Becoming a god by curse

Goryō shinkō^[1], the cult of enshrining the wronged dead as gods to pacify their curses, is a religious mechanism specific to Japan. Its roots reach back into early antiquity, but its installation as a state ritual is precisely dated: the twentieth day of the fifth month of Jōgan 5 (863), at a goryō-e — 'rite of the august spirits' — staged by the court at Shinsen-en in Heian-kyō. Six spirits were enshrined: Prince Sawara (posthumously titled Emperor Sudō), Prince Iyo, Fujiwara no Yoshiko, the Kansatsushi, Tachibana no Hayanari and Funya no Miyatamaro. The notion that epidemics and natural disasters were the work of the resentful dead had been current for some time; what changed in 863 was that the court turned it into a formal liturgy.

The word goryō carries a usefully double charge. Originally an honorific for 'august spirit', it became, from the Heian period onwards, the proper term for the vengeful dead, named with a deliberate excess of politeness. Less a dissolving of the boundary between angry ghost and god than the invention of a translation technique: leave the spirit as it is and it keeps cursing; promote it to godhood and it becomes amenable to ritual appeasement. That is the core logic of the cult.

For the ancient court, the goryō-e was also a useful piece of political machinery. The unease that follows the elimination of a rival, the need for an explanation of natural disaster, the appetite of the populace for ritual reassurance — all of these were processed by the single gesture of translating the dead into a god. The Japanese reaction to a vengeful ghost is, characteristically, not to deny or exorcise it but to accept it and elevate it. The dead are not exiled from society; they are reincorporated under a different status.

Sugawara no Michizane^[2] (845–903) was the Heian period's pre-eminent scholar-bureaucrat. Promoted by Emperor Uda to the rank of Minister of the Right, he stood at the apex of the literary-political class until, under Emperor Daigo, his rival Fujiwara no Tokihira slandered him at court (Engi 1 / 901) and had him demoted to gonsuke of Dazaifu in distant Kyūshū. The exile broke him; on the twenty-fifth day of the second month of Engi 3 (903) he died at Dazaifu, fifty-nine years old.

What followed in the capital was a sequence of misfortunes interpreted, one by one, as Michizane's curse. Fujiwara no Tokihira died in 909 at thirty-nine. In 923 Emperor Daigo's son Prince Yasuakira died suddenly, and the following year his own son Prince Yoshiyori followed. The decisive event was the Seiryōden lightning strike of Enchō 8 (930)^[8]: during a rainmaking ritual, lightning struck the central building of the imperial palace; the dainagon Fujiwara no Kiyotsura and the ushōben Taira no Mareyo were killed instantly, with many others injured. Emperor Daigo, who witnessed it, did not recover; he died three months later at forty-six. 'The curse of Michizane' became the court's official reading of events.

The court's response was rehabilitation. In 923 Michizane was posthumously promoted to junior second rank and Minister of the Right, and eventually to senior first rank and dajō-daijin — the highest civil office. In Tenryaku 1 (947) Kitano Tenmangū^[5] was founded in the north of the capital and Michizane was enshrined there as Tenman Daijizai Tenjin. This is the most complete instance of the deification-by-grievance mechanism: a vengeful spirit raised by state ritual, then redirected by the addition of a new persona — god of learning — that bled the poison out of the original curse altogether. The high-school students who hang prayer plaques at Tenmangū before exams today rarely know that their ritual sits on a thousand-year-old vengeful spirit.

Taira no Masakado^[3] (?–940), a mid-Heian warrior of the Kantō, descended from the imperial line through the Taira branch. What began as an inheritance dispute escalated into a war that engulfed eastern Japan. In Tengyō 2 (939) he attacked the provincial government offices, seized their seals and proclaimed himself shinnō — 'new emperor' — in open defiance of Kyoto. He took the entire Kantō, instituted his own bureaucracy and made the first sustained attempt at an independent eastern polity. The court was shaken; on the fourteenth day of the second month of Tengyō 3 (940) Fujiwara no Hidesato and Taira no Sadamori killed him in battle at Kitayama, in what is now Bandō, Ibaraki prefecture.

