Reincarnation and Misfortune In Old & Modern Japan: An Investigation of Traditional Beliefs and Modern Thought – Including the Hatsushiba Transcripts

By Alan Greenhalgh

This book examines the history of reincarnation in Japan and shows how the idea has developed over time. It looks at exactly what reincarnation is and where it originated. The book also examines reincarnation and tradition, reincarnation and psychology and analyses reincarnation in the context of religion. It offers some curious tales from Japanese history which offer detailed explanations of real incidents of rebirth. The book also looks at the Japanese media and the occult in the modern age. Western views of reincarnation and Eastern Buddhist and Shinto views are also investigated. The book’s purpose is to both inform serious students of Japanese history, Japanese religions and reincarnation and the wider public who have an abiding interest in all things Asian, and in particular the customs and traditions of Japan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9780244613556

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Reincarnation and Misfortune In Old & Modern Japan: An Investigation of Traditional Beliefs and Modern Thought – Including the Hatsushiba Transcripts

Reincarnation and Misfortune in Old & Modern Japan

By

ALAN GREENHALGH

Copyright

Copyright Alan Greenhalgh© 2017

eBook Design by Rossendale Books: www.rossendalebooks.co.uk

Front cover design: [e-mail]

eBook ISBN: 978-0-244-61355-6

All rights reserved, Copyright under the Berne Copyright Convention and Pan American Convention. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Dedication

For Miyuki and Ayako Yabuuchi whose late mother

was my friend and colleague

About the author

Alan Greenhalgh studied Japanese language and society formally at university level, taking examinations in both the UK and Hiroshima, Japan – a country he lived in for ten years. He worked as a teacher and lecturer there while conducting research of his own into the history and religious beliefs of the Japanese nation. He has taught at various UK and Japanese educational establishments, including St. Andrew’s University in Osaka, Japan.

Previously published books include Night Souls in Northern Skies and The Perverse Utopia: Exploring its Fiction, Philosophy and Social History.

He currently lives in Manchester, England, where he divides his time between teaching and writing.

FOREWORD

Many years ago I developed a deep interest in the Japanese language. This pre-occupation with things Japanese extended to the culture and society and I fled poor economic conditions and almost non-existent job opportunities at home in Manchester and travelled to Osaka, Japan, where despite an initial plan to remain for no more than a year, friends, work and other distractions kept me there for 10 years. Within what seemed a fairly short space of time the massive earthquake in Kobe occurred; its aftermath resulting in 4,000 deaths.

While in Japan I nurtured an interest in the spiritual nature of the country; a foundation which seemed to underpin and permeate everything I saw, felt and experienced. At some point, I became interested in both Western and Japanese religions, and subsequently, reincarnation; the subject of this book.

For some years, while living in the large industrial city of Osaka, I visited both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I wondered whether those poor children who died following the dropping of the atomic bombs, while they were still in their schools, or survived for a short time, only to leave this world with pain-ridden bodies due to the radiation poisoning, were able to come back again; that is to be re-born into the world they were so tragically stolen from.

My thoughts on re-birth were private; they were mine only and never discussed with those around me, including colleagues. However later, I became keen to learn what Japanese people thought of reincarnation. And there began my quest, lasting several years, to examine the phenomenon and to try to discover what the Japanese believed about it. As interested as I was in the view of reincarnation as given by religions in Japan, I also sought to determine the thoughts of ordinary people. I asked a group of people I knew more than any other about their thoughts on it: educated and worldly Japanese high-school teachers. They were intelligent, had a good knowledge of their own country’s history and religions – particularly the religious studies teachers who taught the subject – and they were willing to help in the research I was conducting. Their responses became what is now known as The Hatsushiba Transcripts after the district where we worked.

I sensed my research forced them to think about something which had perhaps remained on the edge of their consciousness. Some individuals took several days to think about how they felt about the subject; some wrote about their feelings and opinions in English; and others, whose English skills were weaker, wrote in their own native tongue.

This book, its topic and its current manifestation as a published product, has a curious poignancy. One colleague, who at the time the research for the book was being conducted, was aged 30 years. She became a good friend of mine. She gave her time freely, and her thoughts on rebirth were made sincerely, with a view to helping me with my research.

She had been planning for some time to marry her partner of some years, but, for one reason or another, had postponed the event for a time more appropriate or convenient. I wrote to her not that long ago, after I had long returned to England, and at a time when I had decided to tidy up the rough research manuscripts, gather together the references, and edit the work I had done on this book, with a view to publication.

Her comments on reincarnation are given on p. 148 and are preceded by an asterisk*. They are themselves poignant because a short time after recently writing to her, her eldest daughter wrote back to say her mother had collapsed in school, had been taken to hospital, and not long after, had died of a brain tumour. She had married her long-term partner only a short period before her death. It is therefore to the memory of this friend and colleague – and to her daughters, who, incidentally, knew nothing of my research on re-birth, or their late mother’s written responses to my questions about reincarnation – that I dedicate this book.

INTRODUCTION

Death is psychologically as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life….As a doctor, I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal.

