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- Many Japanese festivals feature enormous, ornate wooden floats called
dashi. The dashi of the Chita peninsula in Aichi Prefecture are
famous for their elaborate wooden sculptures, which express classical Japanese and
Chinese themes (Fig. 1). The city of Handa boasts thirtyone dashi (Fig. 2 & fig. 3),
more than any other municipality in Japan. Chita peninsula dashi
festivals celebrate a putatively stable tradition whose preservation has been one
focus of recent municipal and prefectural government policy. Current depictions of
dashi festivals evoke the lost stability and cohesiveness of the medieval
village community. However, shifts in Edo Period (16001868) dashi
festival sponsorship, ritual process and iconography suggest contestation rather than
consensus. Rituals and sculptural themes often expressed multiple, ambiguous, or
contradictory meanings. Competing notions of origins and cultural legitimacy were contested in the performative and iconographic public sphere of dashi festivals.
2 Location of Handa City (adapted from Handa, 4) - Edo Period dashi festivals were almost always sponsored and controlled by wealthy merchants.
[ 1 ]
On the Chita Peninsula, local producers and shippers of sake, soy sauce and vinegar sponsored the numerous floats
that emerged in local festivals during the Edo Period. [ 2 ] Kamezaki district's
dashi festival was the first in the Chita area. Despite its late fifteenth
century samurai origins, by the Edo Period the Kamezaki festival was
sponsored entirely by merchants. [ 3 ]
3 1992 Handa Dashi Matsuri (from Handa Dashi Matsuri, 18) - The economic power of the merchant class belied their ascribed status as the lowest of the four hereditary social castes of Tokugawa Japan. The NeoConfucian moral philosophy espoused by the ruling samurai class valorized martial over commercial pursuits. [ 4 ] Samurai were forbidden to engage in trade or agriculture without relinquishing their hereditary status. [ 5 ] The ban on samurai commercial activity contributed greatly to their economic weakness. Samurai retainers received a fixed stipend paid in rice. At the mercy of fluctuations in rice prices and the superior business acumen of rice brokers, samurai fell deeper and deeper into debt to merchants. Despite periodic governmental decrees of loan forgiveness, the debts of individual samurai and domainal governments grew. Legitimating samurai social superiority proved increasingly difficult as the Tokugawa bakufu and domainal governments grappled ineffectively with their debts. Social tension between merchants and samurai intensified as the economic position of the latter status group declined.
- Faced with eroding economic status, the ruling samurai sought increasingly to formalize and maintain their status privileges through sumptuary legislation. The Tokugawa shogunate and domainal lords issued sumptuary, statusbased architectural regulations with increasing frequency as the economic disparity between the samurai and merchant classes widened after the midseventeenth century. [ 6 ] Such regulations of residential buildings decreed statusspecific materials, finishes, sizes of timbers, and even stylistic elements such as gate roofs. [ 7 ]
- Wealthy commoners circumvented regulations against the architectural
expression of their economic power by sponsoring the construction of local shrines
and festival floats. Conscious of the status symbolism of dashi, the
Tokugawa shogunate and domainal governments banned them on numerous
occasions. [ 8 ]
However, as representations of sacred and putatively
communal interests, dashi were shielded from strict enforcement of
sumptuary regulations. Edo Period Chitastyle dashi violated many specific
Tokugawa proscriptions of merchant architectural extravagance. William
Coaldrake's analysis of elite gate styles and status in Tokugawa Japan discusses "the karahafu, the ubiquitous element in the contemporary symbolism of
prestige; the curved tie beams and chamfered cornices, originally part of the architecture of Zen Buddhism and redolent with authority transcending the secular domain; and the iconography of karashishi,
dragons, and sages with their heroic and mythical connotations legitimizing by association the preeminence of the ruling class." [ 9 ] Handastyle dashi boasted karahafu roofs, carved beams and sculpture, as well as the use of expensive woods such as ebony and rosewood (Fig. 4 & fig. 5) The wooden wheels (hama, goma), and chassis (daiwa) of dashi required timbers of a dimension forbidden for all but shrine and temple architecture.
