys how deep the historical faith in Izumo Taisha has been. The surviving but incomplete texts are the Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki (Ibaraki Prefecture), the Harima no Kuni Fudoki (Hyogo Prefecture), the Bungo no Kuni Fudoki (Oita Prefecture), and the Hizen no Kuni Fudoki (Saga Prefecture). The other fudoki have been lost, though fragments quoted in other texts have been discovered. The Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki, and a handful of fudoki have survived to the present, but if all the fudoki of that era had been preserved, our ability to illuminate the rich picture of ancient Japan would be immeasurably greater. Because the fudoki project was the act of recording in written form the distinct memories of fudo that differed from one land to the next.
The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki occupy a clear position as centralized documents of the court. The Nihon Shoki in particular was produced with the intention of imitating the Chinese imperial historiographical system. It is written entirely in classical Chinese. This was intended both to establish within Japan the legitimacy of rule that the Chinese imperial system possessed and to present an appropriate face to the international community. In the East Asia of that era, compiling a history in classical Chinese was proof of civilization. The Samguk Sagi of the Korean Peninsula, completed in 1145, was born from the same impulse. Among the compilers of the Nihon Shoki are two figures who appear in historical records around 691: Tsuzuki no Morugon and Satsu no Hirokaku. They were scholars who had emigrated from China and naturalized in Japan. Their deep involvement in the classical Chinese composition of the Nihon Shoki is documented. Without the practical contribution of Tang intellectuals the Nihon Shoki could arguably not have come into existence.
The Kojiki, by contrast, is not written in classical Chinese. It is composed in a special technique called hentai kanbun and man'yogana. No foreign practitioners were involved in its compilation. It was produced by an intensely Japanese method. My own view is that the Kojiki occupies an intermediate position between the Nihon Shoki and the fudoki and carries a highly distinctive context. When looking at a single myth or historical account, what you see from the Nihon Shoki and what you see from the Kojiki are entirely different. Even though the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki appear to record the same myths, traditions, and events, their worlds and their thought are fundamentally different. To put it in extreme terms, the Nihon Shoki is a document compiled through the thought of Tang scholars. The Kojiki is a document free from that influence. The fact that the court pursued both projects simultaneously is evidence that a serious attempt at intellectual independence from China was under way. Considering the history of how these texts came into being, it is clear that by the first half of the eighth century the idea of fudo was already mature.
Above all, fudo is not a matter of scientific markers. It contains everything about the people who lived on that land. From the will and feelings of unnamed predecessors, their faith, their daily acts, their gestures, their words, their gaze, to the cycles of nature, fudo transmits an enormous range. It exists in as many forms as there are places on earth where people have lived. But since the modern era we have dismissed and erased this indigenous quality of fudo. What matters is that fudo is not simply a scientific account of wind and soil. Fudo is a "transmission device for memory" built up by predecessors, activated only when you feel the wind that has not changed for millennia and set foot on the soil. I believe fudo is Japan's true capital and the basis for being Japanese. But this does not mean in the sense of a single ethnic group. The true Japanese are a pluralistic people who have lived on the archipelago and remained connected in a state of non-separation. The world changes depending on which place you look at.
Put differently, fudo is not activated unless you go to the land, feel the wind, and tread the soil. This is why history that does not know fudo is entirely meaningless no matter what authority it wears. In present-day terms, because the great majority of Japanese people do not know fudo, they interpret to their own convenience a "Japan and Japanese people that do not exist" fabricated in the head, and the country is accelerating in the wrong direction. In practice, what is commonly spoken of as Japan and the Japanese within Japan is from my perspective entirely armchair speculation. It exists only in the brains of a handful of scholars. That nearly every person who loudly proclaims Japan and the Japanese today does not know the fudo of Japan is an enormous problem that is never discussed. Countries that have fallen into xenophobia are carrying the same problem to varying degrees.
First, fudo is subject to the absolute condition of being regulated by place. For this reason, within the "space" constructed in modernity, the space of Japan as a unified state or the Japanese as a single ethnic group, the true Japan does not exist and the true Japanese do not exist. As I have noted, the space of modernity is always constructed behind closed doors. It exists only in the heads of rulers. It carries no wind blowing through and no feel of soil. In the modern world it is strangely permissible for people who have never been to Japan and have never spoken with a Japanese person to say whatever they please about Japan and the Japanese. But in truth this is an absurd farce. Because what is being spoken of is not Japan, and the sources on which it is based are not Japan. This is equivalent to no one having said anything.
