Ichirei Shikon and tama: The Soul of a Place

In shrine histories and in books on the right frame of mind, you sometimes come across the phrase ichirei shikon (一霊四魂), "one spirit, four souls." It is explained as a view of the soul the Japanese have held since antiquity: the human soul is made of one spirit, naohi (直霊), joined to heaven, and four souls, aramitama (荒魂), nigimitama (和魂), sakimitama (幸魂) and kushimitama (奇魂).

Today ichirei shikon is put to use in every sphere, but interestingly, the phrase itself does not appear in a single text before Meiji. Ichirei shikon, in other words, was generated when, through the structural turning point of Meiji, old concepts fused, were honed and were sublimated. And the history leading up to its generation is the history of Japan itself.

Surprisingly, for a concept held in such high regard, aramitama appears in the Kojiki only once, in the chapter on the reign of Emperor Chuai. After the legendary Empress Jingu, Chuai's consort, subdues Silla, she drives her staff into the king's gate and enshrines the aramitama of the three Sumiyoshi gods there as gods to guard the country. The three Sumiyoshi gods are enshrined at Sumiyoshi Taisha, a shrine of ancient history in what is now Osaka, and were guardian gods who held the sea. That is every use of aramitama in the Kojiki.

The clear split into a pair is found in the Nihon Shoki. In its account of the same Empress Jingu, the roles are written separately: the nigimitama of the Sumiyoshi gods stays close to the empress and protects her life, while the aramitama goes ahead as the vanguard and leads the warships.

What we learn from this is that the word aramitama was not born to quietly classify divine natures. It appears in order to describe how a god's power worked in the urgent situation of war. This is the most important point: it is an old word that refers not to "what a god is" but to "how a god was activated."

Then, at the end of the shogunate, Chikaatsu Honda (1822–1889), of Atsutane Hirata's school, established "ichirei shikon." This was decisive.

The aramitama of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki belonged to the side of the gods. It was written as a word by which humans described, after the fact, how a god had been activated, and it lived in a deeply predicative world in which people are kept alive by the gods. In ichirei shikon, however, aramitama is moved to the human side. It became one of four functions that a person holds within. In step with this shift, the age had moved into confrontation with Europe and America.

But here lies the problem. The moment this shift took place, aramitama could not avoid becoming an object of control, because what lies within you is either governed or runs wild. The scheme in which naohi rules the four souls appears here as the inevitable consequence of the move. The idea of ichirei shikon is, in other words, thoroughly modern and should be seen as a mutation peculiar to modernity.

And Onisaburo made one last, decisive move. He did not turn aramitama, moved into the human interior, into "an impulse to be governed." He split off violence as aremitama and left aramitama as a power that waits, quietly full, for activation.

Since the modern era we have learned only the art of managing ourselves. But I feel that what will be asked of us next is the art of being quietly filled.

In ancient Japan there really were groups of specialists who moved souls, and they had the power to bring on possession and to release it at will. This skill was prized because the one who took on the soul of a land was, as such, the god. But here is the great difficulty. The moment we see this being who becomes a god as a subject, as an individual, the ancient world flips into the modern one.

What happened in ancient Japan was that the being who took on the tama of a place was estranged in a "realm of illusion," and from this the being called a god was generated. It was not that a particular individual with a subject took on the tama of the place and ruled over it.

The folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi pointed out that the source of the uji was "the range reached by a powerful tama," the people protected by that tama's power. The range the tama's power reached was called 内 (uchi), "inner," and the people belonging to it 内人 (uchindo). Uchi shifted to uji. What matters is that they were not a lineage from a common ancestor. They were people who received the power of a shared tama, and that bond made up the uji. We must look at the form of a community bound by something other than blood.

Why can modern people not decipher even a single character? Because since the modern age a subject has inevitably slipped in unspoken, and we have fallen into the habit of reading everything on the premise of a subject. A sign of it is that modern Japanese have stopped using "onozukara," the word for thought in a world without a subject. After the modern age usage gathered around "mizukara," and even that has been modernized away from its older meaning and defined as "returning to the subject" or "stressing the sense of the subject." The thought of 自 has, in effect, vanished. Yet this thought of 自 carries the essence of Japan from ancient times.

To put the difference between "mizukara" and "onozukara" so it can be understood: "mizukara" is drawing something in and being possessed by it, and "onozukara" is being possessed by itself, naturally. Possession comes up here because in the world of ancient Japan the movement of souls was understood this way.