Masks of Shikoku

During my Shikoku Pilgrimage I actually visited far more shrines than I did temples. One of the things I was hoping to see at the shrines were masks but I was disappointed that compared to shrines in my area or in Kyushu for example there were actually very few masks. These first ones I posted before in the post on Ichibacho Hachimangu, and they remain the strangest looking masks Ive seen in Japan.

On Day 4 at a shrine in Tokushima City I found this Sarutahiko mask.

After my typhoon adventure in the mountains of Tokushima I was invited into a shrine matsuri near temple 22 Byodoji. One of the village men modelled one of the small Sarutahiko masks they had.

On the next day I reached the Tokushima coast at Yuki and found this pair of Oni at a shrine there.

2 weeks later after having walked all the way through Kochi I came across this fine pair of Tengu masks.

Another Blue Hanya Mask

Just shipped off a couple of new masks today. This is the fourth Blue Hanya I've sold and am quite pleased as it is an original design of mine.

Kijo. Demon Woman Mask

There are several kagura dances that have women who become demons, and the Kijo mask is one used in the transformation.

Momijigari (shown above), Kifune, and Kurozuka, are three such dances that feature variations on the mask.

There should be a few more weeks of wintery weather so I should be able to get soem more masks finished :)

A new red hanya mask

I just finished another mask. A fairly standard hanya in the Iwami style. Hopefully this winter I can replenish my stock of masks as there is little to do in the garden, the firewood is all chopped, and the drier air speed up the process.

It is, of course, for sale. My other masks are here

Benkei mask

I have finally got round to finishing some new masks. This one is of Benkei, the archetypal sohei (warrior monk) and famed sidekick of Yoshitsune. The dance he appears in is Tsuzuki Dannoura, which is based on a story in the Heike Monogatari. Popular in kabuki, it is an uncommon dance in the Iwami kagura repertoire, and it has been quite a few years since I have seen it performed.

Benkei is always depicted wearing a cowl and this signifies his status as a sohei.

More posts on Benkei can be found here

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More of my masks can be found here.

A new red hanya mask

In the months of December and January there is almost nothing to do in the garden, and with more than enough firewood for this winter I have had enough "free" time to finally get round to finishing some masks.

Red hanya masks exist in other parts of the country, but I have never seen one in an Iwami Kagura dance.

There was a program on NHK a few days ago that included an interview with a master maskmaker from Hamada, and onbe thing he said was that if a mask was meant to be scary, then make it scary. That's what I have tried to do here....

Hanya Masks of Kunisaki

I did manage to find a few example of Hanya masks at the shrines on the Kunisaki Peninsular in Kyushu. Male demons were far more common though.

I have written earlier about hanya masks and what little is known about their meaning.
That, and some earlier posts with my hanya masks are here

I was fortunate to quite by chance meet up with a mask maker while there. He carved his masks in the traditional way and the standard hanya was one of his mainstays.

Tengu masks of Kunisaki

The oldest type of Tengu had a face that was bird-like, with a beak. Over time this became a long nose, and was probably incorporating elements of Sarutahiko, so long-nosed, red faced masks are sometimes called tengu, sometimes Sarutahiko.

The Tengu became associated with yamabushi, the ascetic monks of Shugendo. If the mask is wearing a small black cap. then I would call it a Tengu. Without a cap it might be a tengu, it might be Sarutahiko.

All of these masks were in shrines in the Kunisaki Peninsular in northern Kyushu.

The Sarutahiko mask will often be found paired with a round-faced female mask and its phallic/fertility association is clearer. The female is Uzume, Sarutahiko's wife.

More tengu masks, including some of mine, can be found here

Akaoni (red demon) masks of Kunisaki

Since I started to make masks myself I have become interested in searching out examples of older, wooden masks.

Shrines are a good place as many of them have old masks on display.

The red demon is often paired with the white demon.

All of these masks were at shrines on the Kunisaki peninsular in Oita Prefecture, northern Kyushu.

You can see a couple of my red demon masks here.

Soja Shrine

Part of the fascination for me in visiting shrines around Japan is to discover the differences and varieties. Architecture, layout, styles of shimenawa and statuary all vary by region, and the first thing I noticed about the larger shrines in southern Okayama is that they all have covered entranceways.

Soja shrine in Soja City gave its name to the town. "Soja" roughly translated means "all the kami shrines", and when the shrine was founded towards the end of the Heian Period the town changed its name from Hachiba to Soja.

