A Primer on Japanese Hell Imagery and Imagination - Occidental ...

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Monumenta Nipponica 63:1
While these images highlight demons or other creatures that torture and devour
sinners, ultimately they portray the sinner as the agent of the punishment experienced.
There is no judgment-issuing central institution, no place to file appeals,
nobody to turn to. The images confirm the perspective succinctly expressed by
the monk Kyôkai (fl. 782–824) in Nihon ryôiki: “Recompense [adheres to]
acts of good and evil the way that shadows follow forms.” 30 Retribution operates
like a law of nature, a morally driven, automatically occurring phenomenon. The
immediacy of these images reinforces the impact of the lesson. Looking at them
entails no inherently distancing activity. There is no background, no establishing
shot, only close-ups of agony.
The scale of hell painting became more ambitious in the medieval period.
Many works portray hell as a monstrous prison with impregnable walls, demonic
guards, and fierce watchdogs. It is a “punitive city” displaying “hundreds of tiny
theatres of punishment,” where “the penalty must have its most intense effects
on those who have not committed the crime.” 31 Soteriological concerns coincided
with disciplinary interests in maintaining a lawful society. One cannot,
however, portray the whole of hell without decreasing the ratio of human size
to environment. As in the Jigoku zôshi, generic representation allows each person
to stand in for a multitude of similar sufferers. Yet because we cannot get close
to those depicted, the impact of shared experience decreases. Artists negotiated
various proportional compromises as they enlarged their window on hell, but
despite the increase in population in these later works, compared to the earlier
Jigoku zôshi, hell seems smaller, resembling a little factory or workshop. 32
Many such depictions of the landscape of hell reflect the influence of Ôjôyôshû
, completed in 985 by the Tendai monk Genshin (942–1017). 33
This treatise starts with reports of hell stitched together from scraps of sutras—
heavily relying on Zhengfa nianchu jing—and weaves them into a compelling
drama advocating salvation through faith in rebirth in the Pure Land. Pivotal
among surviving illustrations of Genshin’s text is the thirteenth-century rokudôe
belonging to Shôjuraigôji in Ôtsu. The iconography from the four
hanging scrolls focusing on hell out of the overall set of fifteen influenced subsequent
hell paintings in Japan through numerous close copies—and copies of
copies—made for other temples and displayed regularly. 34
30 In his introduction to Nihon ryôiki, pp. 4, 201; Nakamura 1973, p. 101. Kyôkai can also be
pronounced Keikai or Kyôgai.
31 This vocabulary is borrowed from Michel Foucault’s discussion of eighteenth-century prison
reform. Foucault 1975, pp. 94–95, 113.
32 No survey of Japanese hell painting is complete without mentioning Kitano tenjin engi
, an emaki that includes illustrations of a tour of hell and other realms in its wider narrative.
In the interests of space, however, this and many other notable images are not addressed here.
33 See T 84:33a–37a. In English, see Reischauer 1930, pp. 27–46.
34 On the Shôjuraigôji set, see Kokuhô rokudô-e. Temple lore claims that half of an original set
of thirty scrolls was lost, but scholarship reveals an initial count of fifteen. Early modern legend
relates that Retired Emperor En’yû (959–991), impressed by Ôjôyôshû, had Kose no Kanaoka
paint these scrolls under Genshin’s direct supervision. See Ôgushi 1983, pp. 92–98. The
temple had copies made in 1823. On various copies of this set, see Ogurisu 1991 and Ogurisu
2003 and 2005.