When Masakado's head was sent to Kyoto and exposed as a trophy, a powerful tradition began in the Kantō. The head was said to have shone with white light and flown east, in search of its body. It landed at Shibasaki, Toshima District, Musashi province — today Otemachi in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo — where a mound, the present Shōmonzuka^[9], was raised. To the people of the Kantō Masakado was not a traitor to the throne but a hero who had tried to defend the region as an independent state; his spirit was at once a source of curse and a tutelary deity. The episode is unusual for the extent to which the bond between a particular dead man and a particular piece of ground outweighed the preferences of the central government.

Late in the Kamakura period, in Enkei 2 (1309), Masakado was given joint enshrinement at Kanda Myōjin^[6] in present-day Chiyoda Ward. The shrine had been founded much earlier (Tenpyō 2 / 730) and dedicated to Ōnamuchi-no-mikoto as a local tutelary; the addition of Masakado made it the spiritual centre of the entire Kantō. Under the Tokugawa it was patronised as the chief shrine of Edo, and its festival, the Kanda Matsuri, sat alongside the Sannō and Fukagawa festivals as one of the three great festivals of the city. For seven hundred years Masakado was, in effect, a god of Tokyo's land.

The modern history of the Shōmonzuka^[9] shows the cult's continuing force. After the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the Ministry of Finance attempted to demolish the mound to build temporary offices; officials and workers, including the finance minister Hayami Seiji, died in unexplained succession until the demolition was abandoned and a memorial was raised in its place. Under the American occupation, a fresh attempt to clear the site was halted when a bulldozer overturned and killed its operator. That a small earthen mound of a few dozen square metres survives, today, in the middle of Otemachi's office canyons, next to the head office of Mitsui & Co., is the cumulative result of a thousand years of folklore bending both terrain and urban planning around itself.

Emperor Sutoku^[4] (1119–1164), seventy-fifth emperor of Japan, was placed on the throne at three years and seven months and ruled in name only under his father, the retired emperor Toba. The estrangement between father and son ended in Sutoku's forced abdication, aged twenty-three, in favour of a younger half-brother. In the seventh month of Hōgen 1 (1156), upon Toba's death, the question of the succession exploded into the Hōgen Disturbance; Sutoku, defeated by his other brother Emperor Go-Shirakawa, was exiled to Sanuki province, in present-day Kagawa. The exile of a man who had been emperor was unprecedented since Emperor Junnin four centuries earlier.

What Sutoku did in Sanuki became the heart of the later legend. According to the Hōgen Monogatari^[10], Sutoku spent three years copying out the five Mahāyāna sūtras — the Daihannya, Daijuku, Kegon, Nehan and Hokke. He sent the manuscripts to Kyoto, asking that they be dedicated at a temple; Go-Shirakawa refused, on the grounds that scriptures copied by a traitor would be defiled. Sutoku, in his fury, bit his tongue and wrote in his blood at the end of his sūtras: 'I shall become Japan's greatest demon-lord and turn emperors into commoners and commoners into emperors.' He stopped cutting his nails and his hair, became wild as a yaksha and, on the twenty-sixth day of the eighth month of Chōkan 2 (1164), died in Sanuki at the age of forty-six. He was buried at Shiramine, on the site of his exile.

The cult of Sutoku grew dramatically thirteen years after his death, in Jishō 1 (1177), when the capital was struck by three calamities in quick succession — the great protest of the Enryaku-ji monks, the great fire of Angen, and the Shishigatani conspiracy. People read these, and the contemporaneous misfortunes of his erstwhile ally Fujiwara no Yorinaga (who also became a vengeful spirit in tradition), as Sutoku's curse coming due. Within a generation the Taira had fallen (1185) and Minamoto no Yoritomo had founded the Kamakura shogunate (1192); the imperial line lost effective power. Contemporaries saw in this an almost literal fulfilment of Sutoku's oath. He returns again and again in the literature of the late medieval and early modern periods, reaching his literary apotheosis in Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu Monogatari (1776), in the story 'Shiramine'.

