The Emotional Toll of Wartime Bell Deployment in Japan (original) (raw)
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In Tibet, a handful of bronze temple bells have been recorded whose epigraphy marks them out as among the earliest examples of cast temple bells from Asia and precious sources of knowledge regarding the movement of material culture across Buddhist Asia at this time. However, the scholars who brought these bells to wider attention focused almost exclusively on the content of the inscriptions as texts of historical interest, briefly describing the bells as “of Chinese pattern.” However, one may ask, what does that really mean? Is there one “Chinese” type or design for bells? In what ways and to what extent do the Tibetan exemplars adhere to this/these form(s)? This chapter focuses on art-historical aspects of Tibetan imperial temple bells, attempting to answer these questions by comparing the bells with the few examples extant in Buddhist Asia.
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The water-clock marks the hour in the _Ta-chung sz'_,--in the Tower of the Great Bell: now the mallet is lifted to smite the lips of the metal monster,--the vast lips inscribed with Buddhist texts from the sacred _Fa-hwa-King_, from the chapters of the holy _Ling-yen-King_! Hear the great bell responding!--how mighty her voice, though tongueless!--_KO-NGAI!_ All the little dragons on the high-tilted eaves of the green roofs shiver to the tips of their gilded tails under that deep wave of sound; all the porcelain gargoyles tremble on their carven perches; all the hundred little bells of the pagodas quiver with desire to speak. _KO-NGAI!_-all the green-and-gold tiles of the temple are vibrating; the wooden goldfish above them are writhing against the sky; the uplifted finger of Fo shakes high over the heads of the worshippers through the blue fog of incense! _KO-NGAI!_--What a thunder tone was that! All the lacquered goblins on the palace cornices wriggle their fire-colored tongues! And after each huge shock, how wondrous the multiple echo and the great golden moan and, at last, the sudden sibilant sobbing in the ears when the immense tone faints away in broken whispers of silver,--as though a woman should whisper, "_Hiai!_" Even so the great bell hath sounded every day for well-nigh five hundred years,--_Ko-Ngai_: first with stupendous clang, then with immeasurable moan of gold, then with silver murmuring of "_Hiai!_" And there is not a child in all the many-colored ways of the old Chinese city who does not know the story of the great bell,--who cannot tell you why the great bell says _Ko-Ngai_ and _Hiai_! * * * * * Now, this is the story of the great bell in the Ta-chung sz', as the same is related in the _Pe-Hiao-Tou-Choue_, written by the learned Yu-Pao-Tchen, of the City of Kwang-tchau-fu.
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This article investigates how things given to local temples generate material, karmic, and emotional excess in contemporary Japan. What, how, and why people “store” at local Buddhist temple tell a story of a community and how people’s individual material histories become matters of communal concern and local heritage-making practices. While walking a fine line between memory and decommissioning of care, the stories of burdensome inherited materiality map out the material and affective networks of community preservation in Japan’s depopulating regions. By stepping into the shoes of a local Buddhist priest at a True Pure Land Buddhist temple in Hiroshima Prefecture, I focus on the tensions between decommissioning of care and the moral and practical conundrum faced by rural Buddhist temples entrusted with the responsibility of meaningful disposal and safe keeping of inherited things. I thus argue that decommissioning of karmically volatile materiality helps us understand better the fragility of Buddhist care structures and how people strive to maintain and, in turn, make sense of the anticipated decline in their depopulating regional communities. https://allegralaboratory.net/heritage-out-of-control-buddhist-material-excess-in-depopulating-japan/
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Visual Arts, architecture, and especially contemporary sculpture exhibit the bells in the most visible manner, together with their supporting structures, whether functional or not, useful or just display artefacts. The belfries of modern churches become aesthetically and visually autonomous and are visual and sound landscape generators, as created by architects like Mario Botta and Le Corbusier. In contemporary sculpture, the bells become readymade sculptural objects fully integrated into sculptural installation, as artists like Jannis Kounellis, Claudio Parmiggiani, Barry Flanagan does, or even manifest memorial and social attitude, like Zaphos Xagoraris and Marcus Vergette. The phenomenon of bells as Social Memorial has emerged from the need for social attitude and involvement in the postwar era, also on the background of an evolutionary process of symbolic values secularization of this typology of traditional liturgical artefacts. The Social Memorial identified today by the artefacts of bells covers from remembrance, heroism, the signalling of a memory archive symbolic or not, to attitude, motivation and social commentary, passing through artistic involvement in contemporary crises-war, suffering and human loss, drama in any situation. It always marks ideas or memory through the sound landscape and the visual structure that inevitably accesses a liturgical reflex of bells, a community memory. The bell and its adjacent structures, all elements of the art and science of campanology, triggers an anthropological vector and evolving cultural icon, due to already occurred essential mutation through the secularization of the original liturgical artefact into a sculptural object and installation, now a militant Social Memorial or archive of memory.
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Memorial tablets (ihai) and memorial portraiture (iei) have long been mainstays of Japanese funerary ritual. The tablet and portrait serve as focal points during the wake, funeral, and subsequent ritual observances. Attempts to reconcile their ritual function have led these objects to be characterized in scholarship either as proxy recipients for offerings, objects which facilitate communication between the living the newly dead, or as a material record of familial, personal, or social relationships. While these interpretations are not necessarily wrong, I argue that the real work of the ihai and iei takes place long after the funeral ends. Far more than static material representations of the deceased or the social relationships they inhabited, the ihai and iei stand in a complex and complementary relationship to one another. Consequently, the mediation of these memorial objects serves to establish and ground the persistent spirit of the departed (hotoke) that is simultaneously of this world and transcendent to it. I will show how both everyday and ritual interactions with ihai and iei reveal a dynamic and decades-long semiotic process which guides this entity through its transformation from a human being, through a “lifetime” as a hotoke, and ultimately, into a household ancestor.
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