Rite of Passage Structure in the Japanese Accession Ceremonies
A ritual-studies reading of the Japanese imperial accession ceremonies as a rite of passage.
A 1992 academic paper that takes van Gennep's three-phase model of ritual — separation, transition, reincorporation, with the middle phase as the threshold or limin — and reads the Japanese Imperial accession ceremonies through it, on the argument that the structure will surface the meaning of the symbols and actions. Sam's own contribution to the theory is recursivity: the pattern nests, so a whole series of rites shows it, and each sub-rite inside that series shows it again, down to individual gestures. Because every finite action has a beginning, a middle and an end, he treats the pattern as ontological rather than merely conventional.
The accession, or gotaiten, has three movements spread across months. The Senso is the legal accession on the death of the reigning Emperor, containing the acknowledgement, the transfer of the Regalia, and the announcement to the Kami. The Sokui-rei, a year later after formal mourning, is the presentation of the new Emperor to the nation and the world. The Daijo-sai, held at harvest as a variation on the Tasting of the First Fruits, is the oldest and most important of the three. Sam works through each in turn, using video of the Heisei accession to read even sub-ceremonies — noting, for instance, that the Regalia enter the room by one door and leave by another, making the room itself a threshold, with the objects passing from the old Emperor's possession through ambiguity into the new.
Two claims carry the analysis. First, recursivity locates the peak of any rite: expand the middle phase and the high point falls in its reincorporation sub-phase — so in the Regalia transfer, the decisive moment is not the Emperor's own bow but the witnesses' acknowledgement, the public act by which possession becomes legitimate. Second, that peak is where the purpose of the rite is lived as a feeling rather than merely understood, which is why a ritual has to be enacted rather than read. In the Daijo-sai this logic runs to its end: progressive purification separates everything used from the profane, divination hands choices to the gods, the Emperor bathes twice and robes in the white hagoromo of the heavenly maidens, processes barefoot on white matting as though down a beam of light, and finally eats with Amaterasu. Tracking the change of costume across the three rites — tuxedo, yellow robes, white hagoromo — Sam reads the whole series as progressive sacrality: a man becomes a king, a king becomes a priest, and a priest, eating with the gods, is incorporated among them.
Originally published at samwebstermage.com →