reli 73h textbook chapter 1

Bones of Contention

Ambros, Barbara R.

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

Ambros, Barbara R.

Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan.Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012.

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one

Order, Karma, and Kinship

animals in japanese history and culture

The Nihon shoki (720), one of the earliest extant written records of Japanese history, contains a myth that explains the divine origins of agriculture, sericulture, and animal husbandry. Amaterasu, the

sun goddess, dispatches her brother, the moon god Tsukiyomi, to call on the goddess Ukemochi. Ukemochi faces the land and produces boiled rice from her mouth. She then turns to the ocean and produces fish from her mouth. Finally, she turns to the mountains and produces land ani-mals from her mouth. She serves Tsukiyomi a meal prepared from these items. Offended and angered because he considers the food polluted, he kills her. Enraged by his offense, Amaterasu banishes Tsukiyomi from her sight and sends another god, Amekumabito, to Ukemochi. He finds that Ukemochi’s mutilated body has produced oxen and horses from her head, two types of millet from her forehead and her eyes, silkworms from her eyebrows, rice from her belly, and wheat and beans from her genitalia. Amaterasu orders that these items be cultivated in order to feed and clothe human beings.1 The physical violence of the story is striking. The slaying of the food goddess viscerally symbolizes the violence inherent in cultivat-ing the soil (the burning, clearing, and tilling of the land),2 domesticating animals, and harvesting silkworms.

Human-animal relationships in Japan have often been described in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, wildlife activists have frequently de-monized Japanese treatment of the natural world, in particular what they perceive as Japanese exploitation of marine wildlife — as illustrated most recently by the documentary The Cove (2009). On the other hand, writers embracing Japanese uniqueness theory (Nihonjinron) have claimed that

18 | bones of contention

the Japanese have an inherently and uniquely harmonious, holistic rela-tionship with nature: Japanese culture supposedly shuns domestication, meat eating, and killing animals; Japanese folklore is full of tales of hu-man-animal metamorphosis, and Japanese literature and art prize animals for their aesthetic beauty. Proponents of this position have argued that such examples indicate that Japanese culture respects animal life and re-gards the animal world on a par with the human world. Any degradation of this harmonious relationship is often blamed on the destructive influence of the West in the modern era. This assertion implies an assumption of a superior ecological consciousness in the Japanese compared to the meat-eating, monotheistic West. Both positions are inherently problematic in that they either uncritically apply Western categories to Japanese thinking about animals or idealize Japanese relationships with animals and compare these relationships with oversimplified Western notions.

As Arne Kalland has observed, it is common for those who idealize Japa-nese human-animal relationships to “compare a Buddhist ideal and what is best described as a caricature of western practices. It is based on a selective reading of Buddhist dogma and an equally selective reading of western practices. . . . Influenced by Zen and Shinto, it has almost been taken axi-omatically that the Japanese love — and lived in harmony with — nature, or at least did so until the Garden of Eden was destroyed by moderniza-tion.”3 It is beyond the scope of this book to explore the intricacies of hu-man-animal relationships in the West, but this chapter presents an over-view of the premodern Japanese conceptualizations of animals in order to transcend an overly idealistic reading of Japanese religious traditions and their views on animals. The chapter briefly explores the conflicting views on human-animal relationships in Japan, describes the premodern terms that were used to signify animals, and finally discusses what these terms can tell us about how premodern Japanese understood the relationship be-tween humans and other animals at the time. This chapter discusses three important tropes: animals as symbols of an ideal cosmological order; ani-mals as subhuman beasts; and animals as fellow living beings. Pre modern Japanese regarded animals as sentient beings imbued with numenous, spiritual, moral, symbolic, and aesthetic meanings. Divine, human, and animal realms were seen as interconnected, but there was also a sense of differentiation and hierarchy that placed humans in dominant positions

Order, Karma, and Kinship | 19

and allowed humans to use animals for utilitarian purposes and thereby maintain the cosmological order of the universe.

An Inherent Paradox: Reconciling Fluidity with Utilitarianism

In Japanese mythology and folklore, there is indeed plenty of evidence that animals were regarded as intermediaries between this world and other worlds and that the boundaries between the human, divine, and animal worlds were not rigid but noticeably fluid. As Nakamura Teiri demon-strates in Nihonjin no dōbutsukan: Henshintan no rekishi (Japanese views of animals: The history of shape-shifting tales), stories of metamorphoses oscillating between divine, human, and animal forms of existence abound in Japanese mythology, didactic tales, and folklore from the Nara through the Edo periods. In the earliest written sources — the Kojiki (712), Nihon shoki, and several regional gazetteers, humans are depicted as transforming into animals and vice versa. Zoomorphism occurs for a variety of reasons: as symbols of degradation, elevation to a sublime status, and for practi-cal purposes, whereas anthropomorphism of animals (representing sea, mountain, or agricultural divinities) usually takes place for the purpose of marriage with a human. Didactic tales from the Heian (794–1185) through the Muromachi (1336–1573) periods expand the types of animals that are depicted as turning into humans and reflect the influence of Buddhism. Thus, zoomorphism and anthropomorphism often occur as a result of re-birth and are used to demonstrate the workings of karma. Another conti-nental influence can be seen in the popularity of tales about shape-shifting foxes, also common in Chinese folklore. Finally, in the early modern pe-riod (1600–1868), ghost stories became popular, many of which contained examples of anthropomorphism, particularly of foxes, raccoon dogs, and cats. Unlike medieval didactic tales, in which animals transformed to repay a debt of gratitude through marriage to a human, these stories tend to be trickster tales in which humans are harmed by shape-shifting ani-mals, an increasingly common trope as the early modern period progresses. Stories about zoomorphism and anthropomorphism by means of rebirth disappear from the middle of the early modern period, a shift that Naka-mura attributes to the growing influence of neo-Confucianism rather than Buddhism on the popular imagination and to widespread belief in ghosts rather than reincarnation.4


How are we to interpret this fluidity? Jungian psychologist Kawai Hayao argues that Japanese stories of human-animal marriage in particu-lar indicate that Japanese human-animal relationships are somewhere be-tween those of monotheistic European cultures, which insist on a strict separation between the human and animal realms that can be bridged only by magic, and animistic tribal cultures, which posit a sense of unity between humans and animals so that transformations can occur naturally. In Japanese folktales, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism take place naturally without external magic, but ultimately the union between hu-mans and animals is only temporary and eventually doomed to fail, which reinforces a sense of strict separation between animals and humans.5 Kawai concludes that this implies a carefully balanced sense of holistic harmony in the Japanese position because “Japan as a culture has never cut itself off from its ‘natural’ roots:”6

Various non-human wives appear in Japanese fairy tales, such as snakes, fish, birds, foxes, and cats. Toshio Ozawa, a Japanese scholar, points out that fairy tales of the non-human wife are peculiar to Japan and the countries near it. Their uniqueness makes them very important in con-sidering the psychology of the Japanese. . . . At first, human beings and nature seem to be at one, but at some point the humans try to see them-selves as beings different from nature who know what nature is. Nature, however, does not like to be known. Thus, humans and nature coexist in a vague harmonious whole. . . . What I have said about the relation be-tween human beings and animals can be understood to apply, in man’s psyche, to the relation between the conscious and the unconscious. . . . Unlike the Westerner’s ego the Japanese ego is not apart from nature. . . . Thus, the [Japanese] ego knows that it is part of nature. When its function of knowing becomes too discriminating, the ego must detach itself from nature.7

This seems to suggest that the Japanese have a uniquely harmonious rela-tionship with nature that understands and accepts animals (and nature) for what they really are and grants them their own independent existence without seeking to dominate them. The tendency to juxtapose Western monotheism with Japanese polytheism, animism, and Buddhism in order to argue that the Japanese have a closer relationship with animals remains popular among Japanese scholars even today.8


One early proponent of the idea that the Japanese have a unique relation-ship with nature was the modern philosophical thinker Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), who, in a study from 1935, attributed the unique relationship with nature of the Japanese to the islands’ climate.9 Similar arguments of Japanese uniqueness gained strength in the postwar period. In an essay entitled “Love of Nature,” D. T. Suzuki extolled the exceptional love of nature of the Japanese due to their animistic and Zen Buddhist heritages.10 A similar view was taken by folklorist Matsuhara Iwao, who asserted that the subtlety and simplicity of Japanese aesthetics contrasted with Chinese materialism and ostentatiousness. Matsuhara further claimed that the “in-timate relationship with nature may be accounted for by the fact that na-ture in this island country is so gentle and beautiful.”11 In particular, Japa-nese interest in native animism grew with the rise of cultural nationalism after the oil shocks of the early 1970s and Japan’s growing global economic leadership role. An idealized notion of native animism was constructed as the antidote to anthropocentric worldviews and environmental exploita-tion in the Judeo-Christian West.12 It is important to notice the emphasis on the harmonious relationship with nature. In Japanese uniqueness dis-course, the concept of harmony plays an important role: again and again the Japanese are said to live harmoniously with one another. Proponents of Japanese uniqueness theory are therefore eager to demonstrate that the Japanese also have had an inherently harmonious relationship with nature, including animals.

