The Head of a Living God’s House: How Suwa Yorishige Actually Lived
Introduction
In The Elusive Samurai, Suwa Yorishige is the man who shelters the young Hōjō Tokiyuki. The real Yorishige had two faces. He was head of the family that produced a living god, the Ōhōri of Suwa Upper Shrine. He was also a vassal of the Kamakura shogunate, and more than that, a private retainer (miuchibito) of the Hōjō main line. This article follows both lives: the god’s house and the warrior’s.
Almost nothing survives about Yorishige’s personal daily life. What follows is built from the roles and annual rituals that the head of the Ōhōri family carried.
The Ōhōri, a living god
The Ōhōri of Suwa Upper Shrine was not simply the highest-ranking priest. He was the body of the god Suwa Myōjin (Takeminakata) himself, a living deity. A young boy became Ōhōri when the Moriya family, the shrine’s chief priests, called down the ancient spirit Mishaguchi into him. ()
A living god lived under strict taboos. He could not leave the land of Suwa, and he could not be defiled by blood.
✦ Satoe’s Take The Ōhōri was Takeminakata. So the Ōhōri had to keep, in his own body, the vow Takeminakata made when he gave up the land: “I will never leave this place.” That, I believe, is why the Ōhōri was forbidden to leave Suwa.
His year turned with the seasons and their rituals.
Winter: the Mimuro ritual
All winter long, a pit dwelling called the mimuro was dug into the ground at the Upper Shrine’s Maemiya. The Ōhōri and the priests led by the Moriya shut themselves inside. The ritual began with straw serpents being placed in the pit. According to tradition, the priests joined Mishaguchi, the male serpent, with Sosō-jin, the female serpent, and brought that power down into the Ōhōri.
Entering the dark earth around the winter solstice and emerging in spring, like a snake leaving hibernation, the ritual is understood as one of death and rebirth, restoring the land’s strength after winter.
I should add that the details come largely from scholars’ reconstructions of fragmentary records kept by the Moriya family.
Spring: the Ontōsai festival
When the Mimuro ritual ended, the Ontōsai was held: a festival where the god and people eat together.
The tō in Ontōsai does not mean the deer heads. It means the tōyaku, the rotating duty of hosting the festival. Locals still call those who take on that duty otōgo-sama.
The stage was the Jikkenrō, a long open hall at the Maemiya. The Ōhōri sat at the far end on a raised platform. The priests sat in rows in front of him, and the otōgo-sama in front of them.
Deer heads were piled up, said to number seventy-five. The finest was called the mimisake-jika, the “split-ear deer,” with a notch in its ear. It was said to have been taken by the god’s spear and was treated as special; it is counted among the Seven Wonders of the Upper Shrine. Boar and serow heads were there too, and birds and beasts were heaped into tall offering mounds.
The Jinchōkan Moriya Historical Museum recreates the offerings, based on sketches by the Edo-period traveler Sugae Masumi. I photographed them:
White heron, copper pheasant, crucian carp, yellowtail, rice cakes, torreya nuts, mountain yam, arame seaweed. Then grilled boar skin, deer meat dressed with brains, and deer and rabbit simmered and seasoned. Think of it as braised venison and braised rabbit, the way we would think of braised pork today.
What was offered to the god, people ate too. In an age when Buddhism condemned killing, Suwa openly kept a festival where people ate meat alongside their god.
Near the shrine, I had a boxed lunch with something like boar chashu in it. Since it was a meal shared with the god, I ate every bite. To be honest, though, I wasn’t thrilled about the boar.
The Ontōsai is still held every April 15 at the Maemiya, with deer heads (stuffed, these days) lined up in the Jikkenrō.
Summer: the Misayama festival
In summer came the Misayama festival, held for five days from the 26th day of the seventh lunar month. Hunts were held on the slopes of the Yatsugatake mountains, and mounted archery and other martial arts were performed. In the Kamakura period, warriors from many provinces gathered there to compete and to renew their bonds.
In 1186, Minamoto no Yoritomo is said to have recognized the Ōhōri as a living god. Why did Yoritomo value Suwa so much? A guide in Suwa told me this: Kyoto already had a living god, the emperor. The east needed one too, and it had to be one that fit the culture and spirit of warriors, not one surrounded by court nobles. A living god with festivals of hunting and martial skill was exactly that.
In the Kamakura period, the duty of hosting these Upper Shrine festivals fell to the warriors of Shinano. Bound together under Suwa Myōjin, they were called the Suwa Jintō. Locals told me it is read Jintō, not Shintō, from Jin (神), the original clan name of the Suwa family. I once met someone whose surname, written 神, was read Jin.
