なぜ、あなたは旅行するのか？Why Do You Travel?

How would you answer this simple question?

For the past several years I have been moving through every part of Japan while contemplating the essence of tourism. The voices that seek a uniform shared experience mediated by social media still hold persistent influence. At the same time it is also true that there are travelers who feel discomfort with that mainstream, and one must not speak of them simply as tourists.

In Japan, traveling to various places to see and learn is called kanko (観光). The term derives from a passage in the Chinese I Ching that reads 観国之光 利用賓于王. It loosely translates to observing the light of the country, the society, and the people one visits, and learning from it as a guest from elsewhere. To observe the light is at the same time to observe the shadow. One must not lean too far toward either side, and the traveler is required to exercise self restraint and respect for others and other countries.

Place the thought of yin and yang at the foundation of travel, and bring yourself to the middle way within the streets you visit. Through this practice one acquires genuine learning, unlike the self-serving traveler of the present age. The original meaning of kanko is learning, not unilateral consumption.

What one learns will differ from person to person. It varies according to each person's nature, and it must not be swayed by the discourse of others. The original kanko is input, but it always presupposes output. Output is often misunderstood. It is not posting travel photographs to social media.

After the journey ends and you return to the country, the society, the community, and the relationships in which you live, you take what you have learned and put it into practice in pursuit of a better future. This is the essence of kanko.

Earlier this year I was approached by people in the tourism industry who had reached an impasse and were looking for ideas to think about "the next form of tourism." Centered on the Kansai region, I have been making new proposals. The foundation I work from is the essence of kanko described above, and it differs from the conventional perspective that pursues "numbers" such as visitor counts and sales figures.

For example, the major tourist areas of Osaka where I myself live, including Namba, Shinsaibashi, Umeda, and Shinsekai, were historically beneath the sea. Almost every tourist visits these districts, but the real Osaka is not there.

Here I want to look at the flow generally narrated in the founding history of Osaka, from my own angle. The current name is written 大阪, but it was originally written 大坂. The earliest known appearance of this designation is in Gobunsho, written by Rennyo in 1496. Originally it did not refer to a regional area, but the great achievements of the charismatic religious figure Rennyo spread the name Osaka in an instant.

The most prominent of those achievements was the construction of Ishiyama Honganji, a large scale temple built on the site of present day Osaka Castle. Rennyo was a monk of Jodo Shinshu, the school founded by Shinran. He was the eighth head priest of the Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu and the eighth gate master of the Otani branch of Shinshu, one of the elder figures of the Buddhist world of his day. To read the history of Osaka, the matter of Honganji must first be set out.

The origin of Honganji was not a temple but a grave. When the Jodo Shinshu founder Shinran died in 1263, a stone monument was erected on the northern edge of an area called Toribeno on the eastern hills of Kyoto, and his remains were placed there. Toribeno was part of the vast cemetery district that lay around the perimeter of the city of Kyoto at the time, and the area in question was called Otani.

This history connects directly to the temples of present day Kyoto. Walking from Kyoto Station toward the city center, two enormous temples appear across the street from each other. They are Nishi Honganji and Higashi Honganji. Both belong to Jodo Shinshu, but their history is intricate and convoluted. After long centuries of confusion, the eastern side calls itself the Otani branch of Shinshu and the western side calls itself the Honganji branch. But originally there was no east or west to Honganji. What does this mean?

What matters is that Shinran himself created neither a temple called Honganji nor a sect called Jodo Shinshu. He lived to the end as a disciple of his master Honen. After missionary work in Kanto, he devoted his later years to writing in Kyoto. Shinran possessed no temple and built no organizational community. He was a figure who was institutionalized after his death.

The origin of the institutional community came around 1272, nine years after Shinran's death. A figure named Kakushinni made a great decision with the cooperation of Shinran's disciples and the lay followers in Kanto where Shinran had carried out missionary work. Kakushinni was Shinran's youngest daughter. She moved Shinran's grave from its original site at Otani, reburied his remains, and there built the Otani Mausoleum.

The land of the Otani Mausoleum had been transferred to Kakushinni from her husband. Shinran's daughter Kakushinni donated the land, and the Kanto disciples raised the funds, and together they built the Otani Mausoleum to enshrine Shinran. This was the moment the history of Honganji began.