Contemporaneous Western writers searching for alternative worldviews have likewise engaged in what Larry Lohmann has termed green oriental-ism13 by idealizing the Japanese views of nature. This is achieved by means of a highly selective reading of historical sources. One of the most recent examples of an argument for Japanese exceptionalism is Richard Bulliet’s assertion that unlike in the modern West, modern Japanese views of ani-mals have remained largely untainted by the anxieties caused by domesti-cation, allowing contemporary Japanese to relate to animals as spiritual beings, similar to their shamanist hunter-gatherer forebears. In his search for a model of “postdomestic” human-animal relationships (when most humans no longer have close contact with domestic animals other than pets), Bulliet concludes, however, that Japanese views on animals cannot serve as useful role models for the West because they are too exceptional.14 Bulliet is able to construct the Japanese as exceptional by downplaying the


role of animal domestication in Japanese history, by homogenizing human-animal relationships in Japan without regard to historical, regional, or class differences, and by ignoring the heavy use of nostalgia in contemporary Japanese pop culture.

In contrast, several scholars have questioned the claim of Japanese ex-ceptionalism. John Knight has argued that human-wildlife relationships in Asia (including Japan) are marked by tropes that do not always imply harmonious coexistence. Wildlife has been treated both as a resource to be exploited and as pests and predators to be exterminated or feared. He concludes that animal symbolism in contemporary Japan neither re-flects a clear dualism that draws rigid boundaries between humans and animals nor does it posit a seamless continuity between humans and animals. When human and animal interests collide, it leads to conflict. In such situations, animal behavior is rationalized in anthropomorphic terms. This establishes a symbolic “equivalence” between humans and animals. Thus Japanese involved in human-wildlife conflict often express their relationship with animals through the metaphor of war, which con-structs the animals as opponents on a par with humans but still allows for depredation.15

Similarly, Stephen Kellert has demonstrated that twentieth-century Jap-anese attitudes toward animals are not all that different from those held in other industrialized areas of the world. He concludes that the majority of contemporary Japanese have a humanistic attitude toward wildlife — that is, they are interested primarily in “individual animals such as pets or large wild animals with strong anthropomorphic associations.” Negativistic at-titudes of “active avoidance of animals due to dislike and fear” are also very common. Dominionistic attitudes concerned with “the mastery and con-trol of animals” and naturalistic attitudes that showed “interest and affec-tion for wildlife and the outdoors” were also widespread, as were utilitarian attitudes that stressed “the practical value of animals” and their habitats. However, moralistic attitudes emphasizing a “concern for the right and wrong treatment of animals” and ecologistic attitudes stressing a “concern for the environment as a system and for interrelationships between wild-life species and natural habitats” were less frequently represented than in the case of Western industrialized countries. Aesthetic concerns, which stress “the physical attractiveness and symbolic characteristics of animals,”


played an extremely important role for his Japanese informants.16 Indeed, aesthetic appreciation of wildlife has a long history in Japan (evidenced, for example, in Japan’s poetic tradition).

Applying Lévi-Strauss’ paradigms of the raw and the cooked, Arne Kal-land has suggested that the Japanese have often displayed great sensitivity toward idealized forms of the natural world while simultaneously dem-onstrating abhorrence “towards nature in the raw.” Once reduced to its ordered, cultivated aspects, nature becomes a “reservoir for metaphors.”17 According to Kalland, Japanese views of nature are contextual, fluctuat-ing between viewing humans as part of a “domesticated, aesthetic nature which is identical with culture” and “nature in the wild” that can be ex-ploited as a resource.18 As Kalland and Patricia Asquith explain, ritual is often used in Japan to mediate the transition between two points of polar opposition and grapple with conflicting views about the natural world. It is precisely because the natural world is imbued with spirits that it can be ritually manipulated and harnessed for human benefit. Human beings and spirits are bound into a reciprocal relationship that is maintained by means of rituals, particularly when human activity threatens to disrupt the cosmic order through agriculture, hunting, fishing, or construction work. Rituals are meant to maintain the balance of the cosmos and avert natural calamities. The spiritualistic conceptualization of the cosmos thus does not ensure that “nature out there” remains untouched and pristine but that the cosmos does not fall into catastrophic chaos.19

In regard to animals, this means that the tensions between opposing views of animals are also resolved through ritual. Animals are understood as spiritual beings; therefore, they can be ritually manipulated to serve human purposes, for example through the performance of ritual releases, hunting rites, memorial rites, and the like. Despite the adoption of modern scientific animal taxonomies, animals are not understood only in purely mechanistic terms; rather, a spiritualistic understanding continues to color conceptualizations of animals — even in the modern era. Understanding this spiritualistic view of animals in its historical contexts is important in connection with the following chapters on animal memorial rites. None-theless, in their spiritualistic view of animals, as this chapter demonstrates, the Japanese are not particularly unique. They were strongly influenced by concepts from the Asian continent.


Premodern Japanese Terms for Animals

Roel Sterckx’s observation about ancient Chinese terminologies for ani-mals is also applicable to the Japanese, who borrowed many categories from the Chinese:

The classical Chinese language lacks a linguistic equivalent for the term “animal.” “Animal” or “animated being,” with its origins in the Platonic notion of “zoon” (ζῷον), implies a notion of animacy and inanimacy as a distinctive criterion. As a concept including everything that partakes of life, including humans and animals, as opposed to inanimate min-eral and plant life, it may not be completely compatible with classical Chinese equivalents such as wu 物, shou 獸, qin 禽, chong 蟲, or even the modern generic term for animals, dongwu 動物 (“moving being”).20

The modern Chinese term dongwu as a translation of “animal” was adopted from the Japanese term dōbutsu, which itself first became com-monly accepted in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Although the term existed previously, dōbutsu as an umbrella category for animals was not commonly used in premodern Japan — or in China. The Chinese dongwu appears in the Rites of Zhou (Zhouli) as a term used in contra-distinction with plants (Ch. zhiwu; J. shokubutsu) and humans (Ch. ren; J. jin/hito).21 In Japan, it also appears in the same sense as the heading for the animal sections of Heian-period poetic dictionaries.22 However, the term became pervasive only in the nineteenth century as a translation of the Western term “animal.”23 The Dutch-studies scholar Udagawa Yōan (1798–1846), who rejected the contemporaneous terminology of neo-Confucian pharmacological texts, was the first to use the term in its modern sense in his Botanikakyo (Botany sutra) in 1822.24 When Fuku-zawa Yukichi wrote his Seiyō jijō (Things Western) in the 1860s, he chose dōbutsuen as the translation for “zoological garden” and explained to his Japanese audience that this was where “living birds, beasts, fish, and insects were kept.”25 Still in the 1860s, not just dōbutsuen but dōbutsu itself needed further explanation in more common terms to be fully comprehensible to Fukuzawa’s contemporaries.

Before the modern era, a variety of different terms were commonly used to designate animals. These terms were indicative of how the Japanese con-ceptualized the place of animals in the cosmological order and indicated


that the category of “animals” was inherently unstable. These Sino-Japa-nese terms for “animal” can be divided broadly into four types: (1) terms implying taxonomical differences between various nonhuman animals (e.g., kinjū, chikurui, and mushi); (2) terms stressing the beastly otherness of nonhuman animals compared with humans (e.g., chikushō and bōshō); (3) terms emphasizing the potential kinship of nonhuman animals with humans as living, breathing, sentient beings (e.g., ikimono, shujō, ujō, and kigyō); and (4) terms linking animals with divinities, demons, and ghosts (e.g., misaki, mono no ke, oni, bakemono).26 In premodern Japan, divine, human, and animal realms were seen as interconnected, but there was also a sense of differentiation and hierarchy.