✦ Satoe’s Take I think the hosting duty was not shouldered by a single warrior alone, but taken in turn by the warrior together with the villagers of his land. The cost and labor of the festival could not have been covered without the whole village.
A private retainer of the Hōjō
The Suwa became private retainers of the Hōjō main line under the regent Hōjō Yasutoki, in the time of Suwa Morishige (Buddhist name Renbutsu). Alongside men such as Bitō Kagetsuna and Taira no Morituna, Morishige served close to Yasutoki in Kamakura.
There is no record of a single year when the change happened; it is understood to have been gradual. The family later served as head of the Hōjō household administration.
Leaving the god’s office: Yorishige becomes Shōun
A living god lived under strict taboos. He could not leave the land of Suwa, and he could not be defiled by blood. The Ōhōri was Takeminakata himself; since Takeminakata had sworn never to leave this place, the Ōhōri had to keep that promise too.
A fighting warrior could not keep the Ōhōri’s taboos. He had to leave Suwa and shed blood. So Yorishige passed the office of Ōhōri to his descendants and took Buddhist vows under the name Shōun. His signature mark (kaō) reads “Suwa Shōun.”
Why would the head of a living god’s house take a Buddhist name? To a modern reader it looks contradictory. But for over a thousand years, Japan practiced shinbutsu-shūgō, the fusion of Shintō gods and Buddhism. The kami were understood as local manifestations of Buddhist deities. Suwa Upper Shrine’s god was identified with the bodhisattva Fugen (Samantabhadra), and the shrine had its own Buddhist temple, complete with a five-story pagoda. Even the kajikimen, the shrine’s license to eat meat, justified hunting in Buddhist terms.
Warriors routinely took Buddhist vows and names in mid-life while remaining active. Sasaki Dōyo, who appears in the manga, is known by his Buddhist name too.
✦ Satoe’s Take
In winter, he shut himself in the earth to receive the god. In spring, he ate meat with the god. In summer, he hunted with warriors. Yorishige’s life as head of the god’s house, running its festivals, could not be separated from his life as a Kamakura warrior serving the Hōjō.
A god of martial prowess who permitted meat and killing: Suwa was truly the god of the Kamakura shogunate.
Suwa Yorishige’s “Prophecy”: What Did He See Coming?
Why can the manga’s Yorishige see the future?
In The Elusive Samurai, Yorishige can see the future. A guide in Suwa explained it this way: leaders of that era had to read the weather for rice farming, and read outside threats and the state of society too. That, he thought, became the manga’s clairvoyance.
A ritual that reads the year’s harvest and the state of the world from the cracks of Omiwatari, the ice ridge on frozen Lake Suwa, still continues today. That makes the guide’s view easy to believe.
Shizuku at Yorishige’s side
The guide also suggested that Shizuku, the girl in the manga, may be modeled on Mishaguchi or on the Moriya family.
✦ Satoe’s Take Jōmon-era faith is thought to have been animism: worship of the spirits living in great stones and trees. Mishaguchi is said to be a god who descends into stones and trees. That is why it can hear the voices of the spirits dwelling there and speak with them. I think that is why Shizuku can talk with spirits and sacred beasts. Since it was the Moriya and their Mishaguchi rites that made the Ōhōri a living god, it makes deep sense that this mysterious girl beside Yorishige carries that role.
✦ Satoe’s Take: the future Yorishige saw
Hearing the guide say “the east needed a living god too,” I thought further. The imperial line had split into two branches, the Jimyōin and Daikakuji lines, and the Kamakura shogunate became involved in deciding who would be enthroned. Whether it wanted to weaken Kyoto or was reluctantly drawn in by both sides is debated. Either way, for the shogunate, Suwa was precious: a living god of the east, standing in for the emperor in Kyoto.
But believing it could manage the emperors, the shogunate created a monster. Emperor Go-Daigo was meant to be only a one-generation “placeholder” under the agreement that the two lines would alternate. His wish to put his own son on the throne could only be fulfilled by overthrowing the shogunate.
The shogunate fell, the wars of the Northern and Southern Courts dragged on, and Japan slid into the Warring States period. I believe the root of that long chaos was the split in the imperial line. With two courts, warriors could side with whichever suited them. In that era, the attitude that betrayal was fine took hold, and it led to the age of gekokujō, the low overthrowing the high. Its symbol was basara, the flamboyant style that laughed at authority. One basara lord even shot arrows at a retired emperor’s ox carriage. Seen this way, perhaps the shogunate really was reluctantly drawn in.
Perhaps because I live in the east, I feel that the basara values of men like Sasaki Dōyo could never sit with the values of the Kamakura-fu and the Kantō Kanrei, who governed the east after the Kamakura shogunate. Just as the manga depicts.
