Le littoral, espace de médiations - Cultes des monts Sengen, Asama, Aomine et systèmes de représentations chez les gens de mer de la côte orientale de la péninsule de Kii
Authors: Bouchy Anne 
Published: March 2010

The first part of the survey deals with the festival in honor of the sea- and mountain-god Sengen in three small harbors of Mie prefecture. Hōza and Isozaki are fishing harbors but Azena is a place where women-divers collect shells and sea-weeds. Even today, in this region, the eastern coastal range of Kii peninsula, these festivals share much in common: purification rites, formulation, the communities' banquets and festivities open to all, and the worship of Sengen. The main worship takes place on heights devoted to Sengen where ornate bonden poles are planted. At the same time, these sacred heights play the role of sea-marks helping the sailors and of a kind of relay or replica of the Japanese sacred mountains. The worship practiced there goes back to archaic marine religious traditions but has been very conspicuously influenced by the kō pilgrims' sodalities which have been controlled by the mountain-ascetics of Shugendō for a long period. Taboos of Shugendō as women prohibiting could have been found somewhat compatible with sea-societies haunted by the fear of defilements. These special features of the cult of Sengen, unified by the Shugendō of Mount Fuji, of which Sengen is the God, and confined to a clearly defined coastal area, pose the wider problem of the convergence of maritime and mountain religious spheres.

In order to better appreciate the influence exerted by the assimilation of sea-related worship by a unifying mountain-worship and of the following partial occlusion of what constitutes the specificity of the sea-faring peoples, the second part of the survey is extended to cover two famous mountain-temples of the hinterland of the eastern Kii seaside. The first is the oku no in of the Kongōshōji on Mount Asama in the Ise country. Its takemairi is a local cult for the dead which can be seen as a duplicate of funerary practices related to a marine netherworld still ongoing during the New Year period on the not so distant beaches of the Kii seaside. The second is the Shōfukuji of Mount Aomine in the Shima country. Two tales about its foundation are extant. Both can be understood as referring to the relocation of a sea-deity (Ōsatsu Kannon) who was transformed into a mountain-deity. Her brilliance shines far away on the sea and she is still venerated by the sea-faring people spanning the whole of Japan's Pacific coast.

This attempt to relocate the worship of Sengen inside the history of the systems of representation of the sea-faring people is only an element of a survey which should cover all the coastal regions and which could also focus on a complex of symbols as suggestive as Mount Fuji itself We can observe a paradigm shift in a seaside which is first seen as a departure point toward a netherworld beyond the sea or as a refuge for gods or men from the outside world, and then is considered to be a line of reefs and heights being the forefront of the land (riku) used for mountain worship. This shift shows a process of "sedentarisation" with ideological intent. The coastal populations, heirs of the "nomads of the sea", when redefining their vision of the world, visible and invisible, see the occlusion of their genuine world, the sea.

Deciphering the process of occluding the world of the sea gives a new approach to the vision that the Japanese society has of itself and transmits to others, its statements both of identity and of otherness.