This attitude is prevalent not only regarding Japan but worldwide. The result may be the global confusion of today. People who do not know the fudo of a country or a people interpret it as they please and plunge the world into chaos. It is a natural consequence. Put differently, the land where you felt the wind and soil and the Japanese people with whom you spoke are your Japan. I believe that alone is wonderful. Even I, a Japanese person, cannot claim to have understood the history and culture despite having traveled across Japan to this extent. Even through a lifetime of research I will most likely never arrive at any answer. I am certain that the idea of fudo can serve as a valuable resource for the people of every country that has experienced modernity, including Japan, as they search for what lies beyond the present impasse.
At the heart of fudo's structuration lies culture. This does not mean that fudo possesses a specific predetermined structure. Rather, a structured system is what we call fudo. Multiple pluralistic elements are involved in fudo, and it is generated through the balance of their transformations and mutual influences. The invisible force that holds these pluralistic elements in a state of non-separation rather than separation is place. This is why fudo can only be realized in place. The moment you try to think about it within the contentless space of the state, it separates immediately.
In the Japan of an earlier era, leaving one village and entering the next meant encountering a different fudo. Because fudo is regulated by place, the same fudo can never be generated twice. This complex reality is the true nature of the pluralistic world and the essence of a Japan that has now been lost. Modern history ignored and erased this essence. From that point onward, Japan and the Japanese were shaped as molds within a monolithic space. The arrival of the unified state called Japan and the single ethnic group called the Japanese. But such things never originally existed.
Fudo is pluralistic and its complex reality refuses definition itself. Because it has already transformed by the next instant and never settles into a fixed state. And the substance of fudo also differs depending on which person, carrying which context, activates it. This is why different people feel different things in the same place.
The reason is that the other elements are moving in a way that structures the culture at the core of fudo. The main forces that generate and nurture this sphere are history, language, body, and technology. Each element acts upon the others in a state of non-separation, vibrating through resonance. Among them, the element that serves as the source of the force forming the sphere itself is language. For example, what kind of linguistic forms a people hold and how they deploy their language in speech become critical. Because these are the driving force that generates culture, and from them history, body, and technology are born. Seen from this perspective, the Japanese language as a unified national language ceases to exist. Because it never existed in the first place. And at the same time, the Japanese culture that most people speak of also ceases to exist. Put differently, Japanese culture exists only within the uniformly prepared space. In place, Japanese culture has no reality.
The reason is that the foundation at the core of culture is place. Beneath fudo lies place. On that place, human beings who deploy language in every form conduct their daily lives, and what is formed over immense spans of time is fudo. Whether the place is an office district in Tokyo, a mountain valley in Hokkaido, a remote island in Okinawa, or the deep mountains of Nagano, the fudo you experience will differ. The fudo experienced there can never be expanded into a generalized Japan. Here lies the core of the pluralistic world. Put differently, fudo is the gods of Japan themselves. In this profound world lies the prototype of the ancient faith of Yaoyorozu, the word that expressed the infinite, or rather the totality. In other words, the gods of Japan are not in essence things to be reified or defined. This is precisely why the gods transformed and eventually merged with the buddhas of Buddhism in the extraordinary phenomenon known as shinbutsu shugo.
Let us consider one example. Okuninushi, the deity of Izumo Taisha discussed in last week's article, is written 大国主. The character 大 means great and 主 means lord or ruler. But what is kuni (国)?
Kuni is generally thought to refer to a regional unit of the time, but this is the first mistake. Certainly kuni became the foundation of the present-day prefectures and the source of local self-governance. But the ancient concept of kuni was entirely different from today's understanding. To grasp it we must look at it alongside the contrasting concept of shima.
Shima is written 島 or 嶋. Today it is understood as referring to islands. But here lies a trap. Because there is an entity that still inherits the old meaning of shima. Surprisingly, that entity is the yakuza. Or rather, the yakuza in their origins possessed the character of kunitsukami. They are an indispensable presence for understanding Japanese history in all its dimensions. Since the intense crackdown by police authorities from the 1960s onward they have lost their former prestige. But when the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the Great East Japan Earthquake struck, it was the local yakuza who took the lead in maintaining public order and supplying relief goods in the affected areas before the government and local authorities, who were floundering. To that degree they were rooted in place. To see them as nothing more than an evil criminal organization is to miss the essence. The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake struck the home base of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's largest yakuza organization. Even amid a disaster of that magnitude, public order was maintained impeccably. This was not the contribution of the police, but that truth is almost entirely unknown. And these people still call their turf "shima."
