Chapters 8-9: cultural footnotes

[telophase]

Again, since there's been summaries already, I'm just adding cultural footnotes. If I don't say where I got the info, it was pretty much ripped off directly from the footnotes in Tayler's translation.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks for the unpacking of the end of Chapter 8--this is one of those things that's supposed to be blindingly obvious to contemporary readers, and while I probably could've unpacked it myself, I was distracted by the incredible skankitude of Chapter 9.

Does Tyler say if the mediums were always female, or were they just female here because the possessed person was female?

Hmm, Seidensticker calls it "a tightly folded bit of paper," and doesn't mention a knot. What's the significance of the incense box in the wedding rituals, does Tyler say? Or Murasaki's "initiation rituals," are those wedding-related or something else?

[telophase]

Morris says that the medium was usually a young woman, and gives examples from the Pillow Book and Genji, but doesn't discuss it further. Presumably A Woman's Weapon will discuss it, but I'll poke through its index in a bit. Morris mentions that exorcists are Buddhist and not Shinto.

(In contemporary Japan, IIRC, people get born and married Shinto but when they die, tend to have Buddhist funerals - has the Buddhist association with death lasted this long? Interesting question.)

Tyler says the incense box was to disguise the contents (the cakes) - presumably until the next morning when the deed had been done, since the women attendants figure it out at that point. I can't figure out where the initiation rituals are - maybe it's a difference in the translation?

[tekalynn]

As I understood it (from one class taken years ago and as a non-specialist) Shinto was always very good at "life" rituals, but had real problems with death, since Shinto sees death as super-impurity and prefers to stay as far away from it as possible. The imported Buddhists were the first to really do a lot with funerals, and slid right into a niche that the Shinto priests were more than happy to provide them with. And the Buddhists have been taking care of the death side of things ever since, responsibilities split between the two religious hierarchies very sensibly.

[akycha]

Hello, I just recently joined (I read Genji some years ago). I thought I'd comment on the medium question, just as an interesting side note, as I happen to be reading an ethnography on the subject.

In current Japan, spirit mediums seem to be overwhelmingly female. Schattshneider's work Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain, deals with female spirit mediums (kamisama or, more derisively, gomiso, which roughly translates to "mystic healer") that generally are possessed by kami or, sometimes, oni (this is usually glossed as "demon," but also seems to have a connotation of "fierce god" in this context). She also mentions itako, who are, "the celebrated 'blind shamanesses'" of northern Tohoku (Schattshneider 2003: 30). Itako usually channel the spirits of the dead, although they have also been known to channel kami.

Kamisama are also ritual experts and may found their own shrines. I have yet to find any mention of a male medium in this volume, although I must note that it is site-specific and not

[telophase]

That's quite interesting, thanks!

[telophase]

Bargen's thesis in A Woman's Weapon: Spirit Posession in the Tale of Genji is basically that possession gives women an outlet from the repression that hemmed them in daily. She concentrates more on the posessed rather than the mediums, but mentions that exorcists were men and mediums were women.

*puts on anthropologist hat* The possession-as-socially-acceptable-outlet is actually pretty common around the world; and I can easily see that it would fall primarily to women in a culture like the Heian, where women had significantly more strictures than the men did.

[telophase]

I just poked about in the online Seidensticker and what he translates as "initiation ceremonies," Tyler translates as:

"He invited a chose few to a donning of the train that he planned to bring off more amply than usual -- which was all very well, except that she had now taken a keen dislike to him."

No footnotes, unfortunately, and I can't find any similar reference anywhere. Morris mentions that the Shinto ceremonies that involve purification of the couple and a three-times-three exchange of wine cups (now the three sips of sake in today's Shinto ceremony), and a small feast at the bride's house, where the groom officially meets the bride's family for the first time. I wonder if it has to do with that, or if it's something completely different?

[franzeska]

The Catalpa Bow by Carmen Blacker has some good information on mediums. (Forgive me if everyone already knows this book: I randomly stumbled across this community while researching something about hair.) The book is primarily about modern remnants of shamanic traditions and their pre-Heian roots.

The book claims that the usual Japanese exorcism involves a (male) priest driving an evil spirit out of the sick person and into a (female) medium. It speculates that the female medium may originally have done all the work but that this was too threatening to the Buddhist establishment, so the practice got absorbed and de-fanged. I'm fairly certain that the medium is always female, regardless of the sex of the victim, but my only actual reference, aside from this book, is the Onmyouji movies, which are of... err... dubious historical accuracy.