In many cases, the Japanese, like the premodern Chinese whose animal terminologies they adopted, did not use umbrella terms but instead used terms for various subtypes of animals, sometimes in combination to cre-ate broader umbrella terms. For instance, the term kinjū (Ch. qin shou) could be used to signify animals in general but more precisely referred to birds (feathered, two-legged beings) and beasts (four-legged, hairy beings).27 Moreover, jū (also pronounced kemono, Ch. shou), which also refers to wild animals, was juxtaposed with chiku (Ch. chu), which means “livestock.” The term chikurui thus narrowly designated various domestic animals but occasionally also encompassed other animals. The formulaic term “six types of livestock” (Ch. liu chu; J. rokuchiku; horse, ox, pig, sheep, dog, and chicken) was a common concept in Warring States (475–221 BCE) and Han (206 BCE–220 CE) China28 and also appears in one of the earliest chronicles of Japanese history, the Nihon shoki. This usage carries over into the modern Japanese term for domestic animal or livestock, kachiku. In ad-dition, there were the categories of fish (gyo) or scaly beings (rin), armored animals (kai), and insects/vermin (mushi). Fish included various types of aquatic beings including even aquatic mammals. Scaly beings encompassed fish and serpents, even dragons. Armored animals included shellfish and turtles. Vermin comprised anything that was not a bird, beast, fish, or shellfish but particularly referred to insects and worms and occasionally was also used to describe creatures in general.29

The tendency to enumerate different types of animals continued from the classical period until the nineteenth century and appears in texts as diverse as the Buddhist cleric Genshin’s (942–1017) description of the beastly realm in the Essentials of Birth in the Pure Land (Ōjōyōshū), Heian


through Muromachi poetic lexica, and early modern materia medica texts and encyclopedias compiled by neo-Confucian scholars. Especially in the case of the latter, animals often appeared in an order that reflected neo-Confucian ideas of a hierarchical order of being as outlined in Li Shizhen’s Bengcao gangmu, a late Ming (1368–1644) text that became the blueprint for taxonomical classification during the Edo period (1600–1868). Animals were ranked from lowest to highest: vermin, including insects and worms, on the bottom followed by scaly animals, armored animals, birds, hairy animals, including domestic and wild beasts, and finally apes and monsters that had humanlike form.30

In addition to enumerating various species, there were also terms that treated animals as a single category. Most were derived from Buddhist and neo-Confucian vocabularies. Some stressed human-animal kinship while others emphasized the otherness of animals: ikimono (living beings), shujō (all life), ujō (sentient beings), chikushō (the beastly existence), and bōshō (the horizontal, i.e., beastly, existence). While the first three terms have the potential to comprise all life, including humans and other beings, in prac-tice they were often used to point to animals in particular. The latter two terms, however, have strong negative connotations that indicate the lower status of animals vis-à-vis humans. They refer to the beastly realm, one of the six realms of existence in the Buddhist cycle of death and rebirth. As one of the three evil forms of existence, the beastly realm ranked third low-est above the hell realm and the hungry ghost realm and below the Asura, human, and heavenly forms of existence.

In addition, medieval Japanese also used the term kigyō (animated forms), a term that is perhaps the least well-known today and therefore needs further explanation. The term — seemingly unknown in that sense in China — appeared as a lexicographic category in fourteenth through sixteenth-century poetic lexica as an umbrella term for nonhuman ani-mals precisely when neo-Confucian thought began to trickle into Japan with the help of Zen Buddhist clerics. The term remained in use through the Edo period but was eventually displaced by the term dōbutsu in the nineteenth century.31 On the most basic level, kigyō is similar to the term “animal” because one of the meanings of ki is “breath.” Hence the term is sometimes glossed as ikimono, meaning “living being,” or rather “breathing being,” because the Japanese word for “breath” (iki) is homophonous with “living” (iki).32


However, the term kigyō has other associations. It might be reflective of a hierarchical relationship between humans and other animals. In Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian cosmological order, humans clearly rank above ani-mals because human nature (Ch. xing; J. sei) allowed the universal prin-ciple of the cosmos (Ch. li; J. ri) to temper the baser influences of material force (Ch. qi; J. ki) through human consciousness or heart/mind (Ch. xin; J. shin). In animals, however, the untempered influence of material force was stronger.33 The Japanese term kigyō thus points to the idea that animals are driven by the baser influences of material force and rank lower than humans on the ladder of beings.

The character kyō, meaning “form,” in kigyō has additional associations. In early Chinese bibliographies, classificatory manuals (Ch. pulu) about animals (other than agricultural texts about animal husbandry) were usu-ally grouped under “form books” (Ch. xiangshu) or more broadly under “prognostication by form” (Ch. xingfa). These “form books” were manuals that explained forms and patterns in the natural world (including animals) as a means to make prognostication — often in the context of five-phases correlative theory. Thus animals could function as omens. In a broader sense, their physiognomy could provide clues to the animals’ qualities, potential, and eventually also their medicinal properties.34 Therefore, the Japanese term kigyō may also have reflected the association of animals as potential omens and as medicinal resources.

Finally, we should note that the Japanese often saw animals as closely related to divinities and to monsters and demonic spirits. Originally, the premodern term misaki (literally, “august front-runner”) meant some-body who clears the path for a dignitary, but in medieval and early mod-ern usage, it also designated the spirit of a dead person or an animal that served as a messenger for a divinity — particularly a crow, fox, or monkey. It seems that by the late Edo period, animal misaki such as the crow had become associated with messengers of the (vengeful or unsettled) spirits of the dead. Yanagita Kunio would later use the term misakigami, meaning a misaki divinity, to describe such animal spirits, but in a premodern usage we find only misaki or misakimono.35 This leads me to the next term, mono (wu in Chinese).

The association of animals with monsters and demonic spirits may be partially lexographic. The Chinese character wu can mean any kind of ma-terial object, inanimate or animate, but was also used to designate a living


being. In Chinese antiquity, it was semantically linked to animals (espe-cially sacrificial animals) because it contained the ox radical.36 In Japanese, the character is read butsu — as in dōbutsu (moving being, animal) — or mono — as in ikimono (living being) or kemono (hairy being). Mono can also stand on its own. In the Heian period, a mono, as noted by Doris Bar-gen, was “not the tangible ‘thing’ it means in modern Japanese, but its very opposite in ancient usage: something unspecifiable, without a clear form, and therefore extraordinary, strange, to be feared as an outside force.”37 In other words, it also denoted spirits. Thus as early as the sixth century, the Mononobe were identified by their name as a service group that ritually manipulated spirits.38 A similar meaning is implied in the term mono no ke. The expression combines mono (spirit being) with ke (monster), which, according to Michael Foster, “signifies the sense of the suspicious, the un-certain, the unstable.”39 In the Manyōshū, mono was sometimes also writ-ten with the character for a demonic spirit, now commonly read as oni. Oni were not just invisible spirits but also “increasingly perceived as visible fantastic creatures, sometimes half human, sometimes more closely resem-bling animals.”40

A similar connection between animals and the monstrous appeared in the Tokugawa-period term bakemono, which also implies instability. Bakemono literally means a “changing being” or “shape-shifting being” and is also sometimes translated as “monster” or “ghost.” The ability to shape-shift was also attributed to certain animals such as foxes, raccoon dogs, cats, and snakes. Animals were thus linked to the world of ghosts and monsters.41 Therefore, Nakamura Teiri attempts to deduce Japanese views of animals entirely by studying folklore related to ideas of human-animal metamorphosis, not only in his above-mentioned Nihonjin no dōbutsukan but also in his other publications.42 Keeping this complex terminology in mind, let us turn to the place animals were assigned by premodern Japa-nese and how they marked boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals.

Animals as Symbols of Cosmological Order

Throughout Japanese history, animals have been regarded as powerful, even potentially threatening spiritual forces, but they were also regarded as resources that sustained human life. Archaeological finds from the Jōmon (12,000–300 BCE) and Yayoi (300 BCE–250 CE) periods seem to indicate


that animals were used in hunting and fertility rituals in cultures that were animistic and eventually became clearly shamanistic. During the mid to late Jōmon period (3000–300 BCE), humans populating the Japanese is-lands subsisted primarily on hunting eventually supplemented with simple cultivation and rudimentary domestication of the boar. The deer and boar, hunted with the assistance of dogs, seem to have been of particular sig-nificance in this culture, but the diet of the Jōmon people included a wide variety of mammals, birds, and seafood. Finds from the mid-Jōmon period include animal shells, bones, horns, and teeth, some of which were used as ornaments, possibly hunting and fertility talismans. Similar functions have been attributed to animal depictions on clay vessels and to clay figurines of animals. Archaeologists have suggested that there are indications the culture was animistic and that animals were seen as mediators between the divine and the human realms.43

During the Yayoi period, wet-field rice cultivation was introduced from the continent. Shamanic leaders ruled small tribal kingdoms. Along with rice-cultivation technology, oracle-bone divination techniques were in-troduced from the Asian mainland. Even as the culture became predomi-nantly agrarian, hunting and fishing continued to supplement the diet. Additionally, hunting of deer and boar was an important method of re-ducing crop damage. Animals — especially birds, deer, boar, small insects, dolphins, and sharks — appear on clay vessels and on bell-shaped bronzes (dōtaku). The depictions on bell-shaped bronzes, in particular, show ani-mals linked to rice fields and seem to have been related to shamanistic ritu-als associated with rice cultivation. These agricultural and hunting rituals appear to have involved animal sacrifice.44

