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Extreme Makeover for a Heian-Era Wizard
Abstract
In 2000, observers of Japanese social life were amazed to see groups of schoolgirls massing at Shintō shrines dedicated to Abeno Seimei, a legendary sorcerer of the Heian era (794–1185 AD). Some noted that these visitors treated Seimei more like an idol than a kami (shrine deity). At a scholarly “culture seminar” on phantoms and the supernatural where Abeno Seimei was one of the topics for discussion, the venue could only hold sixty, but one hundred and twenty people came, many of them schoolgirls who tried to crowd into the room.1 Girls’ interest in visiting Seimei shrines and hearing lectures about him were only part of a trajectory of exploding fascination with this historic figure. Seimei, a genuine person who most likely lived between 921 and 1005 AD, became the focus of intense cultural energy and was the subject of numerous manga, films, a TV series, novels, anime, and books. The question of why a medieval wizard became a modern icon and folk hero is intrinsically interesting, yet is also a useful case to consider in our exploration of trends in contemporary Japanese popular culture. I believe that his new celebrity status reveals multiple threads that might be fruitful to consider. The example of Abeno Seimei idolatry gives us a unique perspective from which to consider the role of the culture industry in fueling and buttressing interest in the occult and the possibility of supernatural powers that extend the limits of the human.
Painting of Abeno Seimei from the Abeno Ōji Shrine Treasury in Osaka. Reproduced on the cover of Fujimaki, Abeno Seimei.
For one thing, production and consumption of Seimei is an illustration of the power of the girl market. Japanese girls have been driving the consumer economy in numerous ways for more than a decade, forming a rich counterpart to male-inspired otaku culture. In medieval folktales, statues, and paintings, Seimei is presented as a grave middle-aged man exemplary of Heian-era masculinity. He has a chubby face, thin eyes, and a pale complexion (Figure 1).2 But in the Heisei era (1989–), Seimei has been re-imagined as a bishōnen, a beautiful young man with huge eyes, flowing locks, and a sculpted face. One cultural change this indicates is the importance of what we might term the “girl gaze” in popular consumption. Because the aesthetic tastes and desires of girls are encoded in Seimei imagery, the creators and consumers of Seimei products and representations do not have to actually be girls for the girl gaze to be present. Takahara Eiri’s somewhat different concept of the “consciousness of the girl” is characterized by a valorization of the fantastic.3 Yet both the girl gaze and girl consciousness point to the fact that a girl’s point of view or thinking like a girl is not related to age or sex. As an onmyōji, or court practitioner of occult science, Seimei was especially attractive to a female audience in which there had been a preexisting fascination with divination and the occult.4 In addition, Seimei challenges the limits of the human with his reputation for having extraordinary magical abilities that point to new realms of human attainment. The combination of mass-culture themes—girls’ desire for bishōnen images and interest in the extension of natural human endowment through the use of magic—led to what Malcolm Gladwell might call a “tipping point,” in which a preponderance of factors ensure that a new trend takes off.5
We know about Seimei and his magical talents from venerable folktales such as the late Heian collection Konjaku monogatari shū (ca. 1000–1100 AD, Tales of Times Now Past) and the early Kamakura period Uji shūi monogatari (ca. 1190–1242, A collection of tales from Uji). In these compilations Seimei uses his remarkable ability for commanding goblins, channeling spirits, and predicting the future to rescue court nobles and to protect the capital. The story of Seimei’s background goes something like this: his father is a court noble named Abeno Yasuna and his mother a famous beauty named Kuzunoha. One day Yasuna is traveling in...
... (Knecht, 1995, p. 328) Igual que ocurre con la estrella de seis picos o kagome, la estrella de cinco picos que en líneas anteriores vinculamos con el pentagrama judeocristiano, tiene su propio referente en el onmyōdō ( 陰陽道) 2 japonés. La estrella de cinco picos se enlaza estrechamente con una de las principales figuras de esta cosmología: Abeno Seimei, hechicero de la época Heian (794-1185AD), quien usaba sus poderes para canalizar espíritus y predecir el futuro en la corte (Miller, 2003). La estrella de cinco picos era conocida como su símbolo: ...
