Ōsaki Hachiman: Architecture, Materiality, and Samurai Power by Anton Schweizer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ōsaki Hachiman: Architecture, Materiality, and Samurai Power by Anton Schweizer Morgan Pitelka Ōsaki Hachiman: Architecture, Materiality, and Samurai Power. By Anton Schweizer. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2016. 438 pages. Hardcover, €49.00/$79.95. Deeply researched and lavishly illustrated, Ōsaki Hachiman: Architecture, Materiality, and Samurai Power is a gold mine of information and ideas for students and scholars of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century warrior politics and culture in Japan. The book presents a detailed and compelling reading of a lesser-known work of Momoyama architecture, the Ōsaki Hachiman Shrine in Sendai, and reveals much about mechanisms of power in the material and visual realms of samurai culture. A revision of author Anton Schweizer’s dissertation at Heidelberg University, the book contains dozens of figures, including sixteen color plates, and eighteen translated documents. The shrine at the center of this study, built by the well-known warlord Date Masamune (1567–1636), is an early example of what Schweizer aptly refers to as “exuberantly decorated architecture” (p. 17), a style also found at better-known sites such as Nikkō Tōshōgū. The author argues that the Ōsaki Hachiman shrine both reflects and expresses Masamune’s “religious commitment, cultural pedigree, and political ambitions” and that it functions to deliberately “trigger notional associations and solicit emotional responses” (pp. 17–18). [End Page 104] The first of the book’s five chapters, titled “The Patron,” examines the period during which the shrine was constructed and offers a biography of the most significant historical actor involved in the project, Date Masamune. In six concise pages, the author summarizes the history of the end of the Sengoku period and the beginning of the Tokugawa period. This is followed by a narrative covering Masamune’s bloody solidification of his status as a powerful regional daimyo, his contentious relationship with Toyotomi Hideyoshi, his pragmatic affiliation with Tokugawa Ieyasu, and his involvement in various international ventures, notably the Keichō Mission of 1613. Schweizer expresses admiration for Masamune as an unusually independent and strategic warlord who may have nursed the ambition of challenging the Tokugawa before their hegemony became institutionalized. Chapter 2, “Ritual Space,” considers the building that the author sees as the crystallization of Masamune’s political, social, and cultural inclinations and aspirations. He begins with a detailed but very readable description of the structure of the single-story shrine, which was designated a Japanese National Treasure in 1952, and follows this with an examination of its “sumptuous” woodcarving, polychromy and painting, and metal fittings (p. 90). Here Schweizer acknowledges that the approach pioneered by Andrew Watsky in the book Chikubushima (University of Washington Press, 2004) informs his analysis of the shrine, which demands a sophisticated reading because of the various architectural, decorative, and spatial elements that together constitute a ritual ensemble full of vibrant sacred meanings. He next interprets the diverse iconographies of the structure, taking the reader room by room as he charts the auspicious symbols and images that make a visual argument for the legitimate rulership of Masamune within a larger framework of cosmological order. Themes such as immortality and spiritual awakening are present throughout, and the author disputes the notion that these were merely decorative: Rather, I argue that the very presence of rich ornamentation is pivotal to indicating the function of a given building; that the subject matter of the base modules of repeating patterns is equally of relevance; that the seeming redundancy of the same repeat patterns in itself communicates specific significance; and, lastly, that pleasure indeed is an important component of ornament—yet not in the sense of indeterminate delight but rather as an integral part of the message. (p. 127) In chapter 3, “Materiality,” Schweizer examines the “defining feature” of Ōsaki Hachiman, the black lacquer covering much of the exterior and interior of the shrine (p. 137). He begins with a useful history of lacquering techniques and then explores the use of lacquer in the decoration of building exteriors from the late sixteenth century onward. Not surprisingly, Oda Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle was a pioneering example of a monolithic structure that used lacquer on various external and internal features. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was “the first to employ it...