The Japanese archipelago is home to a large number of whale graves, monuments, Shinto shrines, and Buddhist steles dedicated to the spirits of stranded or hunted cetaceans. Some of these are located in regions historically associated with coastal whaling, such as the Kii peninsula, western Kyushu, or Yamaguchi prefecture. Others can be found in places where people did not hunt whales prior to modern times, but where whales occasionally beached themselves, such as eastern Tōhoku, Ōita prefecture, or Ainu Mosir. Whales also take centre stage in a variety of ritual practices, ranging from kuyō pacification rituals conducted by Buddhist priests to whaling reenactments performed during shrine festivals. Together, these mnemonic sites and practices show that the history of human-whale relations in the Japanese archipelago is far more diverse than contemporary debates about the purported significance of whaling in Japanese culture suggest. Throughout the early modern and modern periods, humans have perceived and portrayed whales in a variety of ways: as divine incarnations, as religious worshippers, as sacred gifts, as dangerous adversaries, as inanimate natural resources, as cute mascot characters, and more.

This lecture discusses the significance of whale graves and festivals in contemporary Japan. It introduces a number of examples that, taken together, are illustrative of the historical diversity of human-whale relations. It also questions the popular notion that whales are central to “Japanese culture” in ways that cannot be observed elsewhere. The main mode of human-whale relationality, it is argued, is not hunting per se, but ritual care for the spirits of deceased whales, regardless of the cause of death. Such care, exemplified by the practice of construting graves and Buddhist steles and conducting kuyō rituals, is similar to funerary and ancestral rituals conducted for powerful nonhuman actors elsewhere in Asia—most notably, the practice of burying and worshipping whales as incarnations of a protective maritime deity, common in coastal regions of Vietnam. Thus, the lecture proposes an alternative interpretation of human-whale relations in Japanese history, which decentres whaling, while acknowledging similarities between ritual-mnemonic practices in Japan and other parts of Asia.

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Bio:

Aike P. Rots is a professor in Asian Studies at the University of Oslo. He is the author of Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests (Bloomsbury 2017) and the co-editor of Festivals in Asia (special issue of Religion, 2023), Sacred Heritage in Japan (Routledge 2020), and Formations of the Secular in Japan (special issue of Japan Review, 2017). He has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in the fields of religious studies, Asian studies, critical heritage studies, and the environmental humanities. He is currently PI of the ERC-funded project Whales of Power: Aquatic Mammals, Devotional Practices, and Environmental Change in Maritime East Asia (2019-2025).

This event is part of the Ito Center Environmental Humanities Speaker Series