Tamagushi
Encyclopedia
is a form of Shinto
offering made from a sakaki
-tree branch decorated with shide
strips of washi
paper, silk, or cotton. At Japanese wedding
s, funerals, miyamairi
and other ceremonies at Shinto shrines, tamagushi are ritually presented to the kami
(spirits or gods) by parishioners or kannushi
priests.
word tamagushi is usually written with the kanji
tama 玉 "jade; gem; jewel; precious; ball; bead" and kushi 串 "string together; skewer; spit; stick", or sometimes written 玉ぐし with hiragana
since the official Tōyō kanji
do not include 串.
The earliest recorded transcription of tamagushi is 玉籤, using kuji 籤 "bamboo slip; (divination) lot; written oracle; raffle; lottery" instead of kushi. The (ca. 720 CE) Nihon Shoki
"Chronicles of Japan", which repeatedly mentions a 500-branched masakaki 真榊 "true sakaki" tree (tr. Aston 1896:43, 47, 121), is the locus classicus for tamagushi 玉籤. This mytho-history records a legend that when the sun-goddess Amaterasu
got angry with her brother Susano'o and closed the door on the "Rock-cave of Heaven", the gods decorated a giant sakaki tree in order to lure the sun out of the darkness.
This "precious combs" translation derives from tama 玉 (tr. "Toyo-tama" and "jewels") and kushi 櫛 "comb", which is a Nihon Shoki graphic variant of kuji 籤 in the goddess named Tamakushi Hime 玉櫛姫 (tr. "jewel-comb" Aston 1896:62).
The (ca. 645-760 CE) Man'yōshū "Myriad Leaves Collection" does not use the word tamagushi but one poem (tr. Pierson 1929-1938:199) describes making it with paper mulberry
: "I tie pure white strands of mulberry to the branches of the sacred tree".
Some common tamagushi collocation
s include:
Tamagushi has an uncommon secondary meaning of "name for the sakaki tree". The (ca. 1439 CE) Shin Kokin Wakashū "New Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems" (tr. Carr 1995:8) contains the first occurrence, "Holding the ornamented tamagushi leaves".
The sakaki (Cleyera japonica) is a flowering evergreen tree, which is considered sacred in Japanese mythology
. In the present day, Shinto shrines often plant it as a sakaiki 境木 "boundary tree" to demarcate sanctified space. Sakaki is written with the kanji 榊, which graphically combines boku or ki 木 "tree; wood" and shin or kami 神 "spirit; god", compare shinboku 神木 "sacred tree". Carr (1995:11) characterizes 榊 as "a doubly exceptional logograph"; it is an ideograph
"character representing an idea" (which is an infrequent type of logograph "character representing a word", see Chinese character classification
), and it is a kokuji 国字 "national character; Japanese-made character" (rather than a typical kanji 漢字 "Chinese character" loanword
).
of tamagushi, like many Japanese words, is uncertain. Despite consensus that -gushi 串 means "skewer; stick" (of sakaki), the original signification of tama- 玉 "jade; jewel; ball" remain obscure. The Kokugaku
scholar Motoori Norinaga
(1730-1801) suggested an etymon of tamukegushi 手向け串 "hand-offered stick/skewer". The Shinto theologian Hirata Atsutane
(1776-1843) proposed "bejeweled stick/skewer", with tama 玉 referring to decorative "jewels" (cf. tama 珠 "jewel; pearl; bead"). The famous ethnologist Kunio Yanagita
(1875-1962) hypothesized "spiritual stick/skewer", with tama 玉 meaning tama 霊 "spirit; soul" (believed to be shaped like a tama 球 "ball; sphere; globe").
's Yasukuni Shrine
tamagushi lawsuit" over the constitutional separation of state and religion (see Nelson 1999 or Morimura 2003 for details).
Although Article 20 of the Constitution of Japan
prohibits the state establishment of religion and Article 89 forbids expenditure of public money "for the use, benefit, or maintenance of any religious institution", the Ehime Governor officially paid for tamagushi-ryō 玉串料 "tamagushi offerings" presented at several Shinto shrines. In 1982, a group of prefectural residents sued his office for having misappropriated ¥ 166,000 (approximately US $1900) in public funds. On March 17, 1989, the Matsuyama
District Court ruled the tamagushi offerings were unconstitutional and ordered the defendants to repay the prefecture. On May 12, 1992, the Takamatsu
High Court overturned the Matsuyama decision, reasoning that the Shinto offerings were constitutionally allowed within the realm of "social protocol". On April 2, 1997, the Supreme Court of Japan
overturned that decision and made a landmark ruling that tamagushi offerings were unconstitutional.
