The Inbe: The Clan of Hemp

As plants, hemp and kozo are entirely different things. One is an herb that withers where it stands within a single year, the other a tree with a woody trunk. On the shelves of modern taxonomy, they are not even neighbors. Yet in Japan's ancient traditions, the two were carried by the hands of the same clan and led by the same god.

That clan was the Inbe. Yet by the beginning of the Heian period, the Inbe had already lost their former power and were withdrawing from the main stage of history. It was in 807, amid this decline, that Inbe no Hironari, the last head of the Inbe, presented a book to Emperor Heizei. That book is the Kogo Shui, or Gleanings from Ancient Stories.

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. There are differences, of course, but for ancient people, whose craft fitted one and the same technique to each material, there was no difference of the kind we imagine. It was not that the materials differed. There was no concept of "material" at all. What existed was the act of handling fiber itself, and the god who presided over that act.

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.

Behind this lies the lineage of Hironari himself. His roots were in the foremost of the powerful clans who handled the rites of the emperor in ancient Japan. That was the Inbe clan. The name was originally written 忌部, not 斎部, and in Hironari's time the characters were changed while the reading stayed. The Inbe held great influence as a powerful clan of ancient Japan, but their roots lie in immigrant tribes.

They spread out, based mainly in western Japan, and brought with them various cultures from the continent. In moving toward Kansai they came into close contact with the emperor of ancient Yamato, and became involved deeply in politics there. The god they set at their origin appears in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. The Inbe trace themselves to Futodama, who plays an important part in Amaterasu's hiding in the Heavenly Rock Cave, and they held that legitimacy strongly. As history advanced, however, power struggles in the court grew fierce, they lost influence, and they gradually disappeared from the stage of history.

Because the Nakatomi in effect destroyed the Inbe, the details vanished into darkness. From my own survey, after the Taika Reform of 645 raised the Nakatomi line's standing at court, and especially in the time of Emperor Temmu (r. 673-686), the 40th emperor, who led the compilation of the Kojiki, the Inbe were driven out by the Nakatomi, and by the 8th to early 9th century, when Hironari lived, the Inbe seem to have been greatly weakened. The Kogo Shui in fact asserts the legitimacy of the Inbe, a clan with ancient origins, and also carries a character of seeking restoration against the Nakatomi, who had won immense standing. By the early 9th century, when it was completed, the Heian period had already begun.

The craft of spinning thread from the bark of wild plants and weaving it into cloth already appears in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, both completed in the early eighth century. Woven cloth was in use as far back as the Age of the Gods, and among such cloths there is one legendary fabric that has been held sacred above all others. It is the Aratae, the cloth that an heir to the throne wears in the most secret rite of the Daijosai, the ceremony through which he becomes emperor.

This means that when Inbe no Hironari wrote the Kogo Shui in the early ninth century, "Aratae" had already become an old name. From the Heian period on it was written in many ways, as 麁布, 荒妙, 麁服, and so on, and in truth the history of this ancient cloth grew more tangled the further the Inbe declined, so that it was most likely already wrapped in mystery by the Heian period. When the era name changed to Reiwa, a Daijosai was held once more, and once again a great project was carried out in a hamlet deep in the mountains around Mount Tsurugi, centered on the head of the Miki family, descendants of the Awa Inbe, to grow hemp, weave it into cloth, the Aratae, and offer it to the imperial house.

The custom came back only after the Meiji era, when Tokushima revived it as a prefecture-wide undertaking at the enthronement of Emperor Taisho, which was, in today's terms, a form of regional revitalization. It was carried on in the Showa, Heisei, and Reiwa eras, but for this reason each time it began almost from nothing, feeling its way. Heisei and Reiwa were all the harder because, after World War II, under American pressure, growing hemp itself was made illegal except under license, and Japan's hemp cultivation, which a century earlier had covered an area equal to the whole of Paris, fell away drastically. In Tokushima, hemp growing died out after the war. Making the Aratae in the Heisei and Reiwa eras was therefore extraordinarily difficult. For Reiwa in particular, the village had to raise the budget on its own. It gathered investors to fund the work, invited growers from Tochigi Prefecture who knew how to cultivate hemp to come with their tools, hired police at its own expense, and began with the growing of the hemp under twenty-four-hour guard.

Last year, I went to Koyadaira, deep in the mountains around Mount Tsurugi, and heard the head of the family speak. I will share those stories, along with the history of ancient woven cloth, in future issues.