In the Kofun period (250–538), the influx of continental culture, partic-ularly from the Korean Peninsula, increased. Rule became gradually more centralized and large tomb structures were built for the repose of deceased sovereigns. Large clay figurines (haniwa) placed around these tombs depict a variety of animals, such as deer, horses, and birds. Hunting remained important and played a role in the expression of royal authority. Deer in particular become symbols of the sovereign. Royal deer hunts were often depicted on haniwa to demonstrate the authority of the deceased in the beyond. Horses and birds were thought to assist the deceased in his passage to the world of the dead. Furthermore, horse and cattle bones have also been recovered from ancient tombs, which points to sacrificial rites. Ani-


mal husbandry flourished and gained ground during the late Yayoi period owing to the introduction of horses and cattle from the continent. During the Kofun period, various animal-related service groups (be) specializing in the raising and training of specific animals — such as falcons, cormorants, horses, and dogs — were established by the Yamato state.45

During the Asuka and Hakuhō periods (538–710), continental influ-ences reshaped animal symbolism. Animals constituted an important form of tribute paid by foreign envoys and by Japanese dignitaries to the Japanese court. During the seventh and eighth centuries, Baekje, Silla, and later Bohai frequently sent tribute in the form of animals, including exotic species such as camels, peacocks, and parrots. Domestically, unusu-ally colored animals and animals with abnormalities were presented to the court as gifts. Those who caught such animals and presented them to the sovereign were rewarded with ranks.46 These animals were thus part of a symbolic exchange that cemented the relationships between a sovereign and his subjects as well as tributary states.

White animals were understood as manifestations or messengers of mountain divinities in Japanese mythology.47 For example, according to the Kojiki, Yamato Takeru has divine encounters with a white deer and a white boar in the mountains on different occasions. He mistakes them for the messengers of the mountain divinity, but they turn out to be the actual mountain divinities. In the case of the white boar, Yamato Takeru’s oversight eventually costs him his life.48 The belief that certain animals, es-pecially white ones, functioned as divine messengers (misaki) persisted into later periods of Japanese history. For example, foxes have been viewed as the messenger of the combinative divinity Inari and sometimes were iden-tified with the divinity herself.49 The association with divinities dovetails with Buddhist iconography, in which animals, particularly white ones, are portrayed as mounts for enlightened beings. Just as Inari in the form of Dakiniten rides on a white fox, the bodhisattva Fugen (Skt. Samantab-hadra) is usually shown on a white elephant. In Chinese lore, white ani-mals were linked to the cult of the Queen Mother of the West, which also gained importance in ancient Japan.50

In addition, sighting white animals (foxes, bears, dogs, deer, mice, swal-lows, pheasants, owls, falcons, crows) was considered an auspicious omen. White animals were so auspicious that several eras in the seventh and eighth


centuries (e.g., Hakuchi, “White Pheasant”; Reiki, “Spirit Tortoise”; Jinki, “Divine Tortoise”; Hōki, “Treasure Tortoise”) were named after white ani-mals that were presented to the court. Similarly, red animals — particularly crows and other birds — were also considered auspicious omens because they were associated with mythical Chinese birds: the red phoenix and the three-legged red crow that inhabits the sun. As Michael Como has shown, the three-legged crow was linked to the cult of the Queen Mother of the West transmitted around this time to Japan from the continent.51

The presentation of auspicious animals was linked directly to conti-nental practices. When a white pheasant was presented to the court of Emperor Kōtoku in the first year of the Hakuchi era (650), the imperial court consulted an envoy from Baekje and several Buddhist clerics, who compared the incident to similar practices on the Asian continent. The Buddhist cleric Bin (d. 653) explained in detail:

This [white pheasant] is deemed to be a lucky omen, and it may reason-ably be accounted a rare object. I respectfully heard that when a Ruler extends his influence to all four quarters, then will white pheasants be seen. They appear, moreover, when a Ruler’s sacrifices are not in mutual disaccord, and when his banquets and costumes are in due measure. Again, when a Ruler is of frugal habits, white pheasants are made to come forth in the hills. Again, they appear when the Ruler is sage and humane. [Here follow two examples from the Zhou and Qin dynasties.] This is accordingly a favorable omen. A general amnesty ought to be granted.52

Emperor Kōtoku himself is quoted as having expounded on the rationale:

When a sage Ruler appears in the world and rules the Empire, Heaven is responsive to him, and manifests favourable omens. [Here follow ex-amples from the Zhou, the Han, and the reigns of Emperor Ōjin and Nintoku.] This shows that from ancient times until now, there have been many cases of auspicious omens appearing to virtuous rulers. What we call phoenixes, unicorns, white pheasants, white crows, and such like birds and beasts, even including herbs and trees, in short all things having the property of significant response, are favourable omens and auspicious signs produced by Heaven and Earth. . . . For this reason,


let all, from the Ministers down to the functionaries, with pure hearts reverence the Gods of Heaven and Earth, and one and all accepting the glad omen, make the Empire to flourish.53

The presentation and interpretation of auspicious animals were thus di-rectly linked to Chinese ideals of authority and rulership: when a ruler practiced good government and proper rites (sacrifices, banquets, dress codes), the cosmos encompassing heaven and earth was well ordered, so that auspicious omens such as white animals appeared.

As Sterckx has demonstrated, the Warring States and Han Chinese interpreted anomalies in the animal world as an indication of change in the human world. Interbreeding between different species and the result-ing monstrosities, wild animals transgressing into human settlements, and other forms of deteriorating order were seen as portents that pointed to changes in the status quo.54 At the early Japanese court, unusual defor-mities (a four-legged bird or an eight-legged deer) or interspecies copula-tion and other abnormal animal behavior were likewise seen as omens of change. In 670 an unusual tortoise whose patterned shell resembled the Chinese character 申 (shin; the zodiac symbol for the monkey) and was yellow on the top and dark below was caught in the capital. Yellow was associated with earth and black with heaven, while the rounded top of the tortoise usually symbolized heaven and the square bottom earth. The inverted relationship of earth over heaven pointed to a change in reign during the year of the monkey.55 In retrospect, the occurrence could thus be used to justify Emperor Tenmu’s ascent in 672, which happened to be the year of jinshin (literally, “the yang water monkey”), the ninth year of the sexagenary annual cycle. Anomalous animal physiognomy was thus in-terpreted as a reflection of proper and improper conduct in human society. Eventually, the meaning of animal omens — including mythical creatures, white and red animals, and animal deformities — was systematized into four grades in the Engishiki (927), a legal text that described court cer-emonies and detailed regional tax obligations.56 In addition, the Engishiki stipulated that a white horse, a white deer, and a white chicken were regular offerings during the toshigoi festival, celebrated in the second month to pray for an abundant harvest.57

Moreover, following Chinese practices, animal symbols were used in Japan as geomantic and astrological symbols to order space and time. Ac-


cording to Chinese five-phases correlative theory, four mythic animals (the dragon, phoenix, white tiger, and the turtle/snake) represented the four cardinal directions and the four seasons. Five-phases correlative cosmology distinguished between scaly, feathered, naked, hairy, and armored animals and linked these to the five phases (wood, fire, earth, metal, water), the five directions (east, south, center, west, north), the five seasons (spring, sum-mer, late summer, autumn, winter), and the five colors (green/blue, red, yellow, white, black).58 This cosmological model is reflected in the associa-tion of the four seasons and four cardinal directions with the blue dragon, red phoenix, white tiger, and black turtle/snake. In the seventh century, Chinese and Korean artisans introduced this motif in bronze artifacts and in tomb murals, turning the grave into an astrological compass that could protect the deceased. 59