4 Chitastyle (new Handastyle) dashi. Front elevation (adapted from Dashi Choukoku no Waza II, 63) 
5 Chitastyle (new Handastyle) dashi. Side elevation (adapted from Dashi Choukoku no Waza II, 63) - The ritual process of dashi festivals also problematized
samurai social ascendancy. The apparent bow to the status order that we
might read from these carefully ordered processions takes on a different tinge when
we recognize the status inversion shown in actual ritual protocol. Handa City's
Okkawa Group has preserved a 1755 processional scroll which illustrates the
hierarchical social order of religious ritual performers, village and group headmen
(shoya and kumigashira) and poorer commoners (Fig. 6 & fig. 7).
Although they are commoners, the shoya and kumigashira wear
swords whose use was restricted to the samurai class. The buying of such
status privileges by wealthy commoners increased rapidly during the latter Edo
Period, diluting the affective power of regulated class distinctions.
6 Detail of Okkawa scroll, 1755. Anon. (from Sairei, dashi, fuuryuu, plt.36) 
7 Detail of Okkawa scroll, 1755. Anon. image: Sairei, dashi, fuuryuu, plt. 36) - The Edo Period also saw the rise of themes popular with merchant patrons of painting and prints. The most common of these themes was the shichifukujin, or the seven gods of good fortune, a mix of Chinese, Buddhist and Shinto deities commonly represented riding in the takarabune, or treasure ship. [ 10 ] This theme is represented in the sculptures of at least seven of the thirtyone surviving dashi in Handa City.
- Ebisu and daikoku were the most popular of the
shichifukujin among merchants, and appear in several Handa dashi
sculptures (fig. 8). Both gods are considered the primary deities of good fortune,
while ebisu is also the patron saint of fishermen. Although the association
of these two abundantly wellfed and apparently somewhat inebriated gods with
material wealth and fortune may seem an obvious and not particularly elevated link
to the greed of a class in pursuit of profit, these sculptures referred iconographically
to an emerging discourse that sought to legitimate the role of merchants in society.
8 Ebisu sculpture. Okkawa District Nishiyama group Kaguraguruma dashi (from Handa dashi matsuri, 15) - The merchant writer, educator and propagandist Ishida Baigan (16851744), attempted to establish chonindou, or the way of the merchant, to rival the samurai ideology of bushidou that legitimated warrior social dominance. The new merchant ideology, codified into a system called Shingaku, or heartlearning, and expounded by numerous scholars in academies and publications throughout the latter half of the Edo period, portrayed the pursuit of wealth not as parasitic and immoral, as the Tokugawa government's ethical and social code deemed it, but rather as essential to the wellbeing of the nation and operating upon morally worthy principles of honesty and efficiency. [ 11 ] Ebisu, as the god of honest dealing, reflects the ideal of commercial honesty as a key part of the ethical code of the merchant. The rat and sack of grain that Daikoku holds represent the need for hard work and vigilance to preserve and increase wealth, again speaking to merchant claims to a domain of expertise essential to the health of the nation.
- However, dashi festivals were never exclusively an expression of elite merchant agendas. As the Edo Period progressed, the interests of local merchant elites became increasingly intertwined with those of the ruling samurai. Merchant attempts to monopolize contestation of the official Tokugawa social vision masked the existence of other interests. Older traditions did as much to challenge official Tokugawa ideology as did emerging forces and groups.