The question of what constitutes support of State Shinto
remains controversial. For instance, the reformist politician Ichirō Ozawa
disagrees with the court ruling.
Shinto
or Shintoism, also kami-no-michi, is the indigenous spirituality of Japan and the Japanese people. It is a set of practices, to be carried out diligently, to establish a connection between present day Japan and its ancient past. Shinto practices were first recorded and codified in the written...
offering made from a sakaki
Sakaki
Sakaki is a flowering evergreen tree native to warm areas of Japan, Korea and mainland China. It can reach a height of 10 m. The leaves are 6–10 cm long, smooth, oval, leathery, shiny and dark green above, yellowish-green below, with deep furrows for the leaf stem. The bark is dark reddish...
-tree branch decorated with shide
Shide (shinto)
is a zigzag-shaped paper streamer, often seen attached to shimenawa or tamagushi, and used in Shinto rituals. A popular ritual is using a haraegushi, or "lightning wand", named for the zig-zag shide paper that adorns the wand. A similar wand, used by miko for purification and blessing, is the gohei...
strips of washi
Washi
is a type of paper made in Japan. Washi is commonly made using fibers from the bark of the gampi tree, the mitsumata shrub , or the paper mulberry, but also can be made using bamboo, hemp, rice, and wheat...
paper, silk, or cotton. At Japanese wedding
Japanese wedding
Japanese wedding customs fall into two categories: traditional Shinto ceremonies, and modern Western-style weddings. In either case, the couple must first be legally married by filing for marriage at their local government office, and the official documentation must be produced in order for the...
s, funerals, miyamairi
Miyamairi
Miyamairi is a traditional Shinto rite of passage in Japan for newborns.Approximately one month after birth , parents and grandparents bring the child to a Shinto shrine, to express gratitude to the deities for the birth of a baby and have a shrine priest pray for his or her health and happiness...
and other ceremonies at Shinto shrines, tamagushi are ritually presented to the kami
Kami
is the Japanese word for the spirits, natural forces, or essence in the Shinto faith. Although the word is sometimes translated as "god" or "deity", some Shinto scholars argue that such a translation can cause a misunderstanding of the term...
(spirits or gods) by parishioners or kannushi
Kannushi
A , also called , is the person responsible for the maintenance of a Shinto shrine as well as for leading worship of a given kami. The characters for kannushi are sometimes also read jinshu with the same meaning....
priests.
Linguistic history
The JapaneseJapanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
word tamagushi is usually written with the kanji
Kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
tama 玉 "jade; gem; jewel; precious; ball; bead" and kushi 串 "string together; skewer; spit; stick", or sometimes written 玉ぐし with hiragana
Hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
since the official Tōyō kanji
Toyo kanji
The tōyō kanji, also known as the Tōyō kanjihyō are the result of a reform of the Kanji characters of Chinese origin in the Japanese written language. They were the kanji declared "official" by the Japanese on November 16, 1946...
do not include 串.
The earliest recorded transcription of tamagushi is 玉籤, using kuji 籤 "bamboo slip; (divination) lot; written oracle; raffle; lottery" instead of kushi. The (ca. 720 CE) Nihon Shoki
Nihon Shoki
The , sometimes translated as The Chronicles of Japan, is the second oldest book of classical Japanese history. It is more elaborate and detailed than the Kojiki, the oldest, and has proven to be an important tool for historians and archaeologists as it includes the most complete extant historical...
"Chronicles of Japan", which repeatedly mentions a 500-branched masakaki 真榊 "true sakaki" tree (tr. Aston 1896:43, 47, 121), is the locus classicus for tamagushi 玉籤. This mytho-history records a legend that when the sun-goddess Amaterasu
Amaterasu
, or is apart of the Japanese myth cycle and also a major deity of the Shinto religion. She is the goddess of the sun, but also of the universe. the name Amaterasu derived from Amateru meaning "shining in heaven." The meaning of her whole name, Amaterasu-ōmikami, is "the great August kami who...
got angry with her brother Susano'o and closed the door on the "Rock-cave of Heaven", the gods decorated a giant sakaki tree in order to lure the sun out of the darkness.
Then all the Gods were grieved at this, and forthwith caused Ama no nuka-do no Kami, the ancestor of the Be ["clan; guild"] of mirror-makers, to make a mirror, Futo-dama, the ancestor of the Imibe [weavers' clan], to make offerings, and Toyo-tama, the ancestor of the Be of jewel-makers, to make jewels. They also caused Yama-Tuschi [Mountain-god] to procure eighty precious combs of the five-hundred-branched true sakaki tree, and Nu-dzuchi [Moor-god] to procure eighty precious combs of the five-hundred-branched Suzuki grass. (tr. Aston 1896:47)
This "precious combs" translation derives from tama 玉 (tr. "Toyo-tama" and "jewels") and kushi 櫛 "comb", which is a Nihon Shoki graphic variant of kuji 籤 in the goddess named Tamakushi Hime 玉櫛姫 (tr. "jewel-comb" Aston 1896:62).
The (ca. 645-760 CE) Man'yōshū "Myriad Leaves Collection" does not use the word tamagushi but one poem (tr. Pierson 1929-1938:199) describes making it with paper mulberry
Paper Mulberry
The Paper Mulberry is a tree in the family Moraceae, native to eastern Asia. Other names include Dak, Halibun, Kalivon, Kozo, and Tapacloth tree.It is a deciduous tree growing to tall...
: "I tie pure white strands of mulberry to the branches of the sacred tree".
Some common tamagushi collocation
Collocation
In corpus linguistics, collocation defines a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation is the expression strong tea...
s include:
- tamagushi o sasageru 玉串を捧げる "offer a tamagushi"
- tamagushi hōnō 玉串奉納 "dedicate/offer tamagushi [in front of a shrine altar]"
- tamagushi-ryō 玉串料 "[cash] offerings for tamagushi [presented at a shrine]"
Tamagushi has an uncommon secondary meaning of "name for the sakaki tree". The (ca. 1439 CE) Shin Kokin Wakashū "New Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems" (tr. Carr 1995:8) contains the first occurrence, "Holding the ornamented tamagushi leaves".
The sakaki (Cleyera japonica) is a flowering evergreen tree, which is considered sacred in Japanese mythology
Japanese mythology
Japanese mythology is a system of beliefs that embraces Shinto and Buddhist traditions as well as agriculturally based folk religion. The Shinto pantheon comprises innumerable kami...
. In the present day, Shinto shrines often plant it as a sakaiki 境木 "boundary tree" to demarcate sanctified space. Sakaki is written with the kanji 榊, which graphically combines boku or ki 木 "tree; wood" and shin or kami 神 "spirit; god", compare shinboku 神木 "sacred tree". Carr (1995:11) characterizes 榊 as "a doubly exceptional logograph"; it is an ideograph
Ideograph
Ideograph is a term coined by rhetorical scholar and critic Michael Calvin McGee describing the use of particular words and phrases as political language in a way that captures particular ideological positions...
"character representing an idea" (which is an infrequent type of logograph "character representing a word", see Chinese character classification
Chinese character classification
All Chinese characters are logograms, but there are several derivative types. These include a handful which derive from pictograms and a number which are ideographic in origin, but the vast majority originated as phono-semantic compounds . In older literature, Chinese characters in general may be...
), and it is a kokuji 国字 "national character; Japanese-made character" (rather than a typical kanji 漢字 "Chinese character" loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
).
Etymology
The etymologyEtymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
of tamagushi, like many Japanese words, is uncertain. Despite consensus that -gushi 串 means "skewer; stick" (of sakaki), the original signification of tama- 玉 "jade; jewel; ball" remain obscure. The Kokugaku
Kokugaku
Kokugaku was a National revival, or, school of Japanese philology and philosophy originating during the Tokugawa period...
scholar Motoori Norinaga
Motoori Norinaga
was a Japanese scholar of Kokugaku active during the Edo period. He is probably the best known and most prominent of all scholars in this tradition.-Life:...
(1730-1801) suggested an etymon of tamukegushi 手向け串 "hand-offered stick/skewer". The Shinto theologian Hirata Atsutane
Hirata Atsutane
was a Japanese scholar, conventionally ranked as one of the four great men of kokugaku studies, and one of the most significant theologians of the Shintō religion. His literary name was Ibukinoya.-Life and thought:...
(1776-1843) proposed "bejeweled stick/skewer", with tama 玉 referring to decorative "jewels" (cf. tama 珠 "jewel; pearl; bead"). The famous ethnologist Kunio Yanagita
Kunio Yanagita
was a Japanese scholar who is often known as the father of Japanese native folkloristics, or minzokugaku.He was born in Fukusaki, Hyōgo Prefecture. After graduating with a degree in law from Tokyo Imperial University, he became employed as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce...
(1875-1962) hypothesized "spiritual stick/skewer", with tama 玉 meaning tama 霊 "spirit; soul" (believed to be shaped like a tama 球 "ball; sphere; globe").
The Ehime lawsuit
Tamagushi was central to the "Ehime-ken Yasukuni jinjā tamagushi soshō" 愛媛県靖国神社玉串訴訟 "Ehime PrefectureEhime Prefecture
is a prefecture in northwestern Shikoku, Japan. The capital is Matsuyama.-History:Until the Meiji Restoration, Ehime prefecture was known as Iyo Province...
's Yasukuni Shrine
Yasukuni Shrine
is a Shinto shrine located in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is dedicated to the soldiers and others who died fighting on behalf of the Emperor of Japan. Currently, its Symbolic Registry of Divinities lists the names of over 2,466,000 enshrined men and women whose lives were dedicated to the service of...
tamagushi lawsuit" over the constitutional separation of state and religion (see Nelson 1999 or Morimura 2003 for details).
Although Article 20 of the Constitution of Japan
Constitution of Japan
The is the fundamental law of Japan. It was enacted on 3 May, 1947 as a new constitution for postwar Japan.-Outline:The constitution provides for a parliamentary system of government and guarantees certain fundamental rights...
prohibits the state establishment of religion and Article 89 forbids expenditure of public money "for the use, benefit, or maintenance of any religious institution", the Ehime Governor officially paid for tamagushi-ryō 玉串料 "tamagushi offerings" presented at several Shinto shrines. In 1982, a group of prefectural residents sued his office for having misappropriated ¥ 166,000 (approximately US $1900) in public funds. On March 17, 1989, the Matsuyama
Matsuyama, Ehime
is the capital city of Ehime Prefecture on the Shikoku island of Japan. It is located on the northeastern portion of the Dōgo Plain. Its name means "pine mountain." The city was founded on December 15, 1889....
District Court ruled the tamagushi offerings were unconstitutional and ordered the defendants to repay the prefecture. On May 12, 1992, the Takamatsu
Takamatsu, Kagawa
is a city located in central Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku in Japan, and is the seat of the prefectural government. It is designated a core city by the Japanese Government. It is a port city located on the Seto Inland Sea, and is the closest port to Honshu from Shikoku island...
High Court overturned the Matsuyama decision, reasoning that the Shinto offerings were constitutionally allowed within the realm of "social protocol". On April 2, 1997, the Supreme Court of Japan
Supreme Court of Japan
The Supreme Court of Japan , located in Chiyoda, Tokyo is the highest court in Japan. It has ultimate judicial authority to interpret the Japanese constitution and decide questions of national law...
overturned that decision and made a landmark ruling that tamagushi offerings were unconstitutional.
The question of what constitutes support of State Shinto
State Shinto
has been called the state religion of the Empire of Japan, although it did not exist as a single institution and no "Shintō" was ever declared a state religion...
remains controversial. For instance, the reformist politician Ichirō Ozawa
Ichiro Ozawa
is a Japanese politician. Formerly a chief secretary of the Liberal Democratic Party , he later defected from the LDP. He was the president of Japan's main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan , from 2006 until May 2009, when he resigned over a fund scandal, and secretary general of the...
disagrees with the court ruling.
There are some instances where the values specified in the constitution are not in accord with the Japanese traditional culture. The Shinto rite of worshipping one's ancestors is very different from the idea of religion in the West. The 'Tamagushirō Decision' of the Supreme Court against Ehime Prefecture, which declared that making donations to purchase tamagushi was against the Constitution based on the religious freedom of Article 20, would not strike the Japanese (who believe in many gods) as anti-constitutional. Perhaps it would be better to impose restrictions on religious freedom only in order to suppress the development of state-sponsored religious fascism. (2001:169)
External links
- Tamagushi, Basic Terms of Shinto 【早分かり葬儀参列】神式の場合, How to offer tamagushi at a Shinto funeral 神道オプション, Shinto ceremonial implements and tamagushi