In a faraway apple orchard in Sannohe, a small town in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, a
zushi miniature wooden shrine at the Nose Kannon Hall caught the media’s attention with its unique adornment—the
karuta playing cards with European-inspired abstract designs in bold red and
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In a faraway apple orchard in Sannohe, a small town in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, a
zushi miniature wooden shrine at the Nose Kannon Hall caught the media’s attention with its unique adornment—the
karuta playing cards with European-inspired abstract designs in bold red and black colors that were used during the early modern period for pastime and gambling. Because of this decoration, the Nose Kannon Hall is known by locals as the
Karuta Hall, and the
zushi that enshrines the Buddhist deity Bodhisattva Shō-Kanzeon is also believed to be the home of
bakuchi no kamisama “the kami deity of gambling”. Little is known about the nature of devotion to this
bakuchi no kamisama or how the playing cards that were used for frivolous games came to be sacralized as items worthy to be used as decoration of a Buddhist shrine. This article considers the slippage between prayer and play in the regional Buddhist devotion by focusing on the Nose Kannon Hall, which presided at a key intersection along the northern trade route where the local community and outside visitors, such as pilgrims and traders, converged, especially during the Edo period (1603–1868). Marshaling historical records, televised interviews, and images provided by the town officials and guardian family of Nose Kannon Hall, I argue that the use of
karuta playing cards on the miniature shrine at Nose Kannon Hall epitomizes a kind of localized early modern Shinto–Buddhist syncretism at the margins of the urban culture that is simultaneously devotional and tongue-in-cheek sacrilegious in a quintessentially Edo-esque way.
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