- Japan's dynamic, autonomous seafaring culture clashed with the Tokugawa ideal of a completely regulated, immobile and transparent society. Fearful of regional warlord naval power, the bakufu forbade the construction of large oceangoing vessels in 1609. [ 12 ] In 1633 Shogun Iemitsu decreed the death penalty for any Japanese national either leaving Japan or returning from abroad. [ 13 ] During the 1630's, foreign trade was officially confined to tightlyregulated Chinese and Dutch merchants at the city of Nagasaki. [ 14 ]
- Although such concrete measures ostensibly attacked the foreign policy troubles caused by vigorous Japanese piracy, there was an ideological component to these efforts. Because traditional sea culture was seen as dangerously resistant to control, it was represented by the bakufu as undisciplined and less morally worthy than agriculture. The spendthrift ways of seafaring communities were noted disapprovingly in Tokugawa edicts on economy. [ 15 ] Professor Amino Yoshihiko has argued convincingly that the historic diversity, mobility and autonomy of traditional sea culture were primary targets of bakufu efforts at political and ideological control. [ 16 ] An important part of the Tokugawa ideological project was thus the valorization of the stable, immobile, unchanging agrarian producer, and the denigration of the historic role of the sea and waterways in Japanese history.
- The Chita peninsula's entrepreneurial,
cosmopolitan sea culture contrasted sharply with the feudal government's promotion of a regimented, closed agrarian society. The Chita region had been renowned for fish, salt and pottery production for centuries before the Edo Period. Many festive rituals celebrated traditional links to the sea. In the Kamezaki festival, dashi were drawn through the town, onto the beach, and then into the sea, reuniting these temporary carriers of the gods with their sacred source (fig. 9). In a region with no significant history of agriculture, the many rituals connected to the use of ropes and the art of navigation outnumber the more wellknown agricultural rituals. The sea, rather than agriculture, was celebrated as the origin of culture and civilization.
9 Famous Places of Owari Domain (Owari Meisho Zue), Odagiri Shunkou(18101880), midnineteenth century (from Kawata, Hisashi, Edo meisho zue o yomu [Tokyo: Tokyodo Shuppan, 1990], 347) - Referred to as ships (fune) in many areas, some dashi are
modeled on early modern Japanese and Dutch sailing vessels. The town of
Minamichita features a funayama, or dashi in the shape of a ship (fig. 10). The unique kajibou, or long lateral beams used to steer Chita
peninsula dashi, are one structural vestige of nautical origins.
"Kajibou" translates literally as "rudder rod" or tiller and its operation is similar to that of a tiller on an early modern sailing vessel. Moreover, the titular and functional hierarchy of dashi crews closely resembles the crew
structure of contemporary ships.
10 Minami Chita City Hangatsu District funayama (Ship dashi)
(adapted from Minami Chitashi shi [History of Minami Chita City], 364) - Ideological opposition to the mobility and autonomy implied by traditional sea culture was only a part of the bakufu objection to dashi festivals. The festival's enormous expenditure of resources and interruption of productive work flew in the face of the NeoConfucian tenets of thrift and industry espoused by the authorities. In contrast to an official world of status distinctions and frugality, for the mass of participants the world of the festival was one of liminality, renewal and consumption.
- As elite merchant concerns with social unrest began to parallel those of the central government, they joined the samurai in looking askance at the status inversion and carnivalesque atmosphere of dashi festivals. This congruence of perspectives reflected unacknowledged, yet concrete political ties between the two elites. The village headmen (shoya) appointed by the bakufu to act as intermediary between villages and the bakufu intendant (daikan), who collected taxes, displaced a traditional village authority structure. The young men's associations (wakamonogumi) recreated the communal councils common in most villages before the Tokugawa codification of the village social hierarchy. As organizers of dashi festivals, these groups increasingly challenged the hereditary authority of Tokugawaappointed officials such as the shoya. [ 17 ] The increasingly broadbased funding of dashi festivals was brought about by the vigorous and often frankly coercive efforts of these groups to solicit funds from local small merchants and village residents. As their role in fundraising increased, the wakamonogumi demanded more control over decisions regarding commissioned artworks and the determination of festival days, details heretofore reserved for the judgment of wealthy sponsors.
