Back to the future: Images of nostalgia and renewal in a Japanese religious context

Abstract

A recent film focusing on the Buddhist center of Mount Hiei juxtaposed two themes, the rebuilding of the eastern pagoda of the Hiei complex in totally traditional style and the life of one monk undergoing the sennichi kaihogyo 千 日回峰行， a thousand day austerity practiced at Hiei.These two themes were united to suggest one underlying motif, the revival of the Japanese spirit, an idea underlined by the film's title Yomigaeru: Toto よみがえる東塔 (subtitled in English "The Eastern Pagoda -Phoenix of Mount Hiei").As the pagoda, originally destroyed by Oda Nobunaga in 1571, is rebuilt and the monk comes to the completion of his austerity, the film implies that what is taking place is a revival of a basically Japanese spirit.This message is heavily reinforced by a booklet that has been produced to accompany the film.In this, various writers record their impressions: Nakamura Hajime, for in stance, feels that the film could have been called the "revival of the Japanese spirit" (yomigaem nihon no tamashii; 1983， p. 6) while Matsumoto Ken'ichi comments particularly on the contrast between the ascetic in his traditional clothes and the modern, Westernized background of Japan that appears in the film.It is, Matsumoto suggests, in the ascetic's white clothes, redolent with the ethos of tradition and the past, rather than in the Western clothes more commonly seen in Japan these days, that the spirit of Japan resides (1983， pp.32-33).The film's theme of revival and renewal, reiterating what are projected as basic and traditional Japanese values, is by no means unique, for such emotive appeals to an idealized spirit of the past form a recurrent theme in Japan today.The clear contrasts between this ideal past and a modernity that is, at least as it appears in the context of such imagery, implicitly foreign

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