The complication is that the substantial owners were the collective of Kanto based lay followers (called the Takada branch). There was no owner on the Kyoto side. To address this, a special position called rusushiki (留守職) was created on the Kyoto side to manage the mausoleum. The rule was established that this caretaker had to be a blood relative of Shinran.

What must not be overlooked given the circumstances of the era is that the period centered on Heian-kyo within present day Kyoto had ended, and the function of the capital had shifted to the Kamakura side in the Kanto region. The Kanto people who had previously been looked down upon by those of Heian-kyo were already beginning to hold a degree of real power. As a result, Kakushinni's decision produced a distorted structure that would exert enormous influence on later history.

The distorted structure of this moment surfaced as a confrontation between "the legitimacy of bloodline" and "the autonomy of the Kanto lay followers" once the mausoleum had entered an era of acquiring political influence as Honganji. The turning point came in 1321, fifty eight years after Shinran's death. With the appearance of Kakunyo (1270–1351), Shinran's great grandson, the faith became a blatant struggle over political power, and the era of the rising warriors entered a turbulent phase.

In 1302 a fierce conflict erupted between Kakue, Shinran's grandson, and Yuizen, Kakue's stepbrother by a different father, over the position of caretaker of the Otani Mausoleum. The dispute continued for seven years. In 1309, the Tendai school Shorenin in Kyoto decided that Kakue's eldest son Kakunyo would inherit the mausoleum. Enraged by this decision, Yuizen destroyed the Otani Mausoleum and fled to Kamakura seeking the protection of the Kanto based lay followers who held actual ownership.

Seizing the opportunity created by the physical destruction of the mausoleum, Kakunyo launched a new plan in pursuit of his political aims. That plan was to rebuild what had been nothing more than a grave for Shinran into a temple serving as the headquarters of an institutional community. In 1312 Kakunyo declared the conversion to a temple by hanging a placard. Fierce protest from the Enryakuji on Mount Hiei forced him to remove it, but after various twists and turns, the conversion to a temple was carried out under Kakunyo's leadership in 1321 and the institution was established under the name "Honganji."

From this point onward the Honganji community began to call itself Honganji and embarked on large scale political activity. Possessing political acumen, Kakunyo simultaneously realized the religious legitimacy of Honganji while advancing another initiative beneath the surface. That was the legitimization of lineage.

In Kudensho, compiled in 1331, two lineages are presented. One is the legitimacy of the religious lineage, called homyaku (法脈), the dharma lineage, beginning with Honen and connecting to Shinran and eventually to Kakunyo. The other is the bloodline, connecting from Shinran to Kakunyo. Calling himself the third head of Honganji, Kakunyo created the doctrine of the Honganji community. The doctrine of Jodo Shinshu was placed at the apex, the teaching had been passed from Honen to Shinran, and that flow had eventually converged in him.

Put differently, this was an authoritarian ideology asserting that the legitimacy of Jodo Shinshu doctrine and the legitimacy of Shinran's bloodline both converged in himself, and that therefore Honganji was the main current of Jodo Shinshu. Yet even after Kakunyo founded Honganji, for nearly the next 150 years Honganji remained nothing more than a minor force within Jodo Shinshu.

In fact, while the Takada branch of Shinran's disciples rose to prominence in Kanto, Honganji was forced to accept the status of a subsidiary temple of Shorenin within the Mount Hiei system. Independence was Honganji's deepest wish. Securing the vested interests of Jodo Shinshu was essential even from the standpoint of survival.

Even after Kakunyo, however, Honganji remained weak. The flock did not gather, and a long stretch of misfortune continued. In the midst of this stretch the charismatic figure of Rennyo appeared. The Honganji of the time of Rennyo's birth was in catastrophic condition, an institution no one took seriously. Under such circumstances Rennyo grew up in poverty. In 1457, at the age of forty three, he inherited leadership of Honganji from his father and immediately set about reform. This reform changed the history that followed.

Honganji at the time was a subsidiary temple of Shorenin and belonged to the Tendai system. The principal hall is said to have ordinarily housed Tendai school principal images and scriptures. Aiming at the independence of Honganji, Rennyo discarded the Tendai school influence in the principal hall and burned everything. He further dismantled the pyramidal Tendai style relationship between abbot and lay followers. He met personally and on equal footing with the lay followers who came to worship, engaged them in dialogue, and devoted his time to resolving the different concerns that each one brought.