Enshrined here are 324 kami!!!! Apparently the local bigwig found it rather tiresome to have to travel around and visit all the shrines in his jurisdiction every year so he gathered them all together in one place, hence the name Soja Shrine.

The two main kami enshrined here are Onamuchi, which is one of names Okuninushi goes by, and one of his wives, Suserihime, a daughter of Susano.

This area of Okayama, formerly the province of Bitchu, still continues a tradition of kagura, so in front of the main shrine were a lot of fine, wooden masks. The mask in the middle with the snot pouring from his nose is apparently Inasehagi!

A very partial list of some of the other 324 kami enshrined here is

Tenjin
Inari
Numata Sha
Ebisu
Gion Sha (Susano and family)
Ikegami
Kinoyama
Okami
Itsukushima
Kotohira (Konpira)
Various Aragami

The entrance to the shrine is right next to the Soja Local History Museum, not far from Soja Station. Soja is a good place to start or end a trip on the Kibi Bike Path.

Soja Local History Museum

Soja is a small town at the western edge of the Kibi Plain in southern Okayama. The local history museum is housed in the only remaining Meiji Period western-style building left in the town.

Like virtually every other local history museum in Japan they have an exhibit of clothing made from rice straw.

The bulk of the exhibits however are rather unusual and focus on the local industry, travelling salesmen of medicines.......

Anyone interested in Meiji or Taisho era graphic design would be pleased. These were door-to-door salesmen selling what we might call first aid kits.

They also had a few nice wooden masks.

Before we left the curator gave us some free gifts...... paper balloons "kami fusen". These were the free gifts that the salesmen carried to give away to kids.

He also gave us a detailed map of the area around the Kibi Bike Path that was in English and far more detailed than the map given us by the bike rental shop.

Kuro Oni. Black Ogre/Demon

It's been a very long time since I finished a new mask.

Garden, firewood, and home maintenance seem to have taken more of my time than usual, but I am hoping to get working on my masks again soon as all this winters firewood is already ready.

I have about 20 masks in various stages of construction, but I just finished this one.

Like all my masks they are in the Iwami kagura style, but being a barbarian I tend to experiment a little.

It is of course for sale.

My other finished masks can be found here

A Walk to Suga

The weather during May remained unseasonably cool, so I talk advantage and went on another exploratory walk. I started in Nogi, now little more than a suburb of Matsue. A cookie-cutter town of convenience stores, pachinko parlors, and drab, utilitarian buildings.

My route was to roughly follow Route 24 up the Inbe River and over into the watershed of the Hi River around Suga.

After about 30 minutes I was in the foothills on narrow lanes with mostly older, more traditional houses. The person in this house is obviously really into bonsai!

As usual I stopped in at all the shrines along the way.

In the village of Noshira I found this that looks like a shrine, but is in fact a "kyo", translated as "church". Its a branch of Izumo Yashirokyo, a religion started by the then head priest of Izumo Taisha in the late 19th Century when the state basically told priests to stop preaching or dealing with "religious" matters. If they wanted to deal with religious issues they should found their own churches. The state had appropriated the Torii symbol, so only "shinto" shrines could have a torii, so many of the shinto-based Kyo simply use a simple gate with one crosspiece.

Also in Noshira I found an interesting shrine with a huge mask of Uzume or Otafuku. As Uzume is one of the kami enshrined here it is most likely her.

And then, paydirt!!!!! I found 2 examples of something I search for and hope to find on my backcountry explorations, a pair of Phalli!

I chatted for a while with a lady visiting the shrine, but she professed to not know anything about them, which may be true, but its more likely that she didn't want to talk about them with a foreigner.

I have an extensive collection of photos from small fertility shrines I've visited, but I've hesitated to post any as about half the visitors to this blog are from a certain North American country wherein many citizens react strangely to such topics. They either get offended and indignant, or they react like giggling Elementary schoolgirls.

Anyway, to have found these two really made my day and my steps had more spring to them.....

Route 24 is a fairly busy, 2 -lane road, that has been straightened a lot and bypasses many smaller settlements. I chose to walk the old sections of road that snake along the river. Its a longer walk, but there is almost no traffic, often the things to be discovered are in the small villages, and I'm more likely to meet friendly people. Sure enough I soon came upon a small unmarked shrine to Kojin with the rope serpent wrapped around the base of a tree. It looked like nobody had visited the shrine in a few years.

There were a lot of snakes of the non-rope variety out and about. This one was a bit over a meter in length. No idea what species it was, though if it was a 4-lined Rat snake I wouldnt be surprised.