At home in Japan, part 2: A sense of place

The whole extended Yoshimatsu family. 

My second homestay was three nights in Arida, Wakayama prefecture, where my hosts Yoshimatsu Toshitake and his family lived a life that seemed almost untouched by all the flagrant Westernization I’d been seeing.  They seemed to live in a classic Japanese lifestyle, in what is called an ‘ie’ (ee-yeh) household, in which several generations or branches of the family live within earshot of each other.  Three houses separated by just a few feet house Yoshimatsu and his wife, who are in their sixties; his parents who are in their late eighties; their older son and daughter-in-law who are in their thirties; and their seven-year-old grandson Kazuki.  

The tatami room in which I stayed at Yoshimatsu's house.

Yoshimatsu’s house is built in the traditional Japanese style.  Outside there is a lot of wood and curved tile roofs.  Inside there are many tatami rooms and long hallways and space under the house and under the roof to create breezes that cool the house down.  I slept in a beautiful tatami room with intricate wood carvings above the sliding doors, and the next room contained the family Buddhist altar and Shinto shrine, as well photos of ancestors going back three generations. (I was told that this usually goes to the house of the eldest son when his parents die, hence possibly the reason there was no altar room in the Momosawa house.) There are three separate rooms to cover the functions of one American bathroom:  toilet room (with separate urinal and tiny sinks for handwashing); bath room (i.e. bath and shower); and another room with a typical bathroom sink and mirror as well as a washing machine. And then in various places are deployed different squads of slippers, the ranking of which I never mastered.

Clearly, Yoshimatsu and his family had lived here a long time.  A little field trip that Yoshimatsu took me on made clear how deep his roots were in this area.

First, we went to his Buddhist temple, a short walk up the hill, where the monk’s wife (that’s right, Japanese monks are not celibate, thanks to Honen, as I later found out, the founder of Pure Land Buddhism) served me tea and a sweet (something just about everyone I met in Japan in a non-commercial setting did).  This made me feel a little better about the excursion, which Yoshimatsu, in his imperfect yet enthusiastic English, had prefaced with “I’m going to show you my grave!”  I had imagined a dug-out rectangle in the earth, or at the very least a blank headstone waiting to be inscribed.  But of course, it was the multi-generational stone memorial to the same three generations of his family whose photos hung near the altar in his home, which he then proceeded to wash and adorn with flowers. 

As he made what struck me as a perfunctory gesture of prayer (probably for my benefit), I thought of an article I had read about whether the Japanese were religious.  Yoshimatsu, as many Japanese do, said he wasn’t really religious, not really a Buddhist. But according to the article, what’s important is not so much what Japanese people say; it’s what they do that counts.

Yoshimatsu prays to the kami.                           

The next day, he drove me up to his local Shinto shrine, a steep walk up a hill that he and hundreds of others make every New Year’s.  And then on the way home, almost as an afterthought, he took me to a little shrine by the side of a creek.  To me it looked Shinto, but it held an image of Jiso, a ubiquitous roundish stone figure who is seen as a protector of the souls of aborted or stillborn fetuses and other lost souls.  Our guide in Kyoto called Jiso a bodhisattva, but I can’t help thinking it’s from a native tradition that’s older than Buddhism.  The story that Yoshimatsu told is that when Honen (mentioned above) was a child, he was walking with his nurse who, frightened by a wild animal, jumped into the creek.  Yoshimatsu’s family and a few others personally maintain this shrine and hold a yearly festival on this spot.  And then something the Kyoto guide said made sense:  the Japanese erect a Jiso not at the grave of the deceased, but at the site of the trauma.  It’s the place that the soul unexpectedly left this world that matters.

The Jiso shrine that Yoshimatsu tends.

Whether Jiso is a bodhisattva or not, this sense of place is very Shinto.  In

Shintoism, good luck, bad luck, success or tragedy are connected to a particular place either because the kami are there or because they’re absent.

The noren in the entry to Yoshimatsu's house.

Maybe Yoshimatsu is not really religious, but he certainly has a Buddhist respect for the dead and a Shinto sense of the sacredness of place.