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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Competing Festivals in Colonial Jilong

Contestation over sacred space reached its high point when key Taiwanese and Japanese festivals clashed during the 1930s, competing for control over both physical and sacred geography. This pathway leads you through the main celebrations and how they gave form to the competition for mastery over overlapping zones of sacred and profane, through which the local actors reinforced the boundaries between Taiwanese and Japanese identities and social groups.

(Header image: Murakami Hideo, “Kiirun suitō tō” (1927))

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Sacred Geography and the Everyday
In the preceding two pages, I have made numerous references to human activity in defining sacred geography and placing limits on the actions of deities, and I have noted the territorial or human bonds that anchor divinities to specific locations or communities. What these references mean is that sacred and physical geographies often intersect and overlap with each other. To put it another way, human activities call upon aspects of sacred geography and sometimes bring them into the world through ritual actions. Traffic moves in both directions, in fact: the hell scrolls referenced in the previous page are based upon journeys to hell taken by spirit mediums and others, including the Tang Emperor Taizong. (Such journeys are, of course, common across space and time; see, for example, Odysseus's visit to the netherworld, or Dante’s Grand Tour of European sacred geographies.) The most important interfaces between the sacred and the profane (cf., Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion) occur at the sites of temples, in everyday devotional acts, and in annual festivals. I explore these institutions through the separate Taiwanese and Japanese pathways, and examine the conflict around annual festivals in a third pathway.
Temples are the earthly homes of deities and the most socially significant nodes of intersection between the different types of geography. Although they are clearly physical structures, because they house manifestations of divine beings, they take on a sacred aura; that is, they become—or rather, societies define them to be—sacred places. The map below contains the locations of the most important temples in Jilong, and readers should zoom in and pan around in order to also see the locations of parent temples and other sites in Japan and China to which the Jilong institutions held important connections. The key institutions that readers will visit in this module include the Qing'an, Dianji, and Chenghuang Temples, for the islander/Taiwanese in Jilong; the Jilong Shrine, Kubōji, and Kōzonji for the Japanese settlers; and the Lingquan Temple, a fusion of Buddhist traditions. In all cases, the deities were moved from location to location in conjunction with human migration. When Chinese settled in Taiwan, they carried their gods with them and built them new homes in new lands. When Japanese colonized Taiwan, they built Shinto shrines and enshrined particular deities within them; even though the kami were everywhere, they had to be invited to Taiwan, installed there by the colonial settlers. With very few exceptions, such as a shrine in Tainan to Zheng Chenggong or Koxinga, the seventeenth-century half-Japanese merchant/pirate/Ming loyalist who drove the Dutch East India Company from Taiwan and installed his own regime there, Japanese settlers did not enshrine local kami. Rather, they imported familiar kami from their homelands and enshrined them in the colony.
When people perform everyday devotional acts—burning incense or ghost money, or offering food, at a Taiwanese temple; invoking a kami with sake or a written prayer at a Japanese shrine—they open pathways to sacred realms and invite divine intervention. Annual rituals, such as the summer Ghost Festival referenced in the hungry ghosts scroll on the preceding page (Zhongyuan jie or Yulan Penhui in Chinese; Bon matsuri or O-bon in Japanese), or the temple festivals examined later in the module, also bring together sacred and profane space. During such events, rituals open gates in the boundaries between worlds and allow sacred geography to spill into the physical and act upon it.
These practices and institutions reinforce an earlier point: sacred space, as imaginative geography, is a manifestation of power. In the setting of colonial Jilong, building and renovating temples, and performing festivals, were not simply acts of faith. They were tools, or weapons, in a much larger struggle over the physical geography of Taiwan and the identities of its residents.
You have reached the end of this pathway and should follow the route below back to the landing page, from where you can move into the rest of the module.
Sacred Geography: Definitions
The central concern of this module is the analysis of sacred geography: its construction, its operations, and its interactions with physical geography. The latter spatial form is certainly not fixed or closed to redefinition. People apply different, often competing, meanings to discrete chunks of physical topography—that is they territorialize space—and they radically transform the appearance and composition of their environments. Even mountains and oceans change, seemingly of their own accord, across Braudel’s longue durée. Nevertheless, physical geography is susceptible to mapping by the tools of modern cartography. We can plot specific places and represent topography on maps, and use those maps to get from place to place. In contrast, we cannot precisely map the features and boundaries of sacred geography, or apply the tools of GIS systems to it, because it mostly lacks tangible forms and the coordinates of latitude and longitude. With physical geography, we can measure distance and area, and use those criteria to distinguish between different scales of territories, such as town, city, state, country, and continent. Or we can use ideas of time to measure changes in physical spaces and places. We can also build place-based identities—local, national, regional—that we associate with these different scales. We cannot carry out these actions with sacred geography, which is flat in the sense that distance, area, elevation, and time have no meaning there. Therefore, place as a “particular expression of geographical space” (Bodenhamer, 14) does not easily exist in sacred geography.
But I have framed these definitions in the negative, in terms of what it is not. What is sacred geography? It is a type of imaginative geography, both in the sense that it is a spatiality that we can represent but not actually see, and in the sense of a spatiality that people construct as they assert, or attempt to assert, power. Societies create sacred geography, or sacred space, as the territory affiliated with the divine—deities, ancestors, cosmological forces—and imbue it with an existence that is separate from, but intimately connected to, our own world. They construct it as indeterminate, a form of territory that exists both nowhere and, potentially, everywhere. In this regard, because we can tell stories about sacred space, we can also transform it into place and link our identities to particular cosmologies and religions. Moreover, the ability to determine how sacred and physical geographies intersect depends upon whether or not a socio-political group holds sufficient power to assert its spiritual beliefs within specific territories, particularly in the face of counter efforts by other socio-political groups. In this module, readers will see numerous examples of competition around two main points of intersection: the temples that Jilong’s residents built (especially as Taiwanese renovated their temples and Japanese took over and reconsecrated Taiwanese temples), and the festivals that they held in honor of the deities enshrined in those institutions.
Although sacred geography is a human construct, societies have imbued it with its own organizing logics and with powers to shape human affairs. For both the islander/Taiwanese and the Japanese in Taiwan, the most important of these logics were hierarchy, functionality, and socio-cultural specificity. Deities held specific ranks in terms of their importance and power, and they were responsible for certain aspects of human activity or natural phenomena, but only in regards to the social and territorial groups with which they were affiliated. Therefore, sacred space does not simply exist, it also acts upon the physical world and its residents, and it imparts meanings to the territories with which it is associated. The following pages explore representations and architectures of sacred geography, and the everyday practices through which people create pathways that allow the divine to manifest within and affect the physical world.

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"Burning Water Lanterns in Jilong"