... Se trata de una cosmología esotérica sincrética japonesa, que mezcla elementos del taoísmo, budismo y los rituales del shintō japonés. Un elemento central de esta práctica fue el sistema de numerología china aplicada, compuesta por tres aspectos principales: el yin yang, el sistema de los cinco elementos y el I ching(Miller, 2003). ...
In this article, we start from the argument that in manga X, created by the clamp collective in 1992, and published in Mexico between 2003 and 2005 by Editorial Vid, the visual representation of Tokyo in disaster corresponds to a postmodern aesthetic that uses two elements and mixes them: religious references and the visual culture of the Japanese disaster. Our work is an analysis of the image that is inserted in the inductive paradigm of indexical inferences proposed by Carlo Ginzburg and Geovanni Levi and is based on the following theoretical categories: Kevin Lynch’s image of the city, Gennifer Weisenfeld’s visual culture of Japanese disaster, and Gianni Vattimo’s theory of postmodernity. As a result, it is inferred that in the construction of the apocalyptic city of this manga, the struggle between traditional and modern elements is observed, which are mixed from points of convergence, to end with the triumph of the religious and the fall of the modern structure.
... Traditionally depicted visually as a chubby onmyōji, the manga series reimagines Seimei as a young, slim handsome man with a latent budding attraction to Hiromasa. 67 Even though Hanyu's embodiment of Seimei portrays a masculine character in charge of his surroundings -controlling the spirit world while using sharp direct movement without a hint of his partner, the queer and feminised representation of Seimei in the popular manga series strongly enters the viewer's imagination regardless. Hanyu, therefore, fulfils many Japanese 'girl gaze' fantasies of an idealized soft masculinity -which also corresponds to his controlled yet hyperathletic quad jumps. ...
The Chinese American skater Nathan Chen and the Japanese skater Yuzuru Hanyu have demonstrated what we call a ‘hyperathletic-artistic turn’: recognizing an almost superhuman, quad-jumping ability along with an equally developed artistic side. This article closely analyses their 2018 Olympic season performances exploring costuming, music, dance choreography, and jumping ability. While Chen's balletic and dancerly choreography – a ‘return of the dancer’ aesthetic – maintains an individualistic maverick instead of commercially recognisable macho hypermasculinity, Hanyu's ‘soft masculine queer turn’ draws from the queer costuming and mannerisms of Johnny Weir and the confidence of Evgeni Plushenko. Through their performances and choreography, we argue that Chen and Hanyu importantly carve out emerging artistic forms of East Asian and Asian-American masculinities in the predominantly white sport of figure skating. These skaters are part of a driving force in an East Asian turn in men's figure skating.
... For details of Abe no Seimei's life based on historical records, see for example Shigeta (2013). For more on the so-called Seimei boom, see Miller (2008). This paper will not focus on the worship of Abe no Seimei or the practice of Onmyōdō, but the process through which the shrine has become a tourist attraction. ...
Japanese Shinto shrines are popular pilgrimage sites not only for religious reasons, but also because of their connections to popular culture. This study discusses how tourism is involved in the construction of the shrine space by focusing on the material environment of the shrine, visitor performances, and how the shrine is contested by different actors. The subject of the study, Seimei Shrine, is a shrine dedicated to the legendary figure Abe no Seimei (921–1005), who is frequently featured in popular culture. Originally a local shrine, Seimei Shrine became a tourist attraction for fans of the novel series Onmyōji (1986–) and the movie adaptation (2001). Since then, the shrine has branded itself by placing themed statues, which realize the legend of Abe no Seimei in material form, while also attracting religious and touristic practices. On the other hand, visitors also bring new meanings to the shrine and its objects. They understand the shrine through different kinds of interactions with the objects, through performances such as touching and remembering. However, the material objects, their interpretation and performances are also an arena of conflict and contestation, as different actors become involved through tourism. This case study shows how religion and tourism are intertwined in the late-modern consumer society, which affects both the ways in which the shrine presents and reinvents itself, as well as how visitors understand and perform within the shrine.
... Gakken Mechamo Centipede [3] is the robot (Fig. 2), which has similar kinematics scheme to the robot model designed in this work. In contrast with other robots from this comparison list, the robot has to rotate all his legs from one side simultaneously. ...
