Hemp Named an Act, Not a Plant

Back in the twentieth century, archaeologists excavating the Torihama shell mound on the coast of Fukui Prefecture uncovered artifacts showing that cannabis had been part of everyday life as early as the Initial Jomon period. The finds consisted of cord made from cannabis fibers and cannabis seeds; when radiocarbon dating placed them at roughly 12,000 years old, they sparked widespread interest in the bond between the Jomon people and cannabis.

What is even more remarkable is that from the Jomon period onward, the Japanese did not merely utilize isolated parts of the plant. They made use of the entire organism — roots, stalks, leaves, flowers, and seeds — incorporating each into daily life.

To see what that world looked like, I went to the Fukui Prefectural Varve Museum at the Mikata Five Lakes in Fukui Prefecture.

The staff there explained things to me in considerable detail. … At the Torihama shell mound, an Initial Jomon site centered on the Mikata Five Lakes, cords have been found that are regarded as the oldest known use of hemp in the world.

It comes from Mashiho Chiri, an Ainu himself, who became the leading authority on Ainu studies. Through listening to the elders and studying the myths, he established that the Ainu language of former times had no word for "the plant itself."

As I see the sensibility of the ancients, they did not give names in order to identify "things." There was always an "act." People took a certain part of a certain plant, used it within some act of their daily lives, and made something from it, and it was this whole sequence of acts that received a name.

As plants, hemp and kozo are entirely different things. … Yet in Japan's ancient traditions, the two were carried by the hands of the same clan and led by the same god.

Aonigite was hemp, and Shiranigite was kaji, the paper mulberry.

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.

I have to say "former" because cannabis was strictly prohibited in Japan after the Second World War. Today, almost no actual hemp is used in shrines; ninety-nine percent of ritual implements are now made from substitutes such as paper or plastic.

1. Onusa (大幣): This is the wand a Shinto priest waves during rituals — more precisely, a purification implement. … Tellingly, the word onusa was once written with the characters 大麻, the very Japanese word for cannabis.

2. Gohei (御幣): A sacred ornament placed on household altars and shrine sanctuaries. Like the onusa, it is now usually made of paper, though it was once fashioned from hemp fiber.

5. Shimenawa (しめ縄): Though rare today, the shimenawa hung across the torii gates at the entrance to a shrine were once twisted from hemp fiber.

6. The vestments of priests and shrine maidens: Rarely made of hemp today, ritual garments woven from cannabis fiber were once standard.

Today, the living plant has vanished from the shrines, leaving only hollowed-out forms behind.

Cannabis and salt: In Shinto purification rites, cannabis and salt were once used together to cleanse mind, body, and place. Even today, Japanese people routinely scatter salt to ward off ill fortune — placing a small pinch at the threshold of a new home when moving in, for instance. Originally, this custom called not only for salt, but for bundles of dried cannabis leaves and stalks as well. Small dishes of salt can still be seen at the entrances of shrines and private homes alike.

Mike (御饌): According to Japan's oldest surviving chronicles, the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720), cannabis was originally presented to the gods as a sacred offering. At Ise Jingu, during major rituals, mike are laid before the deity once purification is complete, and prayers are offered up.

Awa was the old name of present-day Tokushima. The fertile Tokushima Plain is enclosed by the Sanuki Mountains to the north and the Shikoku Mountains to the south, and the basin of the Yoshino River, which crosses the plain from west to east, long flourished as a renowned source of hemp and paper mulberry. The origin legend of the Awa Inbe tells the same story, relating that their ancestors crossed over to Awa, planted "hemp" and "paper mulberry," and enshrined their ancestral deity, Ame no Hiwashi [天日鷲命].

This legend is bound up with the Daijosai, the great rite through which the heir to the throne accedes as emperor. At the Daijosai held when the Heisei era gave way to Reiwa, too, people from settlements deep in the mountains around Mount Tsurugi, led by the head of the Miki family, descendants of the Awa Inbe, grew hemp, wove it into cloth, and carried out a year-long ceremony to present it to the imperial court. The hemp cloth that the Awa Inbe offer to the heir to the throne is called Aratae [麁服].

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 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.

The Jomon people lived primarily as hunter-gatherers, which meant that securing food on a daily basis was never guaranteed. Cannabis, however, grows far more rapidly than most other plants and thrives across a wide variety of natural environments.

Understanding these qualities intimately, the Jomon people integrated cannabis throughout their lives: as food, as cordage and fishing line, and as clothing. Here lies the wellspring of a Japanese sensibility that wove cannabis into the fabric of life as a whole.