This method can be seen as a re-interpretation and re-enactment of the founder Shinran's achievement of creating the soil that broadly received ordinary lay followers. At the same time, instead of teaching difficult scriptural doctrine to his lay followers, Rennyo carried out his missionary activity through thorough dialogue and through letters. This method was a groundbreaking media revolution in the Buddhist world of the time and demonstrated immense effectiveness. But the movement of Rennyo's Honganji provoked one institution. Enryakuji.

From the standpoint of Enryakuji, the fact that one of its mere subsidiary temples Honganji had begun activity on its own without permission was sufficient provocation. Furthermore, by this point Rennyo had burned the Tendai school scriptures. As a result, the Honganji was destroyed by Mount Hiei monks who poured down upon it, and through Mount Hiei's propaganda Honganji was positioned as "a fanatical sect that slanders the principal images of Mount Hiei and asserts only its own correctness." Barely escaping the religious persecution, Rennyo fled to Omi in Shiga which bordered Kyoto, and was eventually given shelter at Onjoji which had long been hostile to Mount Hiei.

In 1471 Rennyo traveled from Kansai to Yoshizaki in Echizen on the Hokuriku coast (present day Awara City in Fukui Prefecture), built a missionary hall called a gobo, and began an active missionary campaign. With Rennyo's arrival, the wasteland of Yoshizaki rapidly developed and prospered to the extent that a temple town formed in no time at all. In this current Rennyo published two works and built a unique network with his lay followers through letters, with mass reproduced texts as the axis of doctrinal dissemination.

Rennyo's conviction in valuing dialogue between equals exerted enormous influence on people who could not read, and laid the foundation for what would become one of the largest Buddhist institutions in Japan. This patient work bore fruit. Eventually large numbers of pilgrims came to the Yoshizaki Gobo from across the country, and Yoshizaki, where nothing had stood, was transformed into a major religious city.

The Hokuriku life was going well, but in 1473 the distorted structure carried by Jodo Shinshu erupted into a problem. Surprisingly, the trigger was not internal strife within Jodo Shinshu but an internal conflict within the Togashi clan, the shugo daimyo who governed Kaga Province. Yoshizaki, where Rennyo had been active, lay precisely on the border between Echizen and Kaga, and so it was inevitable that he became entangled.

The Togashi clan was split. The elder brother Masachika Togashi and the younger brother Kochiyo Togashi were locked in fierce conflict over the headship of the family. The direct cause was the Onin War, the large scale civil war that raged from 1467 to 1477. By that era the capital had returned to the Heian-kyo side, but the civil war that erupted within the central regime divided into two large factions. The Eastern Army was the Hosokawa house. The Western Army was the Yamana house. The struggle for real power within Heian-kyo gradually spread to the regions, and within the Togashi clan in Kaga, the brothers could not agree and split between the Eastern and Western Armies.

The elder Masachika Togashi joined the Eastern Army and the younger Kochiyo Togashi joined the Western Army. It was a regional theater of the Onin War, but this conflict spread to Rennyo in unexpected form. Understanding these circumstances is important.

For Rennyo's Honganji branch, two fatal risks had become apparent. One was that the rival Kochiyo Togashi's force allied with the Takada branch of Kanto. The Takada branch boasted overwhelming strength within Jodo Shinshu, and its entry was clearly a move targeting the vested interests of the Yoshizaki Honganji branch and posed the risk of overturning Honganji's activity at the root. Furthermore, Kochiyo Togashi allied with Toshimitsu Kai who served as deputy military governor of neighboring Echizen.

These two movements were unsettling for Rennyo who had been active at Yoshizaki on the boundary of Echizen and Kaga. Yet at the moment of the 1473 conflict, Rennyo rejected armed conflict, and so the elder Masachika Togashi was defeated and driven from Kaga. Masachika's expulsion was bad for Rennyo as well. The rise of the rival force led to suppression of the Honganji branch.

Sensing this, in the following year of 1474 Masachika offered Rennyo the condition of officially licensing the Honganji branch in Kaga Province in exchange for intervention in the internal conflict. For a long time even at this point Rennyo opposed armed conflict, and the perspective treating him as a pacifist had been general. In recent research, however, the possibility has begun to be raised that he was a leader of armed intervention. With the Honganji branch siding with Masachika, the situation reversed and Kochiyo was defeated and driven from Kaga.