In one of the eighth-century tombs, twelve smaller human figures with animal faces are depicted below the four animals in reference to an even more complex system.60 This animal-based system linked the twelve ani-mals of the zodiac (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, mon-key, rooster, dog, and pig) with the sexagenary annual cycle, the twelve months, the twelve hours, and the twelve directions. The sexagenary cycle originated during the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–146 BCE) and was not orig-inally linked to the twelve animals. The associative system emerged in the Later Han from divinatory practices infused with five-phases correlative cosmology and became widely popular through the Six Dynasties, Sui, and Tang, when the animals began to be represented visually in mortuary art. It was in this form that the twelve animals were introduced to Japan along with divinatory and astrological practices. The twelve animals became as-sociated with the twelve guardian generals of the Medicine Buddha during the Tang dynasty. During the Heian period, this association was intro-duced through esoteric Buddhism to Japan, and the iconographic associa-tion with the Medicine Buddha became a standard iconographic feature in the Kamakura period. In addition, the twelve animals were also linked with other esoteric divinities, such as Myōken (a divinity associated with the Big Dipper), Rokuji Ten, and Daigensui Myōō. They also appeared in an expanded list of thirty-six animals in the esoteric Star Ritual.61 The twelve animals represented cosmological order on a symbolic level. The association with cosmological order is humorously illustrated in the me-dieval Jūnirui kassen emaki, a parodistic narrative of the otogizōshi genre,


in which the twelve animals in their form as armored martial guardian figures with animal heads battle an alliance of wild-animal rebels. Eventu-ally, cosmic order is restored with the victory of the twelve animals and the rebel ringleader, the raccoon dog, taking the tonsure.62 As the tale sug-gests, some animals, such as the twelve animals, were privileged among all other animals by virtue of their symbolic function. The behavior of such animals thus warranted special attention. According to the Nihon shoki, a rat gave birth in a horse’s tail in 662. Since the rat represents the northern direction and the horse the southern direction among the twelve animals, a Buddhist cleric interpreted the event as follows: “The men of the North are about to attach themselves to the Southern Country,” which in turn was understood as a prognostication in regard to the volatile military situation on the Korean Peninsula.63

From the earliest extant writings from the Nara period, it is clear that the Japanese showed a keen aesthetic appreciation of animals, who appear in great numbers in the Kojiki, the Nihon shoki, regional gazetteers, and in the Manyōshū. However, as Kajishima has argued, animals were also clearly part of the public discourse because they were important natural resources for the Japanese court. The Ritsuyō system regulated the use of certain animals, particularly horses and cattle, and the collection of taxes paid in animals and animal-based products. Animal-based medicine also remained an important element in the trade with China, as attested by inventories of medical substances in the imperial storehouse, the Shōsōin.64 The introduction of Buddhism to Japan in the mid-sixth century, how-ever, added new ways of understanding animals, including viewing them as spiritually inferior forms of existence and sentient beings capable of salvation. From the above-mentioned discussion it is clear that despite the growing influence of Buddhism, from the Asuka through the Nara periods, animals were not first and foremost conceptualized in Buddhist terms. Some evidence suggests, for example, that despite the antisacrificial discourse of Buddhism, people continued to sacrifice oxen in rainmaking cults derived from continental practices during the seventh and eighth centuries.65 Moreover, as Michael Como has shown, ghostly horse-riding spirits were associated with diseases, spurring the use of dolls and animal-shaped clay figurines as scapegoats. By the seventh century, such rituals also involved actual horse sacrifices to expel disease deities.66 As Como has argued elsewhere, archaeological evidence from the Nara period proves


that animal sacrifice was pervasive and often linked to spirit-pacification rites that were adapted from the Asian continent.67 This changed, how-ever, during the Heian and medieval periods, when Buddhism became the dominant ideology. This is not to say that the killing of animals completely disappeared, but it had to be rationalized within a Buddhist paradigm. In turn, Buddhism remained the predominant influence until the rise of neo-Confucianism, which in turn became a strong ideological force in the early modern period.

Animals as a Lesser Spiritual Life Form: Chikusho

The Buddhist terms bōshō and chikushō (Skt. tiryag) can be translated as “beasts,” in reflection of the distinctly negative connotations of the terms. The beastly existence refers to one of the three lower realms of rebirth.68 The concept of the beastly realm was particularly influential in shaping Japanese notions of nonhuman animals during the classical and medieval periods. Beasts were constructed as lower beings in the cycle of death and rebirth that were spiritually inferior and inherently unclean. Being reborn into a beastly existence was understood as the result of karmic retribution for unwholesome deeds and viewed as a punishment. According to the Nihon ryōiki, a collection of didactic tales compiled by the Buddhist cleric Kyōkai between 787 and 822, humans were reborn as beasts because they killed an animal, obstructed the spread of the Buddhist teachings, stole from Buddhist institutions, or displayed excessive avarice and greed.69 Ac-cording to the three most important Pure Land scriptures in Japan,70 the beastly realm is an evil existence associated with suffering. Animals are also seen as a karmic hindrance to humans because livestock are possessions and therefore lead to attachment. Therefore, the beastly realm does not exist in Amitābha’s Land of Bliss. The exotic birds that appear to grace the Pure Land are not real animals but are merely conjured up so that they can proclaim the Buddhist teachings with their song.71 The beastly existence is thus incompatible with the bliss of the Pure Land.

The suffering of beasts is a pervasive theme in other Mahāyāna scrip-tures that were particularly influential in Japan, such as the Lotus Sutra. For example, in the parable of the burning house, the verse section de-scribes the decaying mansion as inhabited by filthy, repulsive, and violent beasts, which are labeled as “evil creatures” and “noxious vermin and evil birds and beasts.” One of their punishments for those who slander the


Lotus Sutra is to be continuously reborn in the beastly existence as wit-less beings leading a restless life, afflicted with scabs and sores, tortured by humans, and suffering hunger and thirst.72

Genshin’s Essentials of Birth in the Pure Land illustrates what makes the realm of beasts such an undesirable existence. Rebirth in the realm of beasts, punishment for being foolish and accepting alms while breaking the precepts and lacking gratitude, guarantees an existence full of suffer-ing: ignorance, hunger, thirst, pain, disease, and torment at the hands of humans and other beasts:

Among the various species, the strong and the weak harm each other. They never have anything but temporary assurance of drink or food. Day and night they live in fear. Furthermore, aquatic beings fall victim to fishing, and land animals fall prey to hunters. As for animals such as elephants, horses, oxen, donkeys, camels, mules, either iron rods strike their brains or hooks pierce their noses or reins are placed around their necks. They bear heavy burdens and are struck with canes. However, they think of nothing but water and grass. They have no other knowl-edge. Moreover, centipedes and weasels are born in darkness and perish in darkness.73 Beings such as lice and fleas rely on human bodies to live and die. Again, there are dragons, who bear the suffering of the three types of torment74 and know no respite day or night. Or again, there are snakes and pythons, whose bodies are long and large. They are deaf, dumb, and have no legs. Slithering they crawl on their bellies, and small vermin feed on them.75

To symbolize the suffering of beasts, who are never certain to find food and water and who live in filth, Japanese mountain ascetics symbolically enacted rebirth in the beastly realm by abstaining from water.76 The strong focus on the immeasurable suffering of beasts is also reflected in visual depictions of the beastly realm from the medieval period. In paintings of the six realms of existence, the beastly realm often shows wild animals at-tacking one another, while livestock toil under a human yoke. In short, nonhuman animals are unclean, have diminished intellectual, moral, and spiritual capabilities, ferociously kill one another, are killed by humans, or are forced to perform heavy labor for them. They lead a tormented exis-tence. They are not easily liberated.

Beasts were also associated with immoral, unethical, or uncouth con-


duct that violated ideals of human relationships and etiquette. Morality was already considered a distinguishing marker between humans and ani-mals in pre-Buddhist China.77 This assumption also carried over into Sino-Japanese Buddhism. According to the twenty-sixth and the forty-sixth minor precepts of the Brahma Net Sutra (J. Bonmōkyō; Ch. Fanwang jing; Skt. Brahmajāla sūtra), those who break the Buddhist precepts are said to be no different than beasts.78 Similarly, the Japanese compilers of the Nihon shoki condemned a Baekje envoy who followed the mourning practices of Baekje, which demanded that the parents refrain from looking at their dead child, with the words: “Judging from this, they are utterly wanting in feeling, and not to be distinguished from birds and beasts.”79

In Japan, the likening of humans to beasts was often applied to mark their otherness, in particular in the cases of foreigners and marginal groups considered to have subhuman status. Thus the Nippo jisho, a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary compiled by Jesuit missionaries in the early 1600s, translates the phrase rei naki ya chikushō ni onaji as “he who has no cour-tesy is like a beast” (o que naõ tem cortezia he como hũa besta) as an expla-nation for the meaning of chikushō.80 A similar usage is documented in several Muromachi-period texts in which the term chikushō was applied to humans in order to imply their subhuman status. For example, appalled by the sixteenth-century customs of the Portuguese, the anonymous author of the Kyūshū godōzaki compared their Western lifestyle and diet to the habits of beasts: The traders and missionaries buy up horses and oxen to skin them alive and eat them with their bare hands. They do not know the etiquette of filial piety governing the interactions between parents and their children. Thus they do not behave like humans but like lowly beasts.81 In Japan, where the slaughter and consumption of large domestic animals had become taboo and associated with marginal groups, the fact that the Portuguese regularly indulged in such dietary practices indeed made them seem subhuman, but this was not the only reason. The absence of filial piety also condemned the Portuguese. The condemnation thus did not rest only on the violation of Buddhist precepts but also on the violation of proper etiquette and Confucian values. Likewise, the term chikushō was applied to marginal groups such as outcasts in order to indicate their subhuman status. During the Edo period, the characters 畜, 玄田 (read vertically as chiku), and 玄田牛一 (read vertically as chikushō 畜生) were used as discriminatory posthumous names for outcasts (eta) in an appar-


ent allusion to the supposedly unclean professions of these groups, which were often related to the handling of animal products (such as hides and carcasses).82