In Meiji 1 (1868), Shiramine Jingū^[7] was founded in Kyoto. Just before his own enthronement, Emperor Meiji dispatched envoys to Sanuki to bring Sutoku's spirit back to the capital. On the site of the former mansion of the Asukai family the shrine was established with Sutoku as principal deity — a national-level declaration that the seven-hundred-year cult was now to be considered closed. The timing is telling: a new imperial regime, seeking to anchor its own legitimacy, required public reconciliation with the most famous victim of the dynastic past. The deification-by-grievance machinery ran without interruption from antiquity until the founding of the modern state.

The decisive moment in which the fear of vengeful spirits crossed from private dread to state liturgy was the Shinsen-en goryō-e of the twentieth day of the fifth month of Jōgan 5 (863)^[1]. The court convoked the rite in Shinsen-en, the imperial pleasure garden of Heian-kyō (in what is now Nakagyō Ward, Kyoto), to enshrine six vengeful spirits — Prince Sawara (Sudō), Prince Iyo, Fujiwara no Yoshiko, the Kansatsushi, Tachibana no Hayanari and Funya no Miyatamaro — all victims of factional struggle, executed, driven to suicide or starved to death in exile.

The central figure was Prince Sawara (c. 750–785), full brother of Emperor Kanmu and crown prince in his own right. Implicated in the assassination of Fujiwara no Tanetsugu in Enryaku 4 (785), he was deposed and exiled to Awaji; he stopped eating and died ten days later. After his death, misfortunes accumulated around Emperor Kanmu, who in Enryaku 19 (800) gave Sawara the posthumous title Emperor Sudō and had him reburied at Yashima in Yamato (today's Nara). This was the first official act of goryō-ka, deification-by-grievance, and the seventy-eight years that lay between it and the 863 rite were the gestation of a complete state liturgy.

The order of service of the 863 rite is recorded in the Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku (compiled 901): recitation of the Lotus and Heart sūtras, presentation of music and dance, joint conduct by the Jingikan and the Onmyōryō. The result was a syncretic ceremony — Buddhism, Shintō and the yin-yang school running together — that would become the template for the Gion goryō-e (today's Gion Matsuri, traceable to 869) and the Kitano goryō-e of the later tenth century. The objective was to block the channel by which a grieved spirit could pour into the world as an agent of plague, by converting it instead into a god. The physical reality of a curse, met by the physical reality of a ritual: the ancient Japanese rationality at the foundation of this cult would continue to function for the next thousand years.

The conversion of vengeful spirits into gods rests on a feature of the older Japanese conception of divinity. In archaic Shintō, a kami is a force outside the categories of good and evil — sheer numinous power, two-faced by nature: pacified, a guardian; angered, a curse. Wayside gods, mountain gods, thunder gods were all venerated under that double aspect. The boundary between the angry ghost and the worshipped god is therefore not a wall but a slope, and traffic in both directions is possible.

The conversion is executed in three steps: (1) restoration of social standing by posthumous title or promotion, (2) the building of a shrine to fix the cult to a particular place, (3) regular festivals that maintain the relationship in motion. For Michizane: (1) promotion to senior first rank and dajō-daijin, (2) the founding of Kitano Tenmangū in 947, (3) the Kitano goryō-e of the fourth day of the eighth month each year. For Masakado: (1) Meiji-period grants of junior third rank, (2) joint enshrinement at Kanda Myōjin in 1309, (3) the biennial Kanda Matsuri in May. For Sutoku: (1) Meiji-era acts of consolation, (2) Shiramine Jingū in 1868, (3) the shrine's regular festival cycle. The same protocol, three times.

Why translate the dead into gods rather than dispose of them as ghosts? The folkloric reading developed by Orikuchi Shinobu and Yanagita Kunio rests on a single insight: to repudiate a dead person is to release their grievance into the world unbound. Denied and forgotten, the vengeful spirit becomes a wandering ghost who curses forever. Given a place in the social order as the object of ritual veneration, on the other hand, the grievance is repeatedly tempered by ceremony, and the force it represents becomes available, controllable, even useful. This is a strategy of considerable political-religious sophistication — not to bury the enemy but to welcome him in as a god — and the goryō tradition is, in this respect, almost without parallel in world religion.

