I have heard that because Osorezan is a place of spirits, people who go for mere sightseeing are cursed.
So wrote the late, great master of photography, Issei Suda, in the afterword of his photobook, Journey to Osorezan (“Fear Mountain” in English). The purpose of my trip was not sightseeing, but neither was I seeking the spiritual consolation of communicating with the dead, as many travelers do. Rather, I was on a literary pilgrimage to the home territory of Shuji Terayama, the poet, film-maker and icon of Japan’s counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s.
Much of the action in Terayama’s surreal, autobiographical masterpiece, Pastoral: to Die in the Country, (“Denen ni Shisu”, in Japanese) takes place on and around Osorezan. Walking past sights familiar from the film felt like leaving the real world behind and entering the bewildering, but unforgettably vivid world of Terayama’s imagination. Here were sulphur-belching “hells” and time-blurred jizo statues (a bodhisattva who works to ease the pains of those in hell.)
Carpenter town temple town rice town Buddha town
Tell me, Swallow, is there a town for buying old mothers
Shuji Terayama
Terayama is closely associated with the town of Misawa and it is near there, on the wooded shoreline of shining Lake Ogawara, that the Shuji Terayama Museum is located. The Museum is a must-see for anyone interested in post-war Japanese literature and art, the history of the 1960s or new wave Japanese cinema.
The current director is poet, actor and author Enmei Sasaki. To film buffs, he is best known as the leather-jacketed youth who glares out of the screen, bellowing a challenge to the cinema audience, in the opening sequence of Terayama’s 1970 feature film, Throw Away Your Books and Run into the Streets.
When we visited, the temporary exhibition was about the year 1969. Needless to say, Terayama was a fireball of activity that year.
Apart from producing his usual flow of books, articles and plays, he took his Tenjo Sajiki theatre troupe on their first overseas tour, to Germany. He proposed an original script for the Japanese version of the rock musical Hair. He wrote op-eds about the battle between radical students and riot police at Tokyo University. He managed to get himself arrested for a punch-up with members of a rival underground theatre troupe.
Meanwhile, he found time to launch the careers of two talented female singers, Carmen Maki and Maki Asahara, with albums of specially-written original songs, one of which, Toki niwa haha ga nai ko yo ni (“Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child”) became a million-seller for Carmen Maki. A well-known racing obsessive, he also had to take care of Ulysses, the race-horse he had bought the year before and named after the James Joyce novel.
Terayama spent only four years in Misawa, at junior school, before moving to Aomori City, the prefectural capital. Yet, according to a short film narrated by Kan Mikami, gut-bucket folk singer and fellow native of Aomori Prefecture, it was at Misawa that Shuji Terayama completed the process of becoming Shuji Terayama. In his work, there is certainly a lot of Misawa and Shimokita, the hatchet-shaped peninsula to the north where Osorezan is located.
I believe that I love my hometown enough to hate it. Shuji Terayama
Misawa had hosted a base for the Japanese airforce during the war, and after the surrender the Americans took it over. Terayama and his mother moved to Misawa because there was a job for her there as a cleaner and kitchen helper on the base. His father had been a policeman who was drafted into the Japanese Army during the war and died of illness in South East Asia.
In those days, the far north of Japan’s main island would have been very remote indeed. The night-train from Aomori City to Tokyo would have taken twenty one hours, as opposed to the three hours that the fastest of the sleek Hayabusa bullet-trains takes today. Yet the presence of the American base would have given the town an exotic and modern flavour which Terayama, in his early tanka poetry, signified by music.
Heavily accented blues songs come through the wall
Pouring hot water into the wash-basin, I sing along
Shuji Terayama
Today, the town seems comfortable with the small, but obvious American presence. The cluster of bars favoured by U.S. airforce personnel are a good deal more friendly and decorous than the average gaijin hang-out in Tokyo’s Roppongi. There is also an excellent jazz club, Moon River, where we enjoyed a blazing performance from a group led by top-class trumpeter and Tohoku native, Shinpei Ruike. Hanging on the wall was an exhibition of Terayama-related photos. Later, delicious fish and sake and laid-back hospitality were to be found at the Irori izakaya in the Aka Noren complex of eateries.
Osorezan is a two hour drive from Misawa. Despite the dark, heavy-bellied clouds, there was no rain. A new elevated expressway runs part of the way up the “axe handle” of the Shimokita Peninsula, but the going is much slower up the final fifty kilometers of coast road. Being trapped behind a slow-moving “vacuum truck” – used to empty septic tanks in places with no access to modern sewerage systems – reminded us that the region has been left behind in the modernization process. These trucks disappeared from Japan’s great cities over thirty years ago.
It is this raw, primal quality of the area that has attracted several eminent creative spirits. In the 1970s, Tokyo-born new wave film director Shohei Imamura made a fascinating documentary called My Shimokita in which he travels around the small towns of the peninsula, drinking with the locals and talking to them about their folk beliefs. It is winter and he travels to Osorezan by snowmobile to pay his respects to his deceased senpai, Yuzo Kawashima, who was a native of the area.
Datsueba, the demon-hag
Painter-sculptor Taro Okamoto was another devotee of Osorezan and the shamanic mysticism of the Tohoku (North Honshu) region in general. The startling primitive power of pottery from the Jomon era (14,000-300 BC), which he identified with Tohoku, seems to have inspired him in the same way that African masks inspired Picasso, who Okamoto knew well during his time in Paris in the 1930s.
In his book Shinpi Nihon (“Mystical Japan”), he writes the whole of this mountain is a bizarre theatre for the popular imagination of heaven and hell. Although disguised by a veil of Buddhist karma, it is a mountain for worshipping the spirits of the dead.
British travel writer Alan Booth visited Osorezan several times in the 1970s and 1980s. Once, an itako (female spirit medium) told him that in a previous life he had been a Japanese living in the north country, but had subsequently been reborn a foreigner as punishment for the sins he had committed in that life.
He, like Okamoto, saw something older and wilder beneath the institutional Buddhism which was brought to Osorezan 1200 years ago by Master Jikaku En’nin. Booth sensed the presence of a dusty, crouching, terrible god who does not often show himself in this world.
Treading the barren, blistered ground of Osorezan, we could see both sides of the story. There was inner peace to be had by tugging the temple bell and praying or contemplating the weathered, but still merry faces of the five sages, each symbolizing a distinct type of wisdom. We watched a middle-aged woman step into the part of Lake Usori that symbolizes Sai no kawara (the limbo of children) and make an offering of sake, presumably to console a prematurely deceased relative.
The pond of blood
On the other hand, there is much that is bleak and frightening. The pond of blood. Crows with beaks like steel pitons cawing incessantly. The sulphur fumes, bubbling up from the “hells,” that attack your eyes and throat. The signs, in Japanese only, that warn of poisonous vipers. Even the colourful pin-wheels – put there to commemorate dead children and aborted fetuses – give off an eerie sound as they whir in the wind.
Some of the iconography is disturbing too. The leering demon-hag, Datsueba, strips the clothes from sinners waiting to cross the River Sanzu, the Japanese equivalent of the River Styx. If they have no clothes, she strips their skin instead.
At Osorezan, fear and consolation go hand in hand. As Imamura’s documentary establishes, the local people believe that the souls of the dead go there and wait to be reborn. Osorezan is the place where this world and the next world merge, also the place where a country called Japan merges with a bizarre and mysterious place called Terayamaland.
Going to bury my dead mother’s bright red comb
On Osorezan there is only the blowing wind
Shuji Terayama