However, not all associations with the realm of beasts were entirely negative. In Heian-period didactic Buddhist tales, animals sometimes served as moral barometers that could reward or punish humans. Para-doxically, beasts were often shown to be unfailingly grateful: they usually repay human kindness and compassion with acts of sacrifice or the grant-ing of wishes.83 Thus the Nihon ryōiki states, “Even an animal [chikushō] does not forget gratitude and repays an act of kindness. How, then, could a righteous man fail to have a sense of gratitude?”84 As Hoyt Long notes, the notion of on (gratitude or indebtedness; Skt. kr. ta; Ch. en) is an important Mahayana concept that served as a distinguishing marker between humans and beasts.85 In other words, gratitude is the marker of the human-ani-mal divide because supposedly only humans show gratitude. In Japanese Buddhist tales of beastly gratitude, this principle is turned on its head as a means to encourage people to display gratitude: if beasts will not for-get gratitude despite being so benighted, how much more should humans remember to be grateful. Several gratitude tales in the Nihon ryōiki and the Konjaku monogatari (1100) are linked to the act of releasing living be-ings, which is based on the Brahma Net Sutra and the Golden Light Sutra (J. Konkōmyōkyō; Skt. Suvarn. aprabhāsa sūtra; Ch. Jinguangming jing). According to the Golden Light Sutra, an animal will shower its releaser with lavish gifts given out of gratitude. On the flip side, animals were also thought to have the capacity to mete out karmic punishment for mistreat-ment by acting as demonic spirits.86 Reward or punishment as a result of gratitude or its lack is still an important motif in contemporary animal memorial rites, in which the theme of gratitude (kansha) is ubiquitous, as we shall see in the following chapters.

Animals as Living Beings: Ikimono, Shujo, Ujo, and Kigyo

Ultimately, beasts were understood as sentient beings with the potential for better rebirth and salvation, though that capacity was diminished in comparison with humans. After all, some Jataka tales, stories about the for-mer lives of the Buddha, depict the future Buddha as an animal.87 Accord-ing to esoteric Buddhism, beings in the realm of beasts are protected by the bodhisattvas Batō Kannon (Skt. Hayagrīva) — the horse-headed, wrathful


Avalokiteśvara — and Jizō (Skt. Ks. itigarbha).88 This association is reflected in animal memorial stones and in the iconography of contemporary pet cemeteries, which often enshrine a statue of Batō Kannon or Jizō.

Like other beings in the three lower realms of existence, beasts are por-trayed as capable of gaining a better rebirth by means of compassionate human agency. Beasts were thus not inherently divine but could attain divine rebirth with the help of Buddhist ritual practices. The Ōyamadera engi, the late thirteenth century founding legend of Ōyamadera, contains a story about the cleric Rōben (689–773), who subdues a wrathful dragon on Ōyama through the performance of ascetic practices near a waterfall. The dragon subsequently appears to Rōben, grants his request for a spring on the mountain, and informs him that Rōben’s rituals have transformed him from a wrathful creature to a protector of the Buddhist precinct and guaranteed his rebirth in Indra’s Trāyastrim. śa.89

Similarly, while the Lotus Sutra claims that slander of the scripture leads to rebirth as a lowly and defiled beast, it does not deny the potential for salvation of beasts. The story of the dragon king’s daughter, which is usu-ally cited as proof for the potential of women to attain enlightenment, also implies a similar potential for beasts because the girl is hampered not only by her female existence, youth, and inexperience but also by her beastliness: she is after all a serpent and thus an inhabitant of the beastly existence. Ac-cording to Saichō, the founder of the Japanese Tendai school, the dragon girl is able to overcome her threefold hindrances because of the extraordi-nary powers of the Lotus Sutra.90 By implication veneration and recitation of the scripture on behalf of animals ought to be efficacious in ensuring a better rebirth for them. Indeed, the Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sutra (Honchō hokke genki; 1040) contains several tales about animals that were reborn in Indra’s blissful Trāyastrim. śa as a result of the power of the Lotus Sutra.91 The link between the idea of universal Buddhahood in the Lotus Sutra and the beastly existence also emerged in Nichiren’s writings early in his career:

When one attains the enlightenment of the Lotus Sūtra, then one real-izes that one’s body and mind that arise and perish are precisely unborn and undying. And the land is also thus. Its horses, cows and the others of the six kinds of domestic animals are all Buddhas, and the grasses and trees, the sun and moon, are all their holy retinue.92


Of note here is of course that the domestic animals stand in for beastly existence as a whole.

From a Buddhist perspective, even beasts have soteriological potential. As living beings, animals fall under the Buddhist precept against the tak-ing of life. There is also a strong rhetoric against eating meat and caging animals. As Lisa Grumbach has demonstrated, the Buddhist rhetoric against meat eating emerged in China only under the influence of Daoist and Confucian practices of dietary abstention, and even there it remained a contested issue for quite some time.93 Be that as it may, the Brahma Net Sutra, a Buddhist text likely composed in fifth-century China, stipulates compassionate conduct toward living beings by prohibiting their domes-tication, trade, ill treatment, slaughter, and consumption and by empha-sizing the kinship between humans and nonhuman animals through the cycles of rebirth: all sentient beings were once our parents in a former life and therefore deserve our respect and compassion.94

Even though the earliest motivations for admonitions against the taking of all life may not have been motivated solely by Buddhist soteriological concerns but also by Confucian ideas of moderation and ritual abstinence as well as by apotropaic magic and a concern with ritual purity,95 they had concrete effects in Japanese antiquity. Hunting, fishing, and animal hus-bandry as a source of meat had had important places in Japanese culture before the advent of Buddhism. However, after the Nara period, large-an-imal husbandry as a source for food gradually declined: domesticated pigs disappeared from Japan entirely, while horses and cattle were nearly exclu-sively used as draft and transport animals. However, fishing and hunting of wildlife continued, as did the use of leather from horsehides and cowhides and the consumption of smaller animals such as dogs, chickens, and fish.96

According to early national chronicles, the Japanese court issued pro-hibitions against eating certain animals, hunting and fishing, or killing living beings well over a dozen times from the late seventh until the early ninth centuries. Such prohibitions were motivated by a ritual concern for temporary abstention for concrete political ends such as preventing natural calamities and illness. They also functioned as the symbolic imposition of imperial authority over animal life and territory. While some of the injunctions were universal prohibitions against the taking of life, others were clearly limited to particular animals, especially domestic animals, and many carried time limits on the abstentions.97 As Hoyt Long points out:


At the same time that emperors such as Tenmu and Shōmu issued in-junctions against slaughtering animals, they and their successors carried on the tradition of accepting deer and other meat for the New Year’s celebration at least until the tenth century. They also continued to ac-cept offerings of animal flesh from provincial leaders since the practice had long been a way for rulers at the center to reaffirm their positions of power.98

Although the Office of Falconry (Shuyōshi), which was responsible for the training of falcons and hunting dogs, was disestablished in 764 and con-verted into the Office of Liberation (Hōjōshi), it was reinstituted in 788 and eventually incorporated into the Imperial Secretariat (Kurōdodokoro) in the late ninth century. Hunting with falcons and dogs remained a popu-lar pastime among the Heian aristocracy and later in warrior society de-spite the rhetoric against taking animal life.99

Injunctions against the taking of life mixed soteriological concerns with concrete sociopolitical goals and claims to territorial power. During the medieval period, Buddhist temple complexes employed a similar rationale. Fabio Rambelli argues that injunctions issued by temples against the tak-ing of life reflected an ideological agenda that sought to protect the as-sets and promote the interests of combinative religious institutions, which found their assets threatened by rapid development spurred by a proto-capitalist economy.100 By controlling such resources through prohibitions against hunting and logging and limiting the use to special guilds, temple estates could generate revenue by demanding a share of the yield derived from the land as offerings to the divinities, presumably to cancel out the karmic infractions incurred as a consequence of the use of the land. Eso-teric Buddhist texts such as the medieval Kankō ruijū justified the killing of animals as long as such acts were performed by perfectly enlightened beings. In other words, temples had the sacred authority to grant permis-sion to kill on their estates.101 Seemingly ecologically minded doctrines, Rambelli argues, “were conceptual pieces in a much more complicated ide-ological chess game about legitimacy, salvation, economics, and ultimately, power.”102 Similarly, as Grumbach has demonstrated, during the medieval period, the Suwa cult spread throughout Japan because meat offerings to the Suwa divinities enjoyed exemptions from increasingly strict prohibi-tions against hunting issued by the bakufu. The adoption of the Suwa cult


allowed local warriors to continue hunting as before. In fact, ritual meat sacrifices to the Suwa divinities were justified as compassionate killing be-cause sacrificial meat consumed by humans and the divinities ensured the salvation of the victims, who were otherwise doomed to continuous rebirth as wild beasts unable to accrue merit.103