Naturally the political calculation cannot be overlooked. Rennyo received the request for support from Masachika because his ability to build a religious city in a single generation was recognized. From Masachika's standpoint, embracing a religious leader who held a vast lay following and immense influence would inevitably work to his advantage. Rennyo is said to have hesitated at the blatant involvement in political conflict. The struggle held the meaning of a proxy war within Jodo Shinshu beyond a regional theater of the Onin War. Drawn into the internal conflict, Rennyo's decision rapidly transformed the situation.

His counterpart was a leader who changed his position with the times. Masachika expelled his rival from Kaga with the cooperation of the Honganji branch but, fearing the rising momentum of the Honganji lay followers, began intense suppression in 1475, the year after his victory. The Honganji lay followers were enraged at Masachika's reneging on his promise. Renso Shimotsuma, one of Rennyo's lay followers, gathered the followers to overthrow Masachika and ordered a simultaneous uprising while falsely claiming Rennyo's command. This uprising was suppressed by Masachika's side, and the Honganji lay followers in Kaga fled to neighboring Etchu (present day Toyama). Furious at the great blunder, Rennyo excommunicated Renso, and Rennyo himself left Hokuriku.

Even so, by the late 1480s the Honganji forces had revived in Etchu, and in 1488 they overthrew Masachika with an army of more than two hundred thousand.

Through both his successes and his failures in Hokuriku, Rennyo's name became famous in many places, and he acquired strong influence wherever he went. Moving from Hokuriku through Kansai, Rennyo poured his energies into missionary work in Osaka with the international port of Sakai as his axis. He then built Yamashina Honganji at Yamashina in Kyoto. Considering the pressure from Mount Hiei warrior monks, the central temple of the Honganji branch was built as a fortified city surrounded by walls seven meters high and deep moats.

Rennyo's reputation became the highest in the Buddhist world. During the Yamashina period he rapidly drew close to the Ashikaga shogunal house. In 1481 a turning point arrived as the Jodo Shinshu institutions other than the Takada branch joined Rennyo's Honganji branch. The de facto unification of Jodo Shinshu was accomplished by a single individual. The Honganji that had no lay followers and was on the brink of collapse at the time of Rennyo's birth had achieved this miraculous revival.

Rennyo retired in 1489, but he continued vigorous missionary work in places throughout Kansai and was revered by great numbers of people. He was a religious figure of grassroots movement throughout his life. The final project of Rennyo's life was given to him in his last years. That project was the Ishiyama Gobo, a small missionary hall constructed on the northern edge of the Uemachi Plateau in Osaka. It would eventually move the founding history of Osaka itself in a major way. It was around this time that the name Osaka was born.

The Ishiyama Gobo during Rennyo's lifetime, however, was nothing more than a small structure. Sensing that his death was near, in 1499 Rennyo moved to Yamashina Honganji. He died at Yamashina Honganji in May of that year at the age of eighty five. The Ishiyama Gobo as the last hall he had built would come to occupy the spotlight in the harsh sixteenth century when warriors waged war upon war.

The trigger was the religious confrontation of 1532.

Yamashina Honganji of the Honganji branch, then at the height of its momentum, was destroyed by lay followers of the Hokke school. In response to this incident, Honganji was moved from Yamashina to Osaka, and in 1533 Osaka Honganji was founded on the site of the Osaka Gobo. This was the birth of Ishiyama Honganji. Through Rennyo's achievements, large numbers of Jodo Shinshu adherents already existed. They saw Osaka as a new land and gathered there at once, and an enormous temple town was formed in no time.

The land where Ishiyama Honganji was born was in fact the central point of ancient Osaka. Ishiyama Honganji was later overthrown by the warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi, and on its ruins Osaka Castle was built and prospered as the great artery of Osaka throughout the Edo period. But the one who first set his sights on this land was not Rennyo. Its origin lies in the faith of people of remote antiquity. The history of Osaka has always begun and ended on this ground, repeating its updates many times to arrive at the present.

Who then first set his sights on this land?

The moment one turns to the founding history of Osaka with Osaka Castle as the basepoint, an Osaka entirely different from the one of today rises into view. In the future piece I will guide you into the world of ancient Osaka.