In this paper, we introduce a modification for legged locomotion and methods for biomimetic centipede robot design. Biomimetic centipede robots can be well-suited to a number of applications, including search-and-rescue around demolished rubble, logistics in rocky and hazardous areas, and more. The design space for such robots is quite large, with numerous open possibilities for body and leg shapes, configurations, and numbers of components. In contrast to similar robotic platforms proposed prototype can move in any direction. Moreover, proposed design allows robot to operate in either omni-direction or conventional states without changing components. It was shown that new design provides better cross-country passability. Structural synthesis of Biomimetic Centipede Robot StriRus was made using evolutionary algorithm and simulation, which includes optimization the number of legs and angles between neighbor legs. Crosschecked angle optimization was done using kinematics.
... Also this robot has some difficulties with controllability. [2] is the robot (Fig. 2), which has similar kinematics scheme to the robot model designed in this work. Its large number of legs may provide it good passability on a rough terrain and loss of a leg will not be critical for robot. ...
Biomimetic centipede robots can be well-suited to a number of applications, including search-and-rescue around demolished rubble, logistics in rocky and hazardous areas, and more. The design space for such robots in quite large, with numerous open possibilities for body and leg shapes, configurations and numbers of components. On the other hand, realistic systems aim toward optimizing various performance measures, some of which can be directly calculated from the design parameters, while others require physical experimentation and simulation. In this paper, we present parametric models of centipede robots as well as rough terrains, and then we evaluate the performance of different robot designs across different terrains. We incrementally derive better designs through an appropriately crafted evolutionary algorithm. Promising results as well as insights are discussed. Finally, we provide a clear list of future steps and a forward-looking conclusion.
This paper analyzes the political implications of aesthetic mimicry in the popular mobile game, Onmyoji. Created by the Chinese company, NetEase, Onmyoji takes advantage of the expansive network of signifiers revolving around the historical Japanese figure, Abe-no-Seimei, and co-opts this network to display a recognizable Japanese popular aesthetic. By remixing elements of Japanese culture, Onmyoji presents a commodifiable and mediated image of Japanese cultural authenticity that is recognizable globally. Mimicry and the co-opting of another nation’s cultural signifiers initiates a negotiated process of ambivalent national self-empowerment that has since resulted in shifting labor flows within the digital entertainment industries in East Asia. The malleability of cultural signifiers allows for the purposeful framing of global media texts. Such multivalent encodings of recognizable symbols emerge from the provocative slippages between media boundaries. This, in turn, engages with the dialectical processes of nation branding within the framework of transnational co-production models.
Onmyōdō, an indigenous Japanese magic system, which developed from the 10th century, also appeared in the Japanese popular cinema. Responding to the needs of theaudience, the filmmakers combined the historic resources with the aesthetics of the popular culture, creating a successful product and, at the same time, popularized a romantic myth of a great onmyōji - Abe no Seimei. The aim of this article is to present the development of the Japanese magic on the screen, as well as to show the differences and similarities between presentations of the protagonists and rituals in the chosen pictures. In the beginning, the author offers a brief summary of the history of onmyōdō on the Japanese ground and the further development of the phenomenon on the screen. In the next parts of the presented paper the author analyses the images of Abe no Seimei in popular cinema and compares the filmmakers' visions to the descriptions of the wizard provided by the historians. The last part of the article revolves around the rituals presented on the screen, inspired by the processes depicted in the chronicles, as well as in the legends.
This essay looks at selected images from tarot decks designed in Japan. Tarot decks reflect a deliberate adaptation process across both cultural and temporal borders, with visual components created and customized for a Japanese viewer. My aim is to consider the nature of these changes in imagery and to focus attention on an under-analyzed and mostly female-gendered domain. In particular, I look at the way the medieval European people and elements originally found on the cards are replaced with images from the world of Japanese art, history, and popular culture. These substitutions either gloss over the gaps between Western and Japanese world views or meld them into a new form, allowing the tarot entry into a different or hybrid metaphysical culture. Attention to tarot cards is important because of their great economic and cultural impact in contemporary Japan. A widespread love of tarot in Japan provides insight into domains of pleasure, spiritual exploration, and fandom.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.