- Petitioned on numerous occasions by village headmen, the Tokugawa regime and domainal lords recognized the political threat of the wakamonogumi. With the rise of the market economy and the increasing regulation and taxation of village products by domainal governments, the increasing activism of wakamonogumi was "an assertion of rural autonomy in the face of an increasingly intrusive central government and economy." [ 18 ] In 1826, through a decree banning all associations, the bakufu also banned wakamonogumi in the Kanto area around the Edo capital. In 1780 Owari domain banned these organizations on the grounds that they interfered with the formal hierarchy of the village, impinging on the authority of headmen and other officials recognized by the central government. Rescripts issued by Owari domain in 1803, 1821 and 1842 also banned the wakamonogumi from making such decisions as the declaration of village holidays. [ 19 ]
- Official disapproval of dashi festivals sprang as much from the spectacle of crowds of unruly peasants as it did from ideological contestation. Festivals were frighteningly evocative of popular peasant uprisings, which increased throughout the Edo Period. The late Edo Period "ee ja nai ka" (translated roughly as "what the hell," or "anything goes") movements were spontaneous festivals proclaiming the end of the existing world and the coming of a new world of free association among social equals. The increase in violence against the property of wealthy commoners was a significant feature of these festive protests. Appeals to traditional justice decried the corruption of local notables, appealing to the benevolence of samurai rulers. [ 20 ]
- Because the festival was explicitly recognized in juridical practice as a liminal realm where formally illegal acts were settled by the mediation of concerned private parties, the wakamonogumi sometimes used festivals to exact revenge on unpopular wealthy merchants. Although dashi festival prohibitions during times of economic crisis were promulgated as economizing measures, they were largely motivated by concerns with the preservation of order. In the late Edo Period, a very thin line separated festivity from temporary anarchy.
- The festive realm temporarily evoked the communitarian social order envisioned in the work of Edo Period nativist (kokugaku) scholars. As the Tokugawa intellectual historian Harry Harootunian has shown, kokugaku offered a radical, if ultimately apolitical vision of the social order. [ 21 ] In search of linguistic and cultural origins, Tokugawa period nativism envisioned an "originary language" unmediated by the influence of Chinese phonetics and ideograms. Nativists contrasted the dynamism of "living" Japanese words with the "dead", uninflected Chinese language. Japanese verb endings and particles were interpreted as more dynamic and adaptable than the Chinese exclusive reliance on ideograms. In contrast to the samurai rulers' use of NeoConfucian philosophy to bolster their claims to political legitimacy, nativists examined such works as the Manyoushuu, the eighthcentury collection of Japanese poems, for traces of "purely Japanese" linguistic and cultural origins.
- This resistance to the Sinocentric Tokugawa order was expressed
plastically in the aesthetic of dashi sculpture. Early works mimicked the
polychromy and Chineseinspired themes of Nikko Toshogu and other Tokugawa
sacred architecture. [ 22 ] In 1826 the Okkawa group hired the
renowned
sculptor and temple carpenter (miya daiku) Tatekawa Washirou Tomimasa
to sculpt a pair of rikijin (gods of strength) for their festival float. Inspired
by a similar unlacquered sculpture on the new gate of Toyokawa Inari Grand
Shrine, this piece ushered in a new age of unfinished wood sculpture (shirokibori) (fig. 11). [ 23 ] Subsequent Chita area dashi sculptures featured the shirokibori style. Tatekawa school
shirokibori exploited the wood grain of unfinished Japanese elm
(keyaki) to achieve a dynamic, flowing aesthetic. Just as the ancient words
of the Manyoushuu were seen as unsullied by Chinese phonetics
and meanings, so shirokibori sculpture was seen as free from the alien
Chinese colors and aesthetic typical of contemporary Buddhist sculpture. The
adoption of the shirokibori style was one early expression of a questioning
of the preeminence of Chinese cultural models in favor of a "truly Japanese" source
of artistic and cultural origins. Although many sculptures of this period used the
traditional Chinese motifs found in Tokugawa shrine and temple architecture, the
unfinished surface and exploitation of the natural wood grain bespoke a desire to
throw off the veneer of continental culture in favor of a more "authentic" and
"natural" Japanese aesthetic. The threedimensionality,
highly realistic detail, and sense of movement achieved by exploiting the natural wood grain mirrored the linguistic search for dynamic origins free of foreign influence.