The ritual liberation of animals (hōjōe) illustrates the complex meanings embedded in the rhetoric against the taking of life. Based on the Brahma Net Sutra and the Golden Light Sutra, the ritual release of living beings is a merit-generating activity leading to the rebirth of the liberated animals in Trāyastrim. śa, Indra’s heaven of the thirty-three divinities on the top of the mythical Mount Sumeru.104 However, the ritual was not strongly motivated by a concern for the physical well-being of the animals. Soterio-logical concerns were far more important. This is already apparent in the Golden Light Sutra. The scripture contains the story of the Buddha, who in a former life as the wealthy merchant Rusui Chōja (Skt. Jalavāhana), saves thousands of fish from dying as their pond dries up by having el-ephants carry fresh water to the pond. He makes a food offering to the fish and preaches to them. Soon afterward, the fish are killed in an earthquake and are reborn in Trāyastrim. śa. Eventually, they appear to Rusui Chōja and shower him with flowers and jewels.105 The point here is not that the Buddha prevents the ultimate death of the fish but that they are reborn into a better existence after the Buddha alleviates their suffering and then introduces the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination to them. Thus the ritual release of animals represents a merit-generating activity for the animals and the commissioner of the rite. The emphasis is on the act of liberation of the animals in a soteriological sense — rather than on a careful reincorporation into a suitable habitat.106 Once elevated to a state rite in the eleventh century, the ritual required a periodic supply of large quanti-ties of fish numbering in the thousands, two-thirds of which would perish in captivity before the release.107

The karmic merit accrued through the release of animals was a far more central goal and often implied physical and material benefits for the person who released the animals. The Nihon ryōiki, for example, contains several stories about crabs and turtles repaying humans who had liberated them.108 The text carries a strong antisacrificial message that suggests replacing ani-mal sacrifice with the ritual release of animals. While these Nihon ryōiki tales depict the release of animals as small-scale, personal acts of piety, the


more common form of such rites occurred on a much grander scale. Even in China, early release rituals were usually commissioned by the state or monastic institutions rather than individual sponsors.109 In Japan, the release of animals had political and ideological significance beginning in the late seventh century, when such rites were often commissioned by the imperial court in conjunction with prohibitions against the taking of life. The rite was conducted in the context of the amalgamation of Buddha and kami worship. Hōjōe at shrine-temple complexes dedicated to the deity Hachiman developed into an important state rite in the eleventh century. Initially begun as a rite to propitiate the spirits of the Hayato tribe slain in imperial conquest of the island of Kyushu, the rites developed into yearly festivals that showcased the ruling sovereign’s piety, averted natural di-sasters, counteracted inauspicious omens, and assured the well-being of the sovereign. The concurrent prohibitions against hunting, fishing, and farming that accompanied the rite on state and local levels were in effect a means for the state and private estates to control the use of land by the general populace.110

Such “compassionate” policies, however, were clearly not universally embraced with enthusiasm by all Japanese. A case in point is Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s (1646–1709) “Edicts on Compassion for Living Be-ings” (Shōrui awaremi no rei). The legislation was condemned as draconian by his critics and led to his pejorative nickname, Dog Shogun (Inukubō). Known for his enthusiasm for neo-Confucianism, Tsunayoshi issued a variety of edicts between 1685 and 1709 meant to protect the well-being of animals and inspire moral conduct among the populace. Tsunayoshi’s edicts were not only directed at dogs but also covered other animals, from horses to birds and fish. The legislation prohibited excessive cruelty toward dogs and horses; regulated the rearing, sale, and killing of animals com-monly used for food (such as certain birds and fish); advocated the release of captive birds; prohibited unlicensed hunting and fishing; and mandated that dead dogs, cats, and horses be buried rather than discarded on the roadside. Those who violated any of these laws faced punishments ranging from imprisonment and house arrest to banishment and occasionally even death. While the laws regarding horses seem to have been easier to enforce, laws protecting birds and fish met with more resistance, partly because these laws infringed on the warriors’ passion for hunting. Yet it was the laws regarding dogs that seemed to have encountered the most resistance,


presumably because the warriors enjoyed breeding dogs and treating them willfully. Many of the dog laws had to be reissued because of the difficulty of enforcing them. Furthermore, the prohibitions against killing dogs led to a spike in strays. To deal with the problem, Tsunayoshi established three large shelters for Edo’s stray dogs in 1695. The costs for construction were covered by property taxes, which hit the warrior class the hardest. After Tsunayoshi’s death the laws were immediately revoked — even before the official end of his reign, on the day of his funeral. Contemporaneous his-torians of the warrior class criticized him for punishing too many people unnecessarily.111

Scholars have argued that the legislation may have been inspired by the Buddhist faith of Tsunayoshi’s mother, Keishōin, and the overbearing in-fluence of her Buddhist advisor, the cleric Ryūkō. It has also been suggested that the legislation to protect dogs in particular was motivated by Tsunayo-shi’s wish to prolong his own life, since he had been born in the year of the dog. However, as Bodart Bailey has convincingly argued, Tsunayoshi, who had received no military training in his youth, was probably inter-ested in curbing social violence in general, particularly that perpetrated by members of the warrior class. Therefore, resistance was strongest among warriors, who saw their privileges curtailed.112 The most offensive element of Tsunayoshi’s policies, his critics held, was that the compassionate edicts seemed to raise animal welfare above human needs.

Modern Amalgams of Tradition and Science

With the influx of neo-Confucian thought beginning in the late medieval period and culminating in the early modern period, animals were primar-ily valued for their pharmaceutical properties and their utility as culinary products that could sustain the populace. Early modern neo-Confucian scholars engaged in the study of materia medica (honzōgaku) strongly re-jected the study of the natural world in and of itself but instead emphasized that such study ought to be driven by utilitarian principles. The study of materia medica flourished in particular in the generation after Tsunayoshi under Tokugawa Yoshimune.113 Neo-Confucian scholars were engaged in the emerging field of honzōgaku and critical of Tsunayoshi’s seemingly nonutilitarian, perhaps Buddhist-inspired, policies toward animals, which they regarded as detrimental to the welfare of the state.

Honzōgaku was embedded in a highly utilitarian discourse that placed


humans at the pinnacle of the cosmological order and that clearly regarded animals as natural resources for the benefit of humanity. As Federico Mar-con has argued in his study on early modern honzōgaku, it was honzōgaku that mediated the introduction of Western natural science during the lat-ter half of the Edo period. The most extensive exchange of ideas occurred between the German physician Philipp Franz Baltasar von Siebold and Japanese honzōgaku scholars in the early nineteenth century. The radical Dutch studies scholar Udagawa Yōan contributed a number of new scien-tific terms that rejected earlier honzōgaku terms, including a new word for “animal,” dōbutsu, which became the common Japanese term for animals in the modern period. Ultimately, however, moderate scholars trained in honzōgaku, such as Itō Keisuke, mediated between the received fields of knowledge and the newly introduced natural scientific knowledge and be-came the leading scholars in the new field of natural science.114

However, in the Edo period animals were not only material resources. They also remained mysterious spiritual forces across various disciplines of learning and the popular imagination. Early modern honzōgaku and ency-clopedic works, such as Terajima Ryōan’s Wakan sansaizue (1713), included not just biological information about the animals and their medical and culinary uses but also information about the spiritual powers of animals, fantastical creatures, and anthropoid monsters. Ryōan’s entry on foxes, for example, includes folkloric information about their purported extraordi-nary life spans, the link with the Inari cult, their ability to transform, and their uncanny ability to possess people.115 Particularly in the mid to late Edo period, people became fascinated with the strange, including shape-shifting animals and exotic species, the latter of which were collected as curiosities and exhibited in sideshows. The fascination with strange ani-mals was closely related to the fascination with folktales, bestiaries, and woodblock prints depicting monsters, ghosts, and mysterious events.116 Simultaneously, there was also an increased preoccupation with spirit pos-session by animals such as foxes, cats, and weasels. In some cases, house-holds were ostracized after being accused of keeping animals that caused possession and thus allowed the family in question to accumulate illicit wealth for themselves and cause misfortune or illness for their enemies. Pygmy weasels (iizuna) and stoats (okojo), which both turn white in the winter and were widely regarded as messengers of mountain divinities and capable of possessing people, were used by miko (female shamans), yama-


bushi (mountain ascetics), and shrine priests in shamanic rituals to cast spells and communicate with the dead. Such religious specialists as well as Buddhist clerics were also believed to be able to use exorcism to cure illnesses attributed to fox possession.117

