Shiramine Imperial Tombしらみねりょう

This edition follows in close detail—discerning the boundary between history and the legend that runs from the Hōgen Monogatari onward—how a single deposed emperor turned into the Great Tengu and Great Demon-Bond called the greatest in Japanese history. First, the history must be grasped. Sutoku's misfortune lay in the political exclusion of being shunned by the cloistered emperor Toba as an "uncle-child" and being made to abdicate without ever holding the power of cloistered rule. After the early death of Emperor Konoe, that his younger brother Go-Shirakawa, rather than his own son Prince Shigehito, was set up became the trigger for the Hōgen Rebellion (1156). On the defeated Sutoku's side, Minamoto no Tameyoshi and Taira no Tadamasa were put to public execution for the first time in roughly four hundred years, and Sutoku himself was exiled to Sanuki. Up to here it is history grounded in records. The uncanny is born beyond that, in the stratum of legend. Both the curse said to have been written in blood—"I shall become the Great Demon-Bond"—after biting off his tongue, and the figure of him turning into a tengu with nails and hair grown long, are stories transmitted not by contemporary records but by the Kamakura-period Hōgen Monogatari. Yet this legend spread with great persuasive force, and the great fires, forceful appeals, and upheavals that struck the capital from the Angen years onward—indeed, the Jishō-Juei War leading to the fall of the Taira—came to be read as Sutoku's curse. The events themselves are history; the interpretation that ascribes them to Sutoku's rancor is goryō belief—the two must be seen as sharply distinct. What fixed Sutoku's tengu image was literature. "Unkei Miraiki," book twenty-seven of the Taiheiki, depicts Sutoku as a demon-king ruling the throngs of tengu and demon-bonds, and in the early-modern era "Shiramine" in Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu Monogatari gave vivid form to Sutoku's vengeful spirit confronting Saigyō—not as a long-nosed tengu but as a golden kite. The image of Sutoku told of as "the foremost Great Tengu of Japan" and "the greatest vengeful spirit in Japanese history" stands upon this accumulation of literature. What deserves attention is that his pacification reached even into the modern era. In the first year of Meiji (1868), the Meiji government welcomed Sutoku's divine spirit, resting in Sanuki, to the capital and enshrined it at Shiramine Jingū. That at the outset of a new reign they still feared the curse of a deposed emperor seven hundred years past tells how deep-rooted the dread of Sutoku's vengeful spirit was. A poet who left a famous verse in the Hyakunin Isshu, and a great demon-king who curses the throne—this very gulf is what pushed Retired Emperor Sutoku to the apex of goryō belief.