If the Kamakura shogunate fell, Suwa’s faith, and Suwa itself, would decline. I believe Yorishige saw that future. That is the manga’s “prophecy.”
That is why Yorishige, and his son too, left the god’s office and went to the battlefield.
In the manga, Yorishige worries that his grandson, the new Ōhōri, has no divine power. That looks different to me now. I used to laugh at the ever-shining, ever-laughing Yorishige. I feel a little sorry about that.
The Nakasendai Rebellion
In 1335, Yorishige raised Tokiyuki, the orphaned son of Hōjō Takatoki, and rose in revolt. This was the Nakasendai Rebellion. Tokiyuki’s army defeated Ashikaga Tadayoshi and retook Kamakura.
What Yorishige saw at Hōkoku-ji
In the manga, Yorishige, holding Kamakura, visits Hōkoku-ji, a temple associated with Takauji’s grandfather, Ashikaga Ietoki.
The Ashikaga house descends from Yoshiyasu, grandson of Minamoto no Yoshiie, known as Hachiman Tarō. The family had a legend: Yoshiie left a written testament saying he would be reborn in his seventh-generation descendant and take the realm. Ietoki was that seventh generation, but he could not. So he gave his own life, praying that the realm be taken within three generations. The third generation was Takauji.
The Ashikaga line
Minamoto no Yoshiie (Hachiman Tarō)
→ Yoshikuni
→ Yoshiyasu (founder of the Ashikaga)
→ Yoshikane
→ Yoshiuji
→ Yasuuji
→ Yoriuji
→ Ietoki (seventh generation from Yoshiie)
→ Sadauji
→ Takauji (third generation counting from Ietoki)
This story comes from the Nantaiheiki, written by Imagawa Ryōshun in the Muromachi period, who says he saw the testament himself. Scholars disagree on whether it really existed.
✦ Satoe’s Take A grandfather who traded his life for his descendants’ rule, and Takauji, who carried that wish. I think Yorishige sensed in it an almost ominous power. This was an enemy he could not beat. That was Yorishige’s final “prophecy.”
The last plan: the faceless dead
Kamakura was held for only about twenty days. Takauji’s army came down from Kyoto and broke them, and Yorishige, with his son Tokitsugu and others, killed himself at Shōchōju-in (the Ōmidō) in Kamakura.
According to the Taiheiki, the faces of all who died had been skinned, so no one could tell whose bodies they were. No one could tell whether Tokiyuki was among them. Tokiyuki survived.
✦ Satoe’s Take No one can skin his own face. I believe that after Yorishige and the others died, the Suwa men who remained skinned their faces, following his orders.
At the Ontōsai, grilled boar skin was a delicacy offered to the god. For the people of Suwa, who lived by the hunt, skinning was a familiar skill. I think Yorishige made this last plan once he knew they had lost. Skin the faces, and no one can tell who died. Tokiyuki could be thought dead, and he would gain time to escape. Yorishige’s “prophecy,” to the very end, was aimed at keeping Tokiyuki alive.
The prophecy came true: Suwa afterward
Meanwhile, Suwa Enchū, of the same family, served Ashikaga Takauji. Under the Muromachi shogunate he compiled the Suwa Daimyōjin Ekotoba, recording how the dragon god of Suwa protected the nation.
Suwa’s path afterward was not smooth. With the Kenmu Restoration, Suwa’s authority, so closely tied to the Hōjō, collapsed.
In the Warring States period, Takeda Shingen, who ruled Suwa, took a Suwa daughter as his consort and around 1565 wrote out a plan to revive the shrine’s lapsed festivals. But the Takeda fell in 1582, and the Upper Shrine’s main precinct burned in Oda Nobunaga’s campaign. By the late sixteenth century, the Ōhōri had been moved out of the Maemiya.
The Meiji era dealt the final blow. Under the 1868 order separating Shintō and Buddhism, the Upper Shrine’s pagoda was torn down. In 1871, the office of Ōhōri itself was abolished. The rite of bringing a god down into a boy and making him a living god ended there.
I think I understand now why Yorishige staked everything on restoring Kamakura. Standing with Kamakura meant protecting Suwa’s god and its rites.
Sources
- Suwa Daimyōjin Ekotoba (Suwa Enchū, 1356)
- Taiheiki
- Nantaiheiki (Imagawa Ryōshun)
- Suwa Onfurei no Kosho
- Suzuki Yumi, Nakasendai no Ran (Chūkō Shinsho)
- Exhibits and materials at the Jinchōkan Moriya Historical Museum