11 Rikijin (God of Strength). Tatekawa Washirou Tomimasa, 1826. Handa City Kamezaki District Nakagiri Group (from Tatekawa no dashi to choukoku, 42) - Sculptural themes implicitly questioned the Sinocentric orientation of official government sponsored art, at once challenging the cultural and political ideology of the ruling warrior class. Art sponsored by the bakufu and domainal lords abounded in portrayals of Confucian sages and classical Chinese landscape themes. Critics of the regime's legitimacy to rule increasingly advocated a return to putatively Japanese motifs. From the seventeenth century onward, Japanese mythological figures such as Izanami and Izanagi, the male and female founders of Japan, appear more frequently in Japanese art. [ 24 ] The "kunizukuri," or "making of the country" theme, represented in several Handa dashi sculptures, illustrates the creation myth of Japan. Handa dashi sculpture show several other "authentically Japanese" themes, such as the sungoddess Amaterasu0mikami. The appearance of such sculptural themes at this time was novel, and carried the underlying message that the Tokugawa government was subject to alien influences and out of touch with the true Japanese spirit.
- Significantly, many of the leading advocates of such originary ideas were lowerranking samurai rather than merchants. The questioning of the Tokugawa order had extended far beyond the merchant elite by the late Edo Period. As a microcosm of the increasingly fragmented and diverse social world of Tokugawa Japan, dashi festivals expressed shifting interests and ideologies rather than stable, communally shared values.
- Modern critics of commercialized nostalgia denounce traditions reconstructed with government planning and funding. This quest for authenticity ignores the long history of a search for a "purely Japanese" cultural identity unmediated by foreign influence. The current commodification of culture in the search for authenticity is another chapter in the reinvention of a mythic, stable past. In the postmodern world of consumer culture, dashi festivals are one of many arenas for the contestation of Japanese identity.
- As the anthropologist Jennifer Robertson has pointed out, the ambiguous authenticity and blatant boosterism of traditional events in a sense reinforces their unifying symbolic power as representations of a common Japanese cultural heritage. [ 25 ] A collective memory of dashi that glosses over their mobilization in past ideological battles lends them an apolitical, unifying appeal.
- Notions of stable, unified traditions have come under increasing scrutiny
in history, anthropology, folklore and vernacular landscape studies. [ 26 ] This
questioning is especially relevant to the recent idealization of the past by an
overwhelmingly urban Japanese populace seeking its rural roots in "old towns"
boasting "authentic" traditions such as folk festivals, or matsuri.
Celebrating putatively shared and unchanging notions of tradition, these events in
fact illustrate the constant reinvention of a mythic, stable past to ideologically
legitimate agendas of the present. This static definition of tradition masks the
tensions inherent in an evolving social and political order, as well as the multiplicity
of meanings and motivations behind any communal display of solidarity.
——Sean McPherson
Department of Architecture
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
"Dashi Matsuri: Festival as Ritual and Iconographic Public Sphere" Iconomania: studies in visual culture (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/arthist/icono/McPherson/dashi.htm) 1998.
