Yamanashi-ken

Past weekend I travelled to Yamanashi prefecture to visit a friend who is learning Japanese carpentry as an apprentice from an experienced  Miya-daiku (宮大工 Shrine carpenter). As I am well aware of the fact that the Japanese countryside has a much higher percentage of traditional houses and elderly people than Tōkyō, I expected to find some remains of the religious customs of former generations. In my experience, kamidana are getting rarer and rarer in Tōkyō so I was hoping to see one at my friend’s master’s residence.  The lady of the house apologised for the dust on top of it, but there was indeed a rather simple gods’ shelf present in the house. There was no mini-shrine (miya-gata 宮形 in Japanese) on the shelf, but there were some offerings like a few sakaki 榊branches and some amulets made out of rice straw – as an expression of gratitude for the rice harvest according to my friend’s master. There were several o-fuda 御札 from shrines the family visited, like one dedicated to the popularly enshrined Amaterasu-ōmikami 天照大御神and another to Dōso-daijin  道祖大神.

We headed to a small residence in the mountains where my friend and his master do all kinds of chores like chopping firewood and the like. I was lucky enough to meet a friend of the master’s who happened to have a kannushi (神主 shintō priest) licence. When I inquired about the position of kami in the household he told me that an old folk tale describes how every one of the Seven Lucky Gods (七福神 Shichifuku-jin) chose a room of the household to protect. Benten-sama  弁天様 (also Benzai-ten弁財天)  was the last one to choose and since all the other rooms were taken she had to settle for the toilet.  Even though she was reluctant at first, she finally accepted, but demanded in return that the toilet should be the cleanest room in the house.

I had heard about a pillar that is considered to be important in Japanese architecture called  Daikoku-bashira 大黒柱 and I asked the master’s friend if he knew why it was called that and if there is any link with Daikoku-ten. He was not sure about its origins, but he told me that, as opposed to the single large pillar that is nowadays considered to be the daikoku-bashira, there used to be four daikoku-bashira in traditional “folk dwellings” (民家 minka) .

I looked up “Shichifuku-jin” and “Daikoku-bashira” in several dictionaries, but I was unable to confirm either of the stories, which makes them even more interesting.