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Takashi Miura - Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan

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Takashi Miura Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan
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This volume examines a category of Japanese divinities that centered on the concept of world renewal (yonaoshi). In the latter half of the Tokugawa period (16031867), a number of entities, both natural and supernatural, came to be worshipped as gods of world renewal. These included disgruntled peasants who demanded their local governments repeal unfair taxation, government bureaucrats who implemented special fiscal measures to help the poor, and a giant subterranean catfish believed to cause earthquakes to punish the hoarding rich. In the modern period, yonaoshi gods took on more explicitly anti-authoritarian characteristics. During a major uprising in Saitama Prefecture in 1884, a yonaoshi god was invoked to deny the legitimacy of the Meiji regime, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new religion moto predicted an apocalyptic end of the world presided over by a messianic yonaoshi god.Using a variety of local documents to analyze the veneration of yonaoshi gods, Takashi Miura looks beyond the traditional modality of research focused on religious professionals, their institutions, and their texts to illuminate the complexity of a lived religion as practiced in communities. He also problematizes the association frequently drawn between the concept of yonaoshi and millenarianism, demonstrating that yonaoshi gods served as divine rectifiers of specific economic injustices and only later, in the modern period and within the context of new religions such as moto, were fully millenarian interpretations developed. The scope of world renewal, in other words, changed over time. Agents of World Renewal approaches Japanese religion through the new analytical lens of yonaoshi gods and highlights the necessity of looking beyond the boundary often posited between the early modern and modern periods when researching religious discourses and concepts.

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i
Agents of
World Renewal ii
iv
Copyright

2019 University of Hawaii Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miura, Takashi, author.

Title: Agents of world renewal: the rise of yonaoshi gods in Japan / Takashi Miura.

Description: Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019019302 | ISBN 9780824880378 (cloth; alk. paper), Amazon Kindle 9780824880446, EPUB 9780824880439, PDF 9780824880422

Subjects: LCSH: Gods, Japanese. | JapanReligious life and customs.

Classification: LCC BL2211.G6 M58 2019 | DDC 299.5/61211dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019302

Cover art: Yo wa Ansei tami no nigwai (National Diet Library)

University of Hawaii Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

v
Contents


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vii
Acknowledgments

i was able to write this book due to the many acts of kindness and generosity offered to me by teachers, colleagues, and friends. First and foremost, I would like to thank Jacqueline Stone, my advisor at Princeton University. She patiently listened to many of my inchoate ideas and encouraged me to think bigger. Her insightful guidance and steadfast support carried me through my doctoral studies. I will always strive to emulate her example in my own teaching career.

My gratitude also goes to Buzzy Teiser and Federico Marcon, both of whom served on my committee and offered numerous helpful suggestions on the project. I also benefited from working with other scholars at Princeton, particularly Jonathan Gold, Leora Batnitzky, Sheldon Garon, Steven Chung, and Keiko Ono. I would also like to thank my graduate advisors at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa, especially Helen Baroni, Michel Mohr, and Christine Yano.

I have been blessed with supportive colleagues and friends. Special thanks to Jolyon Thomas and April Hughes for helping me to settle in and navigate Princeton. I also learned immensely from my conversations with Bryan Lowe, Doug Gildow, Wei Wu, Kwi Jeong Lee, Tim Benedict, Jessica Zu, and Kyle Bond. Other friends from Princetontoo many to thank individuallyhelped me to expand my horizons and have given me many fond memories.

I have been a beneficiary of kind suggestions and guidance from Mark Rowe, Asuka Sango, and Levi McLaughlin. I am also grateful for thoughtful input from Janine Sawada and Barbara Ambros on early drafts of individual chapters. Furthermore, I am indebted to Ono Sho for hosting me at the University of Tokyos Historiographical Institute as a visiting researcher in 2013 and 2017 and Orion Klautau for providing me with opportunities to present my work to scholars in Japan.

Thanks are due to Stephanie Chun and Emma Ching at the University of Hawaii Press for guiding me through the publication process. I also viii thank the two anonymous reviewers for promptly reading my manuscript and offering suggestions for improvement. My research would not have been possible without the support of librarians and staff at various institutions, mainly Princeton University, the University of Arizona, the Historiographical Institute, and the National Diet Library. The International Research Center for Japanese Studies and Egawa Bunko kindly granted permissions to use their images to enhance this book. I would also like to acknowledge the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for providing financial support for my research.

My colleagues in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona provided me with a supportive and collegial environment in which to work on this book. My thinking on the subject of yonaoshi deepened as a result of numerous conversations with faculty in and outside of East Asian Studies and with my students, both graduate and undergraduate. The writing of this book was stimulated by Tucsons vibrant academic and local communities and blessed with lots of sunshine.

Finally, I would like to thank my family. My parents, Keizo and Miwa, supported my decision to pursue an academic career and encouraged me throughout the process of writing this book. My brothers, Naohito and Tomoyuki, are my closest friends and constant sources of inspiration. Thank you all for always being there for me and for believing in me.

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Agents of
World Renewal

x

Introduction

O n the twenty-fourth day of the third month of the fourth year of Tenmei (1784), a low-ranking samurai by the name of Sano Masakoto slashed Junior Elder Tanuma Okitomo in the shoulder in Edo Castle, resulting in the latters death a few days later. The untimely death of Tanuma Okitomo, the heir of the influential Elder Tanuma Okitsugu,

Masakotos apotheosis marked the beginning of the popularity of deities, deified humans, and other superhuman entities invested with the power to realize world renewal (yonaoshi). In this book, I argue that these yonaoshi gods (yonaoshigami) represented a new type of divinity that became prevalent in Japanese society during the period between the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. The prominence of yonaoshi gods spanned Japans early modern and modern periods and manifested in a wide-ranging variety of contexts. Some examples of yonaoshi gods from the Tokugawa period (16031867) include disgruntled peasants who demanded that their local governments repeal unfair taxation; a frugal bureaucrat who cut down administrative spending to reduce the financial burden on his constituents; and an earthquake-causing catfish seeking to resolve economic inequality by destroying the wealth of the hoarding rich. During the Meiji (18681912) and Taish (19121926) periods, major social developments, such as the Chichibu Incident of 1884 and the new religion moto, featured their own yonaoshi gods. As these examples show, individual yonaoshi gods appeared in different contexts and were not directly linked to one another. Moreover, the concept of world renewal itself carried different meanings over time. Yet, starting in the late eighteenth century, the emergence of superhuman agents endowed with a mission to renew the world constituted a recurring and pervasive pattern in Japanese society.

This book traces the rise of yonaoshi gods as a significant yet hitherto marginalized development in Japanese religion during the transitional phase between the early modern and modern periods. Although the theme of yonaoshi has occupied a central place in the historiography of nineteenth-century Japan, no previous study has focused on yonaoshi gods. This is partly because, as in the case of Masakoto, yonaoshi gods often arose spontaneously, without the supervision of religious professionals. To examine the emergence of these deities outside the purview of formal religious institutions, it is necessary to overcome the perennial tendency in the field of religious studies to give preference to research on organized religions, their representatives, and their texts. To this end, this study utilizes a variety of documents that are not explicitly religious in nature, such as government records, popular media materials, personal letters, diaries, and memoirs. Moreover, because yonaoshi gods appeared in various regions across the Japanese archipelago, this study makes extensive use of local historical records in order to contextualize yonaoshi gods within specific communities.

Furthermore, I argue that the initial rise of

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