The dichotomy between animals as resources and animals as spiritual forces continued in the modern period. From the Meiji period onward, animals were increasingly treated either as natural resources that were commodified for the purpose of building a strong imperial nation or as pests that should be efficiently exterminated — yet their spiritual allure also remained a presence. In the late nineteenth century, Western whaling techniques were introduced first from America and then from Norway, which revolutionized the Japanese whaling industry and contributed to the national effort of building a nation on a par with Western powers that engaged in similar practices. Around the same time, the Ueno Zoo was founded in 1882 to display the power of the emerging empire through the display of animals in the controlled setting of the capital. Meanwhile, the Japanese wolf (ōkami) was hunted to extinction as more aggressive wild dogs (yama’ inu) were conflated with less-aggressive wolves after the in-troduction of Western Linnean taxonomies. Wildlife conservation efforts began in the mid-twentieth century. The first national parks were estab-lished in 1934, but the focus has remained largely on tourism and recre-ation rather than preservation of natural habitats. Furthermore, aesthetic appreciation has often taken precedence over conservation. For example, the first efforts of bird conservation in the 1930s through the immediate postwar period were motivated by a mixture of an aesthetic appreciation of wild birds, especially species that had long been appreciated in literature and art, and the realization that birds could serve as a natural resource yielding food and feathers and helping to control insect pests damaging Japanese woodlands.118

Despite the disenchantment of animals in the modern period, pre-modern animal symbolisms and rituals have been strategically invoked and blended with Western views of animals, both on scientific and popu-lar levels. While some modern intellectuals, such as the Buddhist scholar Inoue Enryō, sought to explain away folkloric, antimodern “superstitions” about shape-shifting animals and monsters by removing their enchant-ment through scientific explanations, others, such as Yanagita Kunio, turned to animal and monster folklore to nostalgically construct an au-


thentically Japanese identity from the so-called disappearing traditions of the countryside.119

The introduction of modern Western natural science did not lead to a radical break with premodern and early modern concepts. Instead, new Western concepts — including the concept of an “animal” (dōbutsu) as a biological entity that could be classified by Linnean taxonomy — were, and have continued to be, interpreted through the lens of premodern catego-ries and taxonomies. As we shall see in chapter 5, the late Gibo Aiko, a well-known psychic and TV personality during the 1990s, argued that a hierarchy exists among animals that is determined by their relationship with humans — much in the same way that early modern neo-Confucians took a hierarchical, anthropocosmic ladder of being for granted. Gibo also adopted Buddhist arguments for compassionate killing and karmic ret-ribution. All the while she, like many psychics of the late twentieth cen-tury, stressed that animals can cause misfortune and spirit possession.120 Possession by animal spirits has remained a continuous concern. Modern shamans and certain new religious movements may treat fox possession on traditional terms. However, the phenomenon has also been enveloped in a modern scientific discourse. Spiritualist movements of the early twenti-eth century conducted pseudoscientific experiments to study spirit posses-sion, while late twentieth century clairvoyants like Gibo harnessed mod-ern technology such as photography and videography to document ghostly appearances. In modern psychological literature, fox possession has been correlated to diagnoses such as psychosis, neurosis, and schizophrenia, cre-ating yet another amalgam of premodern tradition and modern science.121

While contemporary Buddhist clerics tend to discount vengeful spirits, they also fuse modern natural science with Buddhist conceptualizations of animals as living, sentient beings in a hierarchical chain of being, as the following excerpt from a sectarian pamphlet published in 2004 by the headquarters of the Sōtō Zen school clearly illustrates:

Well then, compared to animals humans are much more highly ad-vanced animals, but basically both have the same living bodies. From the point of view of zoology, humans are mammals that belong to the family of humans in the order of primates. Dogs, cats, humans, etc., all have living bodies. However, the mechanisms by which they are born into this world may be different. For example, humans and beasts are


born from the womb of their mothers, birds and insects are born from eggs, and bacteria are born from dampness. The mechanisms of their births are different, but they are all the same in that they all have life.122

Contemporary Japanese, including Buddhist clerics, are well aware of mod-ern scientific taxonomies and perceive a clear hierarchy among humans and animals that places humans at the pinnacle of existence. And yet from an ontological perspective humans and other animals — even bacteria — are considered akin in that they are all living beings. As Iwakura Yuki has ob-served, the presence of life plays an important role in contemporary Japa-nese discourse about animal rights, which emerged in the 1970s. In con-trast to similar Western discourses, which prioritize the quality of animal life, Japanese discourses seem to prioritize the protection of life — some-times to the detriment of maintaining the quality of life.123 This attitude is also reflected in the widespread reluctance among Japanese pet owners and veterinarians to euthanize pets.124

Conclusion

From this cursory survey we can draw several conclusions. Premodern Japanese attitudes toward animals, complex and unstable as this category was, were imbued with religious ideas and symbolic meanings. However, this does not mean that the Japanese were decidedly unique in their per-ception of animals. Premodern Japanese notions were an amalgam of various streams that strongly reflected continental influences including pre-Buddhist Chinese and Japanese, Buddhist, and neo-Confucian ones. Moreover, negativistic and dominionistic attitudes toward animals cannot be attributed solely to the rise of modernity or the influence of Western civilization, as has been suggested by some proponents of Japanese unique-ness theory. Japanese premodern attitudes toward animals were already ambivalent before there was extensive contact with the West: while some animals were seen as potentially divine and as symbols of cosmic order or were assigned some form of distant kinship as fellow living beings, they were also considered lowly beasts, threatening entities, or mere foodstuffs. Humanistic, negativistic, and dominionistic attitudes toward animals were already strong during the classical and medieval periods, and appreciation of animals often emphasized utilitarian and aesthetic appreciation that singled out particular species, including pets.


Furthermore, Japanese attitudes toward animals were not uniform or unchanging. They often differed depending on social class, occupation, as well as region and changed over time. Utsunomiya Naoko argues that his-torically two views of animals existed in Japan: that of the elites and that of common people. In Utsunomiya’s view, the elites (particularly aristo-crats and warriors) were far more likely to eat meat and enjoy blood sports such as hunting as well as dog and cock fighting than common people.125 Catherine Knight has suggested that there were differing attitudes toward specific animal species among upland and lowland regions in premodern Japan. In the case of bears, for example, she suggests that the lowland re-gions had a far more negative view of bears than upland cultures and con-tributed more strongly to the commodification of the bear as a source for medical substances rather than a sacred messenger of the gods during the early modern period.126 As John Knight has contended, the reverse is true in contemporary Japan: urban wolf enthusiasts have promoted the intro-duction of wolves from Inner Mongolia with the prospect of encourag-ing tourism and controlling animal pests, whereas rural target areas have strongly resisted wolf introduction because they see Mongolian wolves as a foreign species and fear their potential as dangerous predators.127 Long has argued that Japanese cultural attitudes toward animals are an interactive mixture of residual, dominant, and emerging views that combine memo-ries of past practices with contemporary, predominant practices and newly introduced/forged ideas that have yet to take a wider hold in society.128 This of course leaves much room for strategic nostalgia and accommoda-tion to suit the needs of specific contexts. Japanese culture has not been monolithic in regard to human attitudes toward animals.

As this chapter has shown, Japanese attitudes toward animals were often paradoxical. Modern attitudes toward dead animals are also filled with inherent tensions. According to contemporary Japanese law, animal bodies are classified as general waste that can be disposed of unceremoniously with ordinary garbage — with the exception of large domestic animals (horses, cows, pigs, sheep, and goats), which are classified as industrial waste. This definition of animal bodies as waste contradicts the idea that animals have a spiritual existence beyond their deaths, as suggested by premodern con-ceptualizations of animals. It is out of this tension that animal memorial rites have emerged. As we shall see in the following chapter, mortuary rites for animals developed along with the spread of a Buddhist funeral culture


for humans and the emergence of a protocapitalist economy during the late medieval and early modern periods. Such rites became more common as the commodification of animals accelerated in the modern era. Thus, we find modern Japanese military personnel, animal researchers, veterinar-ians, and staff at major urban zoos conducting memorial rituals for the animals in their care. The inherent tensions between views of animals as fellow living, potentially divine beings and of animals as lower beings that ought to serve human purposes are resolved through ritual, particularly from the early modern through the contemporary eras, during which the ever greater commodification of animals has led to ever greater numbers of animal deaths. As Buddhist funeral and memorial rituals for humans became the norm during the early modern period, similar rites emerged for animals as a means to resolve this tension.

reli 73h textbook chapter 1

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