The word shima as used by the yakuza does not carry the commonly understood meaning of an island. It clearly transmits an older stratum. In antiquity shima referred to "a place where the authority of the emperor held sway." In other words, a turf. Japan of old was never a unified state. The emperor never once controlled the entirety of the Japanese archipelago. Imperial hegemony was scattered like a mosaic. At some point after the emergence of the entity called the emperor, the custom of calling imperial territory shima arose. Whether this origin predates the emperor is unknown, but mythology transmits the memory. That is the Kuniumi myth.
The Kuniumi myth is a narrative told in an important position in both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. In the mythological sequence it is placed at the intersection between the opening myth of cosmogony and the transition of the gods from heaven to earth. As I wrote in the previous article, the ancient word Ama, which came to represent the celestial realm, originally meant the sea. The world must be seen not on the vertical axis of heaven and earth but on the horizontal plane of sea and land. In the Kuniumi myth the divine married couple Isanaki and Isanami descend and through their union give birth to a succession of shima. These are as follows, with their commonly identified locations:
淡道之穂之狭別島 (Awajinohonosawakenoshima): Awaji Island
伊予之二名島 (Iyonofutananoshima): Shikoku
隠伎之三子島 (Okinomitsugonoshima): Oki Islands
筑紫島 (Tsukushinoshima): Kyushu
伊岐島 (Ikinoshima): Iki Island
津島 (Tsunoshima): Tsushima
佐度島 (Sadonoshima): Sado Island
大倭豊秋津島 (Oyamatotoyoakitsushima): Honshu
What is recorded here is that Isanaki and Isanami gave birth to 島 (shima). But critically, this narrative is the Kuniumi myth. It is a story about the birth of kuni. Despite being about the birth of kuni, what is actually born are shima. And while a casual glance might suggest that the places listed are islands, the content points to something else entirely.
First, the emperor himself ordered the compilation of this myth. It therefore reflects the emperor's values and thought. Emperor Genmei was merely the executor of the project. The originator was the 40th Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686). My own view is that Emperor Tenmu was an exceptionally rare thinker. The Kuniumi myth should be read as reflecting the thought that surrounded Emperor Tenmu. What can be perceived here is the moment at which the word shima, denoting imperial territory, was alienated from kuni. In other words, shima was born from the alienation of kuni. It did not exist independently from the start. Put differently, the imperial turf, the emperor's territory, could only come into existence because the kunitsukami, the indigenous powers, already occupied their places. This is critically important. It is why in Japan to this day faith in the kunitsukami remains deep, and at the same time faith in the emperor as the symbol of the amatsukami remains deep. On the Japanese archipelago the gods coexist, and it is the emperor who presides over that coexistence.
Kuni itself derives from the indigenous powers on the Japanese archipelago side, as reflected in the framing of kunitsukami in opposition to amatsukami. Most likely, when Emperor Tenmu oversaw the compilation of traditions befitting a new era, he retained kuni out of consideration for the surrounding ancient clans, while alienating shima from kuni to create a new space and elevate imperial authority into the celestial realm. The figure most directly affected by this new current was Amaterasu. From Emperor Tenmu's reign through that of his successor Empress Jito, Amaterasu was deified as the imperial ancestral deity, and faith centered on the Grand Shrine of Ise, where Amaterasu is enshrined, intensified. What happened simultaneously was that Amaterasu, originally a sea deity indigenous to Ise, was elevated into a deity of the celestial realm. This shift in thought was alien from the standpoint of earlier Japan, suggesting the possibility that people carrying new ideas from China had arrived and influenced Emperor Tenmu. In fact, Emperor Tenmu is thought to have been considerably influenced by Daoism.
What matters is that the Kuniumi myth gives birth to shima but in a highly abstracted form. Modern readings assign all the locations listed above to imperial territory, but this is mistaken. The content is considerably abstract. The reason the emperor needed to abstract the concept of shima was that a substantial number of indigenous powers still existed across the land and had not fully submitted to the court. In fact, the history of the imperial house is less a narrative asserting the legitimacy of imperial hegemony than an accumulation of efforts to bring indigenous powers within the imperial shima into submission and somehow achieve integration. The Nihon Shoki was written to emphasize this legitimacy and therefore portrays emperors as bravely conquering indigenous forces. The Kojiki is fundamentally different. It depicts many tribes over which imperial authority held no sway and who submitted to neither the emperor nor the court. In modern parlance they appear as まつろわぬ神 and まつろわぬ民. Their origin lies in the world of the Kojiki.
