The Sengaku-ji temple appears in the guide books and is well signposted, so it deserved a visit. I’m not much of a tourist, but it’s close to where I live and it seemed a good plan. Going there, I learned about an anecdote that has become a legend. Sometimes it amazes me that, from such small, petty and banal facts, a whole foundational story is built. This is what I am talking about today. Enjoy.
Edited in English by Kathelijne Bonne.
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The story of the rōnin
The origin of many quarrels between people are often simple misunderstandings. Things we expect from others that don’t happen.
The story of the 47 rōnin warriors is a good example. I’m not going to reproduce it in detail because that’s what Wikipedia and many serious people who write history books and guidebooks are for. I will only say, by way of summary, that the legend[1] says that 47 rōnin[2] avenged an offense to their lord who, in turn had felt offended for not having been reciprocated in the way he expected, after having done some favors to another lord, who would be the offender. The offended one ended up committing suicide as per protocol for having shown his anger and determination.
And this is where the avengers come in: some samurai who were left adrift without their master and who planned the death of the offender. The revenge was to cut off his head. After this act, they turned themselves in to the authorities and committed suicide.
A rōnin is a samurai who no longer has a master, a kind of gaucho who wanders the countryside, commits petty crimes, lives on charity and is dispossessed of his former status. Some go in search of a new master; others work the fields. The rōnin symbolize loyalty and the search for the roots of ancient Japan.
It is reminiscent of the story of Martín Fierro as well. The idea of the outsider who wants to return to his roots.
These ideas creep me out a little bit.
Children with guns
For some centuries, this story, which some call heroic, was circulating, increasing in superlatives and unprovable feats. But that‘s not all. I reduce the issue to something simpler: it is about a group of men who were very offended with each other and left a trail of blood in their wake.
the way I see it, these gaffes among adult people are not much different from the tantrums of small children who have grown up and are still having tantrums (Putin strikes me as a kid who took great offense). The difference with children is that these people have guns on them and no parents to mediate. And we already know the consequences of a society in which part of the population is armed. Add to this a total absence of state (in the modern sense) in a context in which the shōgun (or feudal lord) had great power.
Gauchos and samurai
And this brings me to the following. In the magnificent Las aventuras de la China Iron by María Cabezón Cámara, the author speculated on the story of la china who is left alone when Martín Fierro is recruited by the militia to defend the Argentine frontier from the Indians. In the novel, la china, far from sitting and waiting for Martín Fierro’s return, abandons everything and leaves with an English woman who is trying to find her husband. During that time, the women have many adventures of all kinds and there isn’t a single moment la china wants to return to Martín Fierro. Cabezón Camara shows us that shadowy side that has always been the life of women, those who are not founding the myths of countries.
I can’t help thinking of the women in those stories. Where were they, while the rōnin were busy fighting and warring. Who dressed those men, who made them food, who took care of the children they conceived. The women’s story is always shrouded in silence.
In A.B Mitford’s account, the rōnin arrive at the house of Kira, the offender, whom they want to kill, but he hides while the women and children of the house weep disconsolately. We know nothing about them because the chronicle does not make it clear, but no one is surprised that it is the lord who escapes by hiding in a nearby house while the women of the house are exposed to the fury of the rōnin. He is finally found and beheaded. His head is carried on a pole to the Sengaku-ji temple where I am now.
The temple today
I continue my visit. It is interesting. The day is extremely hot. My hat is not enough. We are greeted by a young man at the entrance of the cemetery, holding a mini fan in one of his hands. He sells incense and explains how to put it on the graves. My kids get excited because anything that involves lighting something with fire excites them. And we place a stick on each grave. We are supposed to be honoring the avengers. Isn’t that wonderful.
Tombstones and cemeteries in Japan never smell bad. Nothing smells bad in Tokyo.
Incense in Japanese culture is very important [3]. We continue to pay our respects to the people who are in the history books. I don’t quite understand why we have to keep putting value on those guys. I say this with honesty and some astonishment.
Maybe there should be a reset of heroes every so often. Because the concept itself is mutating. I do like legends, but I am uncomfortable with the moral story behind them. At least, we could go on nuancing or giving a more modern look to the heroes of the past. I’m not saying that anyone should be cancelled. Maybe just ask ourselves some questions.
I propose perhaps to widen the view or to look into that past from another angle. In that sense, I think it would be interesting to know who was that class that supported the other. I’m not just talking about hierarchies, like in Japan, but about knowing what place women occupied in the pyramid of society.
It’s not that I’m obsessed with women.
I am always interested in knowing who supports whom, and of course, in this inquiry we cannot ignore more than half of the population of a country in which women were not subjects of rights.
I keep walking by the tombstones. I like how they carve the calligraphy on the stone. The strokes of a language I don’t know. The Japanese boy in the background starts sweeping. We are in the same space. And yet, for me, that column of beautiful characters are only drawings to me. For him, they are a world. To me just beautiful scribbles. And it seems to me the clearest example of the different layers of existence.
The boy sees one thing. I see another. We look differently. We perceive differently. Our worlds are distant and yet we are next to each other.
That idea impresses me.
I want to know who those women were who supported the rōnin, the ones who stayed in the house fearing the worst. No one knows anything about them. The female voices are anonymous or carried away by the wind. Maybe a bit of them is in incense that burns.
Like ghosts that linger.
Women in Japan
Many believe that feminism does not exist in Japan. At least from the outside we live with that prejudice. Now that I am a little closer, I can see that there are people thinking in another world. They are there, in books of small circulation. Copies that have not been translated. In out-of-print documents. In old libraries that nobody consults. In the murmurs of the families that tell stories across generations. An example is the interesting book by Yamakawa Kikue that tells the story of a samurai family by collecting the anecdotes of his mother. In it, we can have a semblance of the daily aspects of a woman’s life, the school, the division of roles, the organization of the domestic economy and other aspects of which we usually have no idea when we think of the samurai culture. The author, one of the first feminists and socialists in Japan, had to bear the brunt of censorship, but even so, her book Women of the Mito domain was able to see the light of day in a difficult time for nonconforming voices.
In the West we always talk about shining a light or making visible. Perhaps because brightness is part of Western culture. The «I». The lights. Tanizaki already spoke to us wisely about this. In Japan, the land of shadow, everything is whispers, even women’s movements. But there have been women who have tried to document and give voice to others, also today, in daily life.
I walk along the tombs. They are beautiful. My children perform the ritual.
My thoughts wander to the women.
[1] A detailed account of the events can be read in A.B. Mitford’s Tales of old Japan. It is striking that even the author of this book views this act of revenge with admiration.
[2] The story was made into a movie in Japan and the United States starring Keanu Reeves in 2013. The movie turned out to be a box office flop.
[3] There is an excellent essay on incense and its history within Japanese rituals that can be read in Ghostly Japan by Lafcadio Hearn.
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