-         C. G. Jung

During the 1990s, reincarnation (rinne in Japanese) – the theory that people are reborn or reincarnated into another human body following death – became fashionable with Japanese people. The young especially, if they believe in the phenomenon, have come to desire knowledge of their previous lives. Even in Britain, which is not a Buddhist country, the belief in reincarnation is strong. In a study by Walter and Waterhouse, they note of the West: 'A sizeable minority of Westerners who have no particular connection with Eastern or New Age religions nevertheless claim to believe in reincarnation.'¹ They continue: 'For many Westerners, however, belief in reincarnation is held alongside conventional Christian beliefs...'² It is almost as if Christianity and the belief in reincarnation are in conflict with one another, however. And yet MacGregor notes that some important figures inside the Church state that it has never officially opposed the doctrine of reincarnation.³

Palmer and O' Brien say that people have become more interested in reincarnation as their belief in Christianity has faded and yet would also agree with Walter and Waterhouse that such beliefs in reincarnation appear to co-exist with traditional Christian ones:

Reincarnation has risen in popularity in the West in recent decades. Partly this is due to the decline of traditional Christianity's hold over people's imagination, partly due to the increased numbers of Buddhists and Hindus active in the West, but also partly due to a search for a greater sense of belonging to something greater. In the search for a meaning of life and a cause for suffering, the belief in reincarnation has come to lodge firmly alongside more traditional Western views of what happens to us after death.⁴

But what about reincarnation in Japan? According to Hitoshi Miyake’s very informative book 宗教民族学への招待 (Shukyo minzoku gaku e no shokai, An Invitation to Studies in Folk Religion), one book on reincarnation has become exceedingly popular in Japan, and a foreign one at that. Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb which was published in 1986.⁵ Another popular one is Yayumi Matsutou's Reincarnation which tells of love and rebirth, this time in comic form. In another example, a boy involved in a car accident loses his memory but manages to recover memories from a previous birth in Ken Mizuki's comic Sequence. Reincarnation appears to be a popular topic for comics.⁶ In Hiwatari Saki's comic for girls, Protect My Earth, a young person has dreamy recollections from a past life on the moon – the kind of tale that typifies the genre.⁷

One of the issues taken up in some of the recent comic literature is how the individual can learn to foresee his rebirths and understand why they happen. Miyake says of the modern-day interest in rebirth in Japan:

Maybe the fact that young men and women long to know about their previous lives and about reincarnation in general is a bit strange but even though rebirth is looked at by young people, since ancient times Japanese people have looked at life as not only a question of this existence but the next one too; I have to think that there is support for the continued belief that reincarnation can be seen in terms of at least once travelling from the next world to being reborn in this one.⁸

Curiously, although Japanese people seem to be oblivious to religion in many respects, they are interested in its many paranormal (reitekina) offshoots.⁹ This certainly appears to be the case in modern literature. Witness the recent popularity of Koya Yamakawa (see chapter 4 for more on this writer) whose readers are obviously fascinated by the various paranormal and spiritual healing topics he writes about.

A variety of 20th century Japanese writers have written about the purported veracity of reincarnation or 'transmigration' (samsara in the Hindu religion; an important non-Vedic doctrine reintroduced by the Upanishads); referred to as 'rebirth' in the Buddhist religion although terms are used interchangeably by most authors – ranging from Buddhist scholars, essayists, writers on the occult and the supernatural, to scientists and historians.¹⁰

Writings on reincarnation date far back into Japanese history. Despite the various treatises available on the subject, both ancient and modern, it is primarily with modern Japanese writings of the last few years with which I am concerned, although we must also look at some Western explanations of several concepts of rebirth so that we are able to compare them with the Japanese view.

Historically, reincarnation stretches far back into ancient Japanese history; some writers, influenced by their familiarity with Chinese literature, make reference to it. Otomo no Tabito (667-731) – Governor-General of the headquarters of the ancient government of Kyushu – wrote of future reincarnated existences:

If I can but be happy in this life

What should I care if in the next

I become a bird or a worm!¹¹

And in the eleventh-century anthology Goshuishu, the following poetry by Izumi Shikibu expresses rebirth in the following way:

I lie with my hair dishevelled

But I do not even notice

As I long for the man who caressed it.

To make another memory

For my after-life,

How I wish I could see him once more!¹²

In ancient folklore, Smith recounts the story of a Governor of Echigo Province who had been a monkey in a former life:

He (the Governor Kinomi-ta-ka Ason) told the priests and the old man that he was the Lord of Echigo Province, and that he had journeyed all the way to their temple to see if unfinished volumes of the (Buddhist) Bible remained there. ‘For,’ he said, ‘I was the senior of the two monkeys who were so anxious to obtain copies of the whole of our Lord Buddha’s sermons; and, now that I have been born a man, I wish to complete them.’¹³

As many of the works that discuss rebirth are not specialist, but books readily available in the domain of popular reading material in Japan, it means that the typical Japanese reader is exposed to the topic of reincarnation through a variety of popular writers on religion; writers who express their ideas through writing about the supernatural, New Age and modern science. In other words, what the average Japanese person thinks about the subject is influenced by the type of works referred to in this book; works readily available in any major Japanese bookshop. In this way the modern Japanese reader is at an advantage – in terms of the amount of information accessible to him – over the Japanese reader of earlier times whose principle knowledge and beliefs concerning reincarnation came mainly from Buddhist beliefs and ancient folk customs.

The modern Japanese reader also has another contributor to aid him in forming an individual view of rebirth: the scientist. Reincarnation or metempsychosis, as it is known scientifically, is a domain scientists have been reluctant to invade, perhaps because of the empirical difficulties involved in substantiating such other-worldly claims. In this respect, the subject is on a par with ghosts and UFOs; topics that, like reincarnation can cause most serious scholars to avoid the prospect of their names being connected with journal articles that discuss or investigate such themes. In spite of this, certain scholars of a scientific bent have attempted to make inroads in to what is considered by many an uncertain path,