The May 29th issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article written by a Revd Suzuki, whose day job was at a prefectural museum in Chiba Prefecture, immediately to the east of Tokyo. He was writing about an exhibition he had worked on, which concerned some old ema (絵馬) found in the roof of a jinja. (He said that he has since been transferred, which is very common for civil servants.)
Ema are very common at jinja. They are small wooden boards with a picture (traditionally of a horse, which is why the Japanese means “picture horse”) on one side, and, these days, a blank surface for writing a wish on the other. The tradition goes back a very long way, and is thought to have originally been a substitute for offering a real horse. The earliest surviving ema are centuries old, and they were popular, in a wide range of forms, in the Edo period (1603–1868, conventionally). The exhibition concerned some of these ema.
A jinja in Chiba, Mihashira Jinja (三柱神社), was badly damaged by a landslide in 2013, and needed extensive repairs. As part of this, they decided to completely disassemble the main sanctuary, restore or replace any parts that were damaged, and then reassemble it. Because the aim was to put it back together using as many of the original parts as possible, it was, naturally, taken apart carefully.
In the course of this, they discovered that the roof was partially made of old ema. Some of them had dates on, and were from the very early eighteenth century. All the ema, it seems, look about the same age. They vary widely in size, with the largest being a metre across, but most are about 25 by 15 centimetres, and about 2 mm thick. Most of them had been cut down to the right size for roofing materials, but because they had been incorporated into the roof with the picture side down, and because the main sanctuary was protected from the elements by another building (which is not uncommon, although certainly not universal), the state of preservation of the pictures was very good.
After careful cleaning and inspection, the parts could be put together to make 34 ema with identifiable images, mostly animals, along with a lot of smaller fragments. These were donated to the museum, as an important source for the history of the area.
One reason why these drew interest was that the pictures were similar to those used in a local tradition, called “oëma”, which had been current until “recently” (the article is no more specific). In this tradition, people would buy a new ema every year and put it on their home kamidana (神棚). The initial plan was for an exhibition showing ema from Mihashira Jinja, and from this tradition.
However, during the planning, they came across another set of ema like this, found in the roof of an Inari Jinja (稲荷神社) in Kisarazu City (also in Chiba, and close to Mihashira Jinja). In this case, the ema had been used to roof the “interior sanctuary”, a building inside the main sanctuary that houses the goshintai (御神体), the item in which the kami dwells. As a result, they were also very well preserved, and also dated. These ema were slightly older, from the late seventeenth century. They were thus incorporated into the exhibition.
The ema are small, on thin wood, and painted in a stylised way that makes them look mass-produced and inexpensive. It is not clear whether they were manufactured locally, or bought in from Edo (modern Tokyo), but there are, it seems, stylistic similarities with ema that are known to have been produced in Tokyo. The similarities between the Inari and Mihashira ema are strong enough that they were probably produced by the same workshop, or even the same artist.
These ema are good evidence for the history of the local tradition, but their reuse as roofing material for the sanctuary is also intriguing. There are two examples from this area, from the same period, and no other known cases. Of course, two data points is still not enough to build a theory, but there might be more ema hiding in sanctuary roofs, or in local museums. It would be interesting to know how people at the time thought about this activity. Was it purely practical reuse of material, or did it have greater significance?