The word matsurofu (まつろふ), no longer used in modern Japanese, expressed the act of not submitting. In the Kojiki these figures were also objects of contempt from the court, and so they appear not as personified gods but as animals and other creatures. Yet the beings who knew the fudo of the land were not the people who lived within the shima pledging submission. They were the people who lived in the raw and primordial dimension of kuni. The authentic people of place who lived in kuni were the "gods who do not submit." The kunitsukami were those who occupied the position alienated as shima. But no rigid definition is possible. Because figures like Susanoo, who appears as Amaterasu's brother, move across the categories of amatsukami, kunitsukami, and the gods who do not submit. The deeper you trace toward the ancient stratum, the more indigenous fudo these figures carry.
While the brother Susanoo moves about freely, the indigenous rootedness of place that the sister Amaterasu once carried was discarded in this era. As I wrote in the previous article, in the kuniyuzuri (国譲り) myth directed at Izumo, Amaterasu does not take a single step. She could not be made to move if she was to be elevated as the imperial ancestral deity of the celestial realm. What is happening is a matter of thought. Amaterasu was alienated through thought. What is suggested is that originally Amaterasu too was not an amatsukami but a kunitsukami.
In fact, after the Kuniumi the myth proceeds to the birth of various deities. The flow from "birth of the land" to "birth of the gods" was critically important for the mythology's legitimacy. If the order had been reversed their thought would have faced a problem and governance would not have been possible. A succession of deities associated with nature, customs, technology, and resources are born. I see this as the prototype of fudo-faith in the Kojiki. Because a great many deities appear I will discuss the details on another occasion. The essential point is that in the textual arrangement, the establishment of shima comes first and the establishment of fudo comes second. Of course myth is not a linear progression from past to present to future. It is a non-linear compression that must be read retroactively. But the arrangement at the textual level carries political intent, and caution is required. Because the consciousness of "a land governed by the emperor" was born in the era of Emperor Tenmu. Why did Emperor Tenmu devote himself to this kind of thought-construction through myth?
His greatest purpose was the change of the national name. The person who first established 日本 as the national designation that is still in use today was Emperor Tenmu. As I have disclosed in the Communal Illusion series, before this change the name used for Japan was 倭, the Chinese designation. While the reading shifted from Wa to Yamato, the written national designation had long remained 倭. This effectively signified being under the protection of the Chinese imperial court. As a step toward autonomy Emperor Tenmu changed the national designation to 日本 and began promoting it internationally. The Tang court had been using 大倭国, but the Shoku Nihongi records that in 702 a Japanese envoy rejected this designation and asserted 日本. Even earlier, in 671, a record in the Korean Samguk Sagi notes that the national designation of 倭国 had already been changed to 日本. The name 日本 is said to derive from the meaning "the place closest to where the sun rises." The age in which Amaterasu, positioned as the imperial ancestral deity, would be transformed into the embodiment of the sun had arrived.
Indeed the document compiled with the Chinese imperial court in mind uses 日本 in its very title: 日本書紀. Many mysteries remain regarding the history of the national designation, but that Emperor Tenmu initiated the change is broadly accepted as fact. With a slightly wider lens, it can be said that the change was accomplished by three emperors: his elder brother and predecessor Emperor Tenji, Tenmu himself, and his wife and successor Empress Jito.
Above all, the current designation 天皇 was established during this period. Today 天皇 is read Tenno, but historically it was read Sumeramikoto. Before 天皇, the designation was 大王, read Okimi (the great king). When the great king became Sumeramikoto, the written national designation changed as well, and the revision of the relationship with China accelerated. The written designation itself changed from 倭 to 日本, but the reading continued to be inherited as Yamato. The custom of reading it as Nippon did not exist.
Within this great turning of the era, Japan in a sense took its first step toward the future of today. That is how revolutionary the changes were that Emperor Tenmu executed in succession. He introduced the ritsuryo system, placed Buddhism under state patronage, restructured the power of the ancient clans, built a system centered on the emperor, launched military campaigns against forces opposing the court, changed the national designation, pursued active diplomacy with Tang China, systematized myths and oral traditions, established Amaterasu as an object of faith, and concentrated worship around the Grand Shrine of Ise. It is no exaggeration to say he built the foundations of the Japan of today. This means that the Japanese people are still living within the intellectual world Emperor Tenmu created.
To summarize: the fudoki speak of "kuni." The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki speak of "shima." The Kojiki oscillates between kuni and shima. The Nihon Shoki speaks exclusively of shima. This has been the foundation of Japan then and now. The reading is difficult, but the essence becomes visible not by viewing the state or the people as a monolithic space but by discerning from place. Fudo preserves the memory of place and can be called the sole basis for speaking of it. When the fudo regulated by place was set in motion by Emperor Tenmu's sweeping political reforms, Japanese history may at last be said to have begun.
Why did Emperor Tenmu carry out such radical reform?
Unraveling this question may be the shortest path to understanding Japan.