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The Exiled Warrior and the Hidden Village Author(S): Carmen Blacker Reviewed Work(S): Source: Folklore, Vol The Exiled Warrior and the Hidden Village Author(s): Carmen Blacker Reviewed work(s): Source: Folklore, Vol. 95, No. 2 (1984), pp. 139-150 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1260198 . Accessed: 09/11/2011 07:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. and Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Folklore. http://www.jstor.org Folklorevol. 95:ii, 1984 139 The Exiled Warriorand the Hidden Village CARMEN BLACKER Presidential Address delivered before the Society at the Annual General Meeting on 17 March, 1984. FOR my last PresidentialAddress I present you with an enigma, a puzzle in Japanese folklore for which so far no satisfactorysolution has been found. The most that I can give is a clue or two. The problem is this. All over Japan, with the exception of the northern island Hokkaid5, villages and communities have been discoveredwhose inhabitantsclaim to be descended from a fugitive warrior,fleeing for his life afterthe defeat of his family in a sea battle in the late 12th century. Most of these villages have been found in isolated and inaccessiblespots; on islands, for example, or on the ends of capes, or tucked into inlets of the sea. But the majoritylie deep in mountains, in valleys so remote that they appear to have been cut off from the world until their discovery sometime during the last couple of centuries. The villages are known in general as Heike-dani,or 'valleys of the Heike,' after the surname of the vanquished clan. A map giving the distribution of these communities shows them to be scatteredin a wide double curve from the far north of the main island down to the semi-tropical Ryiikyii islands. Their greatest concentrationseems to be to the west and south. In Kyiishii, for example, there are thirty-six, in Shikoku twelve, while the mountainous Kinki district has revealedto date at least nineteen. There is an odd cluster of fourteen more in the Ryiikyii islands. Further north but still west, along the coast of the Japan Sea, at least a dozen more have come to light, while still further north another two dozen are to be found. It is only in the eastern district known as the Kant6, much of which is flat plain, and the urban sprawl of Tokyo, that the numbers fall to a mere seven. In all, more than a hundred of these strangeenclaves have been discovered,many of them hundreds of miles from the scene of the battle from which the warriors are believed to have fled. This took place in the year 1185 in a bay at the western end of the Inland Sea known as Dannoura. Although these villages tend to be in isolated spots, cut off from each other as well as from the rest of the world, they are said to preserve certain curious customs in common. Most of these appear to hark back to the aristocraticorigin of the warrior ancestor,and are hence jealouslypreserved by the communities as proof of their heroic lineage. All are said to observe in common, for example, a taboo on the colours red and white, the colours of the rival clans in the last battle. All are believed to preserve a certain antiquated mode of speech. Their songs anddances are held to betray an unmistakable elegance and refinement, and their women are believed to be paler skinned than their neighbours. Finally, their pride in their aristocraticblood forbids them to marryoutside the community. 140 CARMEN BLACKER Some of the families preserve a tangible relic of their mysterious noble forebear. This sometimes takes the form of a cup, sometimes of a sealed box which must on no account be opened, on pain of the ancestor'sluck or virtue being squandered.2 A few accounts of such communities have come down to us from the last century. A traveller from Niigata prefecture, one Suzuki Makiyuki, has left an account of an intrepid journey into the mountains in 1828 to a place called Akiyama. Here he discovered one such lost hamlet. He was astonished by the conditions of life, which seemed to him not only desperately poor and primitive, but at the same time quite unfamiliar,as though he had walked into a foreign country. He found a night's lodging in one of the better houses, and was shocked to see that when night fell the entire family slept together on the bare boards of the floor, without a single blanket or coverlet despite the cold. The women wore rough homespun garments,and were quite shamelessin pulling tip their skirtsto their thighs to catch lice and fleas. He was served boiled millet, mushroom soup and a bean soup with grey pellets in it too hard to swallow. Also a paste made of horse chestnuts boiled, skinned and mashed. The old patriarchof the family, Ichiemon by name, told him that the village was proud of its ancient customs, and in no circumstancespermitted any boy or girl to marryoutside. Should any girl do this, she was irrevocablycut off from her family, whom she could never hope to see again. There was no crime in the village, and no gambling. Unfortunatelythe travellerdoes not tell us the name of the warriorwhom they claimed as an ancestor.3 Again, Ernest Satow, one of the early English scholars of Japanese whose distinguishedwork laid the foundationfor those coming after, was given permissionin 1878 to make a journeyinto the mountainousregion of Tateyamaand Hida Takayama. 'Foreign travel' into the interior of Japan was still much restricted,and Satow, then a secretaryin the British Legation, may well have been the first foreigner to penetrate this unfamiliar region. The weather was atrocious, and the steep mountain paths so deep in mud and slush that he found himself more than a week overdue. On July 27th he wrote from the foot of Tateyama to Sir Harry Parkes, the British Minister in Tokyo, to apologise for his late return. Part of our route has lain through a country where distances are estimated only by guesswork, and concerning which it was impossible to obtain any information in Yedo. We have heard of an interesting community of people who inhabit a region called Arimine to the south of Tateyama, twenty miles from their nearest neighbours. They have inter-marriedfor several centuries past, in fact ever since they were heard of first, and live in patriarchalstyle, three or four marriedcouples under one roof, but with separate households. Like other secluded communities, they are said to be descendantsof the Heike fugitives. If we had a few days to spare, I should certainly have visited them, in order to learn more with my own eyes and ears ... Had the rains lifted by the end of July, and had Sir Harry Parkes been less of a martinet,we might have had a full descriptionof a Heike community from this remote part of Japan, by so acute an observer as Ernest Satow. Concerning the discovery of these lost villages by the outside world an odd story, clearly a legend, is cited in several cases. From what were believed to be unexplored heights, the story runs, a red lacquer cup was found floating down the river. Scouts were sent upstreamto investigateand came upon the hidden hamlet. The apparitionof the cup was explainedby the fact that the village included families of the wood carvers known as kijiya, who made wooden cups and bowls with a device called a rokuroor potter's wheel, said to have been revealed to them by their founding ancestor. They were a 'special' people, differentfrom the agriculturalfolk below, who were reputedto THE EXILED WARRIORAND THE HIDDEN VILLAGE 141 have been travellers, moving like gypsies from place to place until they eventually chose to settle down.5 Let us now returnto the circumstanceof the last battle, in the year 1185, and of the flight of the defeated warriors. The Heike family first rose to glittering power and wealth in the middle 12th century. Its sons occupied the highest positions in the land. One of its daughterswas married to an Emperor, and became the mother of another Emperor. But eventually the family overreacheditself, became arrogantand proud, and at last reaped the Buddhist reward of arroganceand pride in a disastrous fall. Another clan, the Genji, set itself to overthrowthe Heike, and by and by, after a long civil war, pressedthem so hard that they were forced to flee from the capital eastwards. They took with them in their flight the child EmperorAntoku, then only seven years old, his mother the Lady Kenrei-monin, and the whole retinue of the Court. These elegant people were finally compelled to take refuge on ships, in a bay in the inland sea called Dannoura. And there, in the year 1185, the clan was finally and irrevocablydefeated. The nurse of the child EmperorAntoku took the little boy in her arms, and saying to him, 'There is a wonderful city at the bottom of the sea called the Pure Land of Bliss. That is where I am taking you,' she leapt with the child over the side of the ship.
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