seanmac@uclink.berkeley.edu
Notes to Text
1. The most famous dashi festival, the Gion matsuri of Kyoto, was sponsored by "neighborhood organizations and not the central government" even during the Muromachi Period. See Kazuo Nishi, What is Japanese Architecture?, trans. H. Mack Horton (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1985), 63).[back]2. Lacking plentiful water and arable land, the Chita peninsula was historically noted for pottery, fishing and salt production. During the Edo Period, jyuuzou (sake, soy sauce and vinegar) production blossomed, making the area a wealthy protocapitalist center of production and shipping.Handa, ed. Handa kokyou dokuhon henshuu iinkai (Handa City: Handa-shi kyoiku iinkai), 88101.[back]
3. The Kamezaki festival was initiated in the late fifteenth century by a group of samurai families who pulled a decorated freight wagon through their hamlet. Hiroshi Tatematsu et al., Handashi shi: sairei minzoku hen (History of Handa City: A compilation of folk festivals) (Aichi Prefecture, 1985) 10. [back]
4. The definitive analysis of the ideology of the ruling samurai remains Masao Maruyama's Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Nihon seiji shisoushi kenkyuu), trans. Mikiso Hane (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1974). [back]
5. The most significant exception to this rule was Satsuma Domain, where goushi, or "rustic warriors," were allowed to retain warrior status even though they were in essence rural managers of tenant farmers. Stephen Vlastos, "Opposition Movements in Early Meiji, 18681885," in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 395. [back]
6. Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U.C. Press, 1993), 245247. William H. Coaldrake, "Edo Architecture and Tokugawa Law," Monumenta Nipponica XXXVI, no. 3 (1981): 1981. [back]
7. Coaldrake, "Edo Architecture," 271284 gives numerous examples of regulations issued by the bakufu in the capital city of Edo (Tokyo). [back]
8. Tatematsu et al., Handashi shi, 8, 9. Kouji Mizuno, Tatekawa no dashi to choukoku (Tatekawa dashi and sculpture) (nagoya: izuryou, 1996): 126. [back]
9. William Coaldrake, "Edo Architecture and Tokugawa Law." Monumenta Nipponica XXXVI, no. 3 (1981): 235-284.[back]
10. Robert Treat Paine and Alexander Soper, The Art and Architecture of Japan, 3rd ed. (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1981), 219. [back]
11. See Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Preindustrial Japan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); Jennifer Ellen Robertson, "Rooting the Pine: Shingaku Methods of Organization," Monumenta Nipponica 34, no. 3 (1979): 31132, and Robertson, "The Shingaku Woman: Straight from the Heart," in Recreating Japanese Women, 16001945, ed. G.L. Bernstein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Totman, 359360. [back]
15. Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 370371. [back]
16. Yoshihiko Amino, Nihon no rekishi o yominaosu (Reinterpreting Japanese history) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1991). [back]
17. Marius B. Jansen, "Japan in the Early Nineteenth Century," in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. V (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 80. [back]
19. Hiroshi Tatematsu et al., Handashi shi, 8, 9. [back]
20. See Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds. Japanese Thought in The Tokugawa Period 16001868: Methods and Metaphors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); George M. Wilson, Patriots and Redeemers in Japan: Motives in the Meiji Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).[back]
21. H. D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). [back]
22. Takatoki Iga, Chita no dashi matsuri (Dashi festivals of Chita) (Nagoya: Soumusha, 1994), 3233. [back]
23. Tatematsu et al., Handashi shi, 342.[back]
24. Paine and Soper, 213. [back]
25. Robertson, "Hegemonic Nostalgia, Tourism, and NationMaking in Japan," Japanese Civilization in the Modern World IX: Tourism (Senri Ethnological Studies no. 38. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, 1995). [back]
26. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Irwin Scheiner, "The Japanese Village: Imagined, Real, Contested," in Mirror of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming); Dell Upton, "The Tradition of Change," Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review (TDSR) V, no. 1 (1993). [back]
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Iconomania: studies in
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The Symposium Issue:
Spaces of Transformation
Dashi Matsuri: Festival as Ritual and Iconographic Public Sphere
—Sean McPherson
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1 1992 Narawa District Festival,Nansha dashi of Minami Group (from Handa Dashi Matsuri, 34) |