Issue 277 of Shintō Shūkyō reported on the annual meeting of the academic society that publishes the journal, and contained several interesting articles. The first I want to write about is “Mikoshi Parades in the Bōsō Peninsula”, by Kobayashi Hiromi. The Bōsō peninsula is part of Chiba Prefecture, which is immediately to the east of Tokyo and part of the Kantō metropolis. While that metropolis is no longer officially the largest city in the world (the UN changed its definitions), it is still number 3, but the Bōsō peninsula stretches away to the south, and is suffering from rural depopulation.
In this article, Dr Kobayashi discusses several matsuri that involve mikoshi parades, and I do not have space to go into the details. Thus, this post will be my summary of her general conclusions, and while I will do my best not to misrepresent her, it will, at the very least, be less nuanced than the original.
Dr Kobayashi observed a number of common features between the matsuri. The first, and the reason for the title of this post, is that the mikoshi are carried down to the sea. “Hama” means “beach”, and “ori” means “go down” (it’s a different “ori” from the one in “origami”), so the word “hamaori (浜降り)” means “going down to the beach”, and is the standard term for this sort of matsuri. It is widespread in Chiba, and also found further north, in Fukushima and Miyagi Prefectures, as Dr Kobayashi notes.
The second and third features concerned elements of the stories and practices: snakes and stones. Kami often take the form of snakes, both in myth and in more recent stories attached to matsuri, and in some cases that has developed into associating them with (oriental) dragons. These kami are normally associated with water, including both rivers and rain, and, as a result, with fertility — particularly the harvest.
Similarly, sacred rocks are common in Shinto, but in these cases they often seem to be stones — things small enough to pick up in your hand. For example, the origin stories of several of the jinja talk of someone finding a shining round stone, which turns out to house the spirit of the kami. Similarly, at one of the matsuri there are two wooden boxes full of stones, several dozen in each box. One box is full of roughly cylindrical stones, and the other of round stones. It is said that, if a couple who want children embrace these stones on the day of the festival, they will get a child, and so the matsuri is very popular.
And that leads into the general feature that Dr Kobayashi proposes. She thinks that these matsuri are all, in origin at least, fertility matsuri, and thus prayers for a good harvest. The associated myths often suggest that the kami are going to meet their spouses, or travelling to the places where they, or their children, were born. However, she suggests that the fertility aspects may have been played down after the Meiji Revolution, when the government was trying to make Shinto as boring as possible respectable.
Dr Kobayashi’s interpretation is a bit controversial, because the orthodox interpretation of hamaori in folklore or ethnographic studies is that it is a form of misogi (禊)— purification in water. She suspects that this is because priests say that purification is one of the most important things in Shinto, and that early scholars in this area (she mentions Yanagita Kunio (柳田國男) by name) wanted to remove anything sexual from Shinto practice.
I doubt that everyone who participates in these matsuri interprets them in the same way, but that is not the important thing in Shinto — the important thing is to participate.