Jutsu beliefs, villages of unregistered people… Sites of history never mentioned in textbooks “Walking around the Forgotten Sites of Japanese History”.
There are many parts of the history of our ancestors that have not been told in the official history. Nonfiction writer and cameraman Takaaki Yagisawa, in search of these remnants, which would simply be forgotten if left unchecked, walked through sites from Hokkaido to Kyushu in his book, “Walking the Sites of Forgotten Japanese History” (Tatsumi Publishing), published on June 4.
Mr. Yagisawa tells his story.
The places I walked may be mentioned in a corner of a city or town history, but I think they are rarely seen anymore, or are places that people pass by without noticing. I have always wanted to walk in such places, and since I became a freelance photographer, I have compiled the information I have gathered over the past 15 years.
In the 19 locations visited by Mr. Yagisawa in this book, there is one case in which he met a “worshipper” himself, who inherited the art secretly handed down in a village deep in the mountains of Kochi. However, the places where he was able to hear even the slightest trace of the traditions of the time were still good, and there were even places where there were no traces left of those days. Still, Mr. Yagisawa says, “It is important to walk around the site.
If you look at the scenery, you can find some clues there. For example, in Chichibu, where there used to be a village where people lived without a register, there is nothing left. But there was the first drop of the headwaters of the Arakawa River, and it was a place where people could live. There is no proof that he definitely lived there.
However, it does say that they were in the vicinity, and I felt that people were able to live there as an objective fact. I could understand this because I walked the site, and I don’t think it would have been possible without it.
Mr. Yagisawa thus introduces several “sites” from the “forgotten history of Japan” that he visited one at a time.
A village where worshippers live in the “Izanagiryu,” a unique belief in witchcraft (Kami City, Kochi Prefecture)
It was 15 years ago that I learned of the existence of people called “Worshippers” or “Tayu” in the mountains of Kochi Prefecture, which is also home to the legend of the fallen Heike clan. (From “Walking the Forgotten Sites of Japanese History,” hereafter the same)
The Tayu, who presided over this belief, were involved in all aspects of the villagers’ daily lives, including prayers for the sick and village festivals. Sometimes, at the request of the villagers, he would even cast curses on them. Mr. Yagisawa went to Monobe Village in Kochi Prefecture (now Monobe-cho, Kami City, Kochi Prefecture), where he found a tayu still active today; a forest road had just been built there a month before, and he was able to meet the “last of the tayu” after visiting a place that looked just like it appeared in “Potsun to Ichikenka.
It was really the most mountainous place on the border of Kochi and Tokushima prefectures in Shikoku,” he said. The only road that existed had only recently been built, and until then it was only accessible by foot. It really was like an isolated island on land. Because it was such an isolated place, there were no doctors there. So, there was no choice but to rely on the indigenous beliefs, such as magic.
When I went to Nepal for a report a long time ago, I had a cough that wouldn’t stop for about a month, and I had to go to bed. The villagers told me that it was because I had been cursed by a witch, but one day, a man who looked like a prayer warrior came and wielded a sword to cast a spell. In the end, I drank the drops of water that came out of the tip of the sword’s blade, and my cough was cured. I don’t know if that really worked (laughs).
Nowadays, most people can go to the hospital, so there is no longer a need for it, but perhaps this kind of folk belief existed all over Japan. Perhaps some of the progression of folk beliefs led to new religions like Aum Shinrikyō, but I thought that Japan must have had the soil to accept such things in the first place.”
A “sanctuary” for those who have turned their backs on the state: The valley of the stateless (Chichibu City, Saitama Prefecture, etc.)
It was about five years ago that I came across a newspaper article about the stateless people of Japan. The article was stored in the database of Kobe University. The article was prewar and dated September 30, 1920, and appeared in the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun. That was the year the first national census was conducted in Japan. In the course of the survey, the existence of unregistered persons became public knowledge.
According to the article, there was a “no administration, no police” tribe at the foot of Mikuni Pass in Chichibu County, Saitama Prefecture, with 31 households and a population of over 210. One such tribe had 31 households and a population of over 210. Only a few of the residents were registered in Ueno Village in Gunma Prefecture, but many did not have family registers. The residents made a living by selling wooden chopsticks and geta (wooden clogs) to Gunma Prefecture on a one-day trip, and an old monk from somewhere conducted a school in the style of a temple school. The area was deep in the mountains, and in order to get there from Chichibu, one had to go around from Yamanashi Prefecture, and the prefecture abandoned the investigation because they could not spend days on a person whose whereabouts were unknown.
The Chichibu area is quite large,” he said. It is also spread out over Okutama in Tokyo, Yamanashi, and Nagano prefectures, so I think the administrative area is quite complicated. But it doesn’t matter to the people who live there. As I mentioned earlier, when you go there, there is water that is the source of the Arakawa River, and it was certainly a place where people could live.
In starting the modern nation in the Meiji era, the government started by making a firm family register and registering people. I felt a great sense of romance in the fact that there were people who had been left out of that process.
Nowadays, with the introduction of the my number card, the government is able to manage individuals on an individual basis. However, in the end, there are some people who cannot be confined within the gender framework of “male” and “female,” aren’t there? Therefore, I believe that it is not easy for the state to classify human beings by symbols. When I did this research, I felt that human beings are very vague things, and that labels should not be arbitrarily applied to them for someone else’s convenience.
Three villages wiped out by famine: Akiyamago (Sakae Village, Sakaemura, Sewerage County, Nagano Prefecture, and others)
The village I was heading to was once called Amazake Village. The name comes from the fact that, as the name implies, sake was made in the village, and the village exudes an indescribable smell of daily life. The village is now abandoned, but the reason for its demise is quite tragic in contrast to its emotional name. During the Edo period (1603-1867), famines occurred frequently, and during the Tempo famine, one of the three major famines of the Edo period, all the villagers starved to death.
It was not until the Meiji period (1868-1912) that rice cultivation began in Akiyamago. During the Edo period, the land was poor, with millet, millet, and other minor grains, and buckwheat noodles as staple foods. Amazake Village was wiped out during the Tenpo famine (1833-1839), but two villages, Daiakiyama Village and Yabitsu Village, were also wiped out during the Tenmei famine (1782-1888) a short time before that. In other areas of Akiyama-go, many people died as a result of the famine, but only a few were exterminated.
Akiyamago is a very large area, and there are still houses in the center of the village, where some materials are on display. The villages that were wiped out, such as Amazake Village and Dai-Akiyama Village, are a bit out of the way. Where the village disappeared, there is nothing. Only graves. The land was flattened, and there were only gravestones and landscapes where there must have been buildings.
But when I went to Akiyamago, I felt really scared. I felt that we are living in a very precarious balance. Even the food self-sufficiency rate is now around 40%. The population has grown far more than it was at that time.
In the chapter of this book titled “The Village Masumi Sugae Passed Through,” he writes about the Hirosaki Clan that starved to death 100,000 people in the same period. I think this kind of thing was happening all over the country. So it just so happened that we did not have to worry about food for the past few decades, but in fact, we are living in a terrible time. The title of the book is “The Forgotten History of Japan,” but we should not forget it.
What is passed down only among a few people in the region, and what is no longer even spoken of…. These “forgotten histories,” which cannot be found in textbooks or stories, are the histories that our predecessors have spun out. Knowing such history may be a clue to confirming one’s current location.