The Meiji Restoration shifted the centre of gravity of the vengeful-spirit tradition. The founding of Shiramine Jingū in 1868 was not an isolated act but part of a broader project — the Shinto-Buddhist separation edicts, the establishment of State Shintō — under which the country's goryō shrines were tidied up and reordered. Historical figures who had been feared as vengeful spirits were absorbed into the state-Shintō frame and redefined as patriotic heroes: Michizane as god of learning, Masakado as guardian of the Kantō, Sutoku as a loyal soul of the imperial line. The vengeful face was pushed into shadow, the convenient face brought forward.

After the war, State Shintō was dismantled. The shrines of the three vengeful spirits sank, however, into ordinary local festival life and survived through secular functions: tourism, examination prayers, the cult of good marriages. The exam-success votive plaques at Kitano Tenmangū, the salaryman pilgrimages at Kanda Myōjin, the ball-game charms of Shiramine Jingū (a curiosity inherited from the kemari tradition of the Asukai family; football players visit before the World Cup, baseball players consign amulets before the season) — even contemporary Japanese with no notion of the cult's origins still walk through its machinery.

Modern urban kaidan and 'haunted spot' tourism are a further continuation of the same set of ideas. The Shōmonzuka^[9] in Otemachi remains a pilgrimage site for the urban-legend community, and every related incident is duly read as 'the curse of Masakado' — a folklore that goes on reproducing itself. The way Mitsui & Co. went out of its way to preserve the mound when redeveloping its headquarters in the post-war period has become a famous case: not even a global trading house can quite ignore a thousand-year tradition. Goryō shinkō is not a relic of the past; it persists, transposed, as a deep stratum of the religious landscape of modern Japan.

Kitano Tenmangū^[5] (Kamigyō Ward, Kyoto). Roughly thirty minutes by city bus 50 from Kyoto Station, or five minutes on foot from Kitano-Hakubaichō on the Randen line. The head shrine of some twelve thousand Tenmangū across the country. The monthly Tenjin-ichi fair on the twenty-fifth — Michizane's death-anniversary by the lunar calendar — fills the precincts with stalls of antiques, plants and food. Most visitors come as students seeking exam success, but the plum-blossom festival on the twenty-fifth of February is a direct survival of the original goryō cult.

Kanda Myōjin^[6] (Sotokanda, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo). Five minutes on foot from JR Ochanomizu Station (Hijiribashi exit) or from Suehirochō Station on the Tokyo Metro. The Kanda Matsuri, one of Edo's three great festivals, holds its main observance in mid-May of odd-numbered years; the procession (Saturday) and the homing of the portable shrines (Sunday) involve hundreds of mikoshi parading the precincts of the old Edo castle. Since the Heisei era the shrine's proximity to Akihabara has drawn pilgrimages from IT companies and the doujin-author, voice-actor and animation communities, who treat a millennium-old vengeful-spirit shrine as a contemporary subcultural sanctuary — a striking re-activation.

Shōmonzuka^[9] (1-2-1 Otemachi, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo). Direct from Exit C5 of Otemachi Station on the Tokyo Metro, next to the Mitsui & Co. headquarters. A small clearing in the corner of an office block: a torii, a stele, and a forest of small frog figurines (the pun is 'frog' / 'return home', petitions for the salaryman's safe commute). At lunchtime on a weekday, men in dark suits queue to pay their respects. The 2020 redevelopment of the surrounding blocks left the mound carefully in place and the new towers were designed around it: a rare worked example of modern urban planning yielding to ancient onryō.

Shiramine Jingū^[7] (Asukai-chō, Kamigyō Ward, Kyoto). City bus route 9 from Kyoto Station, three minutes on foot from the Horikawa-Imadegawa stop. Founded on the former site of the Asukai family mansion in Meiji 1 (1868). The principal deity is Emperor Sutoku, but Asukai family worship of Sei Daimyōjin, the deity of kemari, also survives; this is the source of the shrine's modern reputation for ball-game charms (Japanese national football team players visit before the World Cup; professional baseball players deposit amulets before the season). To see the most famous vengeful spirit of Japanese history venerated today as the patron of sport is the strangest possible measure of how thoroughly the goryō tradition has been domesticated. To follow the cult to its physical limit, complement the Kyoto visit with the tomb itself, the Shiramine no Misasagi at Sakaide in Kagawa prefecture, fifteen minutes on foot from JR Yasoba Station.