維新前夜の乱衆と家連合

御札降りとええじゃないか踊り

抄録

In the year before the Meiji Restoration (1867), there was a series of ecstatic dancing throughout Japan. This movement was apparently originally inspired by some political agitators who had been intending to capitalize on the discontent among the masses which had been expressed in the very severe peasant riots of the previous years. In order to carry out this plan, at first they put some amulets into several fairly wealthy homes, unknown to the people there. Afterwards, the same incidents began to occur in large numbers of houses, not only the wealthy but the ordinary houses as well. When the people discoverd the amulets, they assumed that some supernatural spirits had selected their houses as an indication of some particular virtue, which would be rewarded with divine protection.
This led to a series of movements which took place in different parts of the country at different times, from August of the year till the next January.
This particular research is based on Kyoto, the Imperial capital, where the movement had paticular political significance. It began here around October 20th, as soon as several samurai started from Kyoto to their Daimyo with a secret Inperial order that the shogunate should be destroyed. They must gain time, and thought of, perhaps, the miracle.
The people responded to the discovery of the amulets in a very ectatic way. They placed the deities on the alter in their houses to make a religious service, inviting their Dozoku and affinal families, the members of their Chonai (institutional neighborhood groups), and their friends to join in those religious servises, large feasts, drinking rice-wine, and dancing. There were also mutual invitations between those houses where “the amulets had descended from the heaven”. Even if uninvited, people who visited the alter to worship and to offer congratulations where welcomed. Later, some uninvited people took advantage of the festival by forcing themselves into the feasts, which sometimes led to aggressive mob behavior.
The festivity soon extended beyond their houses, into the streets, and was characterized particulary by the frenzied dancing. At first, the people of the same Dozoku and the same Chonai etc. danced whithin the street of the Chonai, and later the dancing extended out from there.
This type of dancing, “ee-ja-nai-ka odori” (literally, a dance with the refrain meaning “eveything's 0. K., isn't it ?”) had a history in the periodic pilgrimage made by commoners to Amaterasu-O-mikami's shrine at Ise about evey 60 years. This pilgrimage included ecstatic dancing and served as a release for the frustration of the common people under the feudal system of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Actually, 1867 was too early for the time of the periodic pilgrimage, but the special critical situation, directly “the descent of the deity” caused the analogous movement to develop at this time, even without the long pilgrimge to Ise.
Although for the first few days of this ecstatic celebration the deities were limited to Amateras-O-mikami, after this time, the celebration spread widely and included not only this Shinto goddess of the “Imperial Ancestor” which had been used by the original agitators to prove the divine protection on the Restoration, but also large numbers of other Shintoistic and Buddhistic folk gods as well. In those days, unidentified people, who put amulets, might be divided into various social classes : samurai, common people, priests etc..