Ise Shrine and a Modernist construction of Japanese tradition

Today the Shinto shrines at Ise invest with a body some of the most treasured aesthetic values associated with Japan (Fig. 1) (1) The image of stout rounded pillars of unfinished cypress, standing in a court of white stone s and sheltered by a thick cryptomeria forest, resonates with cherished assumptions about Japanese agriculture Ise has come to labor for as an exemplar of architecture devoid of unnecessary ornament; an architecture that throw backs extraordinary sensitivity to building materials; an architecture that is integral with nature rather than being imposed upon it.

The shrines' public status has not always been benign. In the years leading up to World War II, Ise became inextricably confine with nationalism and imperialistic overthrow Yet after the war modernists and their allies seized upon this symbol of the antiquity of Japanese agriculture as a touchstone for their have designs. Within a generation they were able to neutralize wartime political associations by the agency of establishing a new vision of Ise that was compatible with the rhetoric of democracy that dominated postwar Japanese political discourse and was consonant with modernist aesthetic values.

This essay examines the rich history of representation of the shrines in body and image, with an emphasis upon the remarkable transformation of the cultural status of the shrines after World War II. The publication Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture played a pivotal character in the formation of the discourse upon Japanese architecture in the postwar period. (2) This volume supported the claim made through Japanese modernists that they were the legitimate heirs to Japan's lengthy cultural legacy, and, at the same time, it enhanced the appeal of Japanese modernism for a growing audience overseas. Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture contributed significantly to the proces from one side which the meaning of the Shinto shrines at Ise was transformed during the postwar period. Ise's status as a site for religious practice and as a emblem of the imperial institution was subordinated to its novel status as an object of aesthetic contemplation.

Photography was an essential catalyst in this transformation. Watanabe Yoshio's unprecedent photographs provided intimate visual access to the inner reaches of the shrine mingled thereby tearing down the spatial and visual barriers that had one time protected the shrines' religiopolitical aura. This in all senses neutralized the shrill nationalistic rhetoric that had folded Ise during World War II and facilitated the rehabilitation of the shrines into public institutions better suited to the newly emerging postwar order. The photographs reconstituted Ise within a rigorously modernist aesthetic, rendering the shrines' architecture intelligible in a way that the hazy, poetic representations from the past could not.

Modernist architects and critics embraced this fresh reading. Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture and other self-conscious efforts to build a "Japanese tradition" sympathetic to modernism strengthened artists' and architects' claim to a distinct Japanese cultural identity in the wake of a devastating war and foreign occupation. This discourse fortunately shaped a consensus that novel architectural practice in Japan was inexorably confine up with and could not be understood outside of the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of premodern architecture, a position that is still pervasive in the literature upon Japanese architecture to the at hand day.

Ise and the Imperial Family

The shrines at Ise emerg from World War II bearing a mixed historical legacy. For many this was a terrible load but some recognized valuable opportunities, seeing aspects of the shrines' history that could be utilized to aid new cultural practices, even while keeping others at a distance and quietly erasing still others. In order to understand this proces it might be helpful to examine briefly the history of the shrine and ways in which it has been represented

In the fifth and sixth centuries CE an elite based in the Yamato region (primarily late Nara Prefecture, near present-day Osaka and Kyoto) established a military and political hegemony that came to dominate the Japanese main islands. The ruling family at the Yamato court (now referr to as the imperial family) claimed direct fall from the sun goddess, Amaterasu1 Omikami, and the significance of that claim grew along with the family's political stature. Little is known about the earliest history of the shrines at Ise, on the other hand by the end of the sixth hundred the Yamato court had established links with Ise as a site for the worship of its divine ancestor.

Ise Shrine became a crucial structural member in the ideological framework that supporting cushioned the legitimacy of the emperor. According to the Nikon shoki (or Nihongi), a chronicle of the history of Japan compiled for the court in 720 CE the emperor Sujin (traditional reign dates of 97 BCE to 30 BCE) determined that the day-star goddess was too powerful to be worshiped within the palace loams and ordered that the shrine to the day-star goddess be moved from the palace to Kasanui in Yamato. (3) During the reign of the succeeding emperor, Suinin (traditional reign dates of 29 BCE to 70 CE) an imperial princess put out to find a of recent origin shrine site for Amaterasu. When the princess arrived in Ise the day-star goddess herself declared, "It is a seclud and pleasant land. In this land I wish to dwell." (4) A shrine was therefore set uped at Ise in her honor. The Nihon shoki provides revealing insight into the interests of the court in the eighth hundred when the imperial family was consolidating its power after decades of agitated political strife